“I’m not asking you to help my father. I’m asking you to help me. Why do you think I’ve trained you to lie, to cheat the Readers and the Feelers and the Seers? Do you really think I am working for my father, the man who destroyed my mother? The man who destroyed you? Is that what you think of me?” He sounds hurt.
“I don’t know what to think of you.” I close my eyes, squeeze them shut, try to clear my head. I have too many feelings for and about James. “I could help people here. They’re going against your father. I could help them.”
“They’re barely scratching at the farthest parts of his reach. They know nothing about what’s going on. Do you really want to help?”
I wish he were here so I could see him to know if he’s lying. But he’s right about Sarah and Lerner, I know he is. She’s too happy, too calm. She doesn’t understand anything about what’s really going on. She hasn’t seen anything. “Yes. I really want to help.”
“Then help me destroy my father from the inside. You’re the only one who can. I’ve been building toward this for years. Years. I need you, Fia. I can’t plan things, I can’t decide things because if I do, one of his Seers might see. But they can’t see you. I’ve wanted to tell you so many times, when you’d ask me why I was working for him. It killed me that you think I’m like him. I want you to—I want you. I always have. But I couldn’t be sure, couldn’t know if you’d agree. For this to work, no one can know. They can never suspect I am anything but loyal and that you are totally mine.”
I look out at the trees, at the perfect blue of the sky. I am untethered. I am on my own track. I am no one’s.
No. I am still Annie’s. I will always be Annie’s. And as long as she is out there, she isn’t safe, and as long as she isn’t safe I can do nothing but protect her. I will always be tied to that path, to those choices, to those instincts. Even if I get her away, even if Lerner can somehow help us, Keane won’t stop looking for me. Annie will always be in danger because she will always be the only way to control me.
“We don’t get to choose happy,” James says, and I know now that he isn’t lying. That he’s talking to me in a way he won’t talk to anyone else, not ever. Because James and I speak the same language. He has lived a lie with every move and every choice and even every thought and emotion for years now. “You and me. I wish we could choose happy. I wish I could let you go. But I need you. Please don’t walk away.”
I look down at my hand, remember the way it looked in Adam’s. Think about the other life I could have. Think about how I don’t feel anything now, right or wrong, right or wrong, I could go either direction and neither is right or wrong. “Bring Annie with you. Tomorrow. Underneath the arch at noon.”
I hear a soft exhalation on his end. I picture his face. I think he is relieved and a little sad at the same time. “You’re still with me. Thank you.”
“Just bring Annie.” I hang up.
Tomorrow I will be free. Really free. Forever.
FIA
Six Months Ago
IT’S BEEN ALMOST A YEAR.
I have taken laptops, sneaked into offices, cracked safes, and gotten James into places he shouldn’t have been. I have been his “date” at political functions, at luncheons with other rich worthless people, at club after club. I have danced and sabotaged and stolen my way across Europe, and I have no idea what any of it was for. I follow instructions and turn off the part of my brain that works for myself. Off, off, off. It’s easy, really.
I am happiest and most miserable with James. Sometimes I think I love him. And sometimes I think I hate him more than anyone else in the whole entire world, because he brought me back from the darkness where I tried to end myself, but I do not know this me that has taken my place. He is kind and he is funny and he is angry and he lies with everything he is.
Nearly a year without Annie. Annie, who I was never apart from our entire lives.
She writes me, but her letters are all false cheer. In one she “decided” not to go to college because she couldn’t find a program she liked, and the Keane Foundation was “kind” enough to let her stay on. At the end of every letter she tells me she’s still planning not to plan and can’t wait not to plan with me again.
Today’s letter leaves me feeling hollow. I read it again and again, but it only makes it worse.
“Hey,” James says, leaning his head into my room. This Paris hotel is old in the way that it’s good to be old, apparently, and smells like money and dust. My bed is massive (I drown in it, and it doesn’t matter how big the bed is, my nightmares more than fill it) and four-postered and cold. I’m sitting in the middle of it, reading the words.
“I knocked,” he says. Then he walks in and sits next to me. “What’s wrong?”