She can’t help but doubt all her choices, yet again. It feels as if that’s all she’s ever done.
The porch door bangs open, and George comes tumbling out in a jumble of gangly limbs, the tail-wagging dogs on either side, they’re all swarming around her.
This, at least, she doesn’t have to doubt. Maybe this can be enough.
CHAPTER 48
DAY 4. 5:25 A.M.
Ariel is already at her kitchen table when the sun breaks over the horizon at the far end of her eighty-acre field of corn, reds and golds shot through the green stalks, brilliant, spectacular.
Last night was another of limited sleep ruined by fears and reconsiderations and misgivings, both general and specific. Ariel is again living with that parenting-an-infant level of sleep deprivation, night after night, a mounting tab of exhaustion, more every morning than the day before.
Now it’s even harder than it had been thirteen years ago, her body less resilient, less forgiving. She looks, she knows, horrible. That’s fine. Horrible is how she should look, for a day like this.
*
“Still no John?”
Ariel’s mom has never met John. If it weren’t for George as an eyewitness, she might not even believe that there’s any such person. Elaine makes no secret that she thinks her daughter has gone out of her way to make herself unappealing—hard to be attracted to, hard to deal with, hard to love. She probably wonders what sort of man overcame all that. And why he bothered.
“Not yet. He’s stuck in Europe.”
“Stuck. In Europe. How stupid do you think I am?”
Ariel turns away. The only way to make Elaine understand would be to tell her the whole thing, every bit of it. But Ariel has been down that road before, and her mom had responded poorly. There’s no reason to expect a different response the next time. People don’t change, not that much. They just become more like themselves.
Plus the truth is that Ariel doesn’t actually know where John is. This too is not something she’s eager to admit to her mom, nor to anyone else. It’s one of many new secrets that Ariel is about to keep, to replace the old ones that are about to be revealed.
Ariel offers her mother a hug instead of an explanation. “Thank you, Mom. For everything.”
*
“Do you know who this is?” Kayla Jefferson extends her tablet.
“For the love of Christ,” Griffiths says, “I’m so tired I can barely see. I’m not going to play guessing games with you.”
Griffiths has barely slept in two days. She knows that her investigation is a race against time; a bomb is ticking. There’s no way she’s going to defuse this bomb, but maybe she can figure out who needs to get out of the blast’s way, to do the least damage to national security.
That part of this investigation is her job. There’s also a part that’s something else, beyond her job. Curiosity, definitely. Plus an uncharacteristic sympathy she feels for Ariel Pryce. As well as a strong suspicion that what’s going on here is not what it appears.
“This is security-camera footage of Lucy Reitwovski entering a bank branch on the rue du Rh?ne in Geneva, carrying a bag, which five minutes later she exits without.”
“Holy fuck.” Griffiths is fully alert again. This case sure is a roller coaster.
“If they drove straight through from Seville, making necessary stops only, they’d have arrived in Geneva two hours ago, which is when this was taken.”
Two hours ago. So they could still be in Geneva, though Griffiths suspects not. They could also be somewhere else in Switzerland, or in France or Italy. They could be headed in any direction, and two hours is a big head start.
But there’s no harm in trying the most obvious possibilities. “Have some people take a look around Geneva hotels, airport, train station. Was there any sign of Wright himself, or just this woman?”
“Just the woman.”
No surprise. Griffiths is pretty sure that they’re not going to find John Wright, who’s an average-height average-build ex-Army ex-CIA devious motherfucker with two million in cash who has gone to ground in a part of the world where almost everyone looks like him. No one is going to find this guy, at least not until it no longer matters, which will be any day now. Maybe even today.
Griffiths turns back to her research.
*
“You’re going to be hearing some things about me, George, in the coming days.”
Ariel and her son are seated side by side in the front of her pickup.
“What sort of things?”
“Some of these things will be true. Some of them, I’m sure, won’t be.”
Ariel takes a turn slowly onto a street lined by high brush where she often comes across wild turkeys, or a family of deer. Sometimes normal vigilance is not enough; sometimes you need to be extra-careful to avoid inflicting unintentional harm.
“One of the true things is that long ago, before you were born, a man sexually assaulted me. You know what this means?”
“Yeah, I do. I’m sorry, Mom.”
Ariel recently learned that the truck is the very best place to have real conversations with her son. A place where neither of them can look the other in the eye; where neither can just get up and leave; where nothing feels like a direct confrontation, even when it is.
The front seat was also where she’d chosen to tell Bucky about the same exact traumatic event.
“This man is now very powerful. In fact this man has been nominated to be vice president.”
Out of her peripheral vision Ariel can see the boy turn to face her, then quickly look back out the front windshield. “Are you talking about Charlie Wolfe?”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Of course I do, Mom.”
“One of the things you might hear that isn’t true is that Charlie Wolfe is your father.”
“He’s not?”
“No.”
“Does that mean you actually know who my father is?”
She’d told him differently. “Yes. Your father’s name is Bucky Turner. He was my husband for a few years.”
The night of the assault, her pregnancy test was positive. She was already pregnant when Charlie raped her. It was a biological certainty that the father was Bucky. So Ariel never submitted to any paternity test, any genetic matching. She didn’t want to create any evidence of this truth.
“But you told me that you didn’t know my father? That he was an anonymous donor to a sperm bank.”
Ariel knows that the boy would never have been able to utter “sperm bank” to his mother in any situation other than while facing this windshield.
“Well, I lied to you. I’m very sorry about that. I lied for a few reasons. One was that I didn’t want you to seek out your father, and I was worried that if you knew who he was, then you’d feel like you had to have a relationship with him.”
“And what’s so horrible about him?”