me like that—”
“Why not?” she challenged. “Is your mommy going to do something about it? Yeah, Greg, I know, she was the mayor of Baltimore for two years. You only mention it every other sentence. No one gives a shit!”
His throat flexed and his face flushed red, but he said nothing in return.
“Maya.” Maria spoke softly, yet firmly. “I know you’re upset, but it was just an accident. There’s no reason to be rude. We’re all adults here—”
“Oh.” Maya scoffed. “I think there’s every reason to be rude. Would you like me to enumerate them for you?” She was smart enough to know what was happening, but angry enough not to care. The truth was evident; she was still very angry with her father, despite telling herself she wasn’t. But she had channeled all of that hostility and ire into school and her goals. Here and now, without any of that and sitting across from the man who had done this to her, it all came bubbling back to the surface. Her face felt hot and her heartbeat had doubled its pace.
She was suddenly keener than ever that she could not conjure a single happy memory from her childhood without the stabbing realization that her father’s life, and by extension much of her own, was one big lie wrapped in a thousand smaller lies. The brightest light in her young life, her mother, had been cruelly and coldly extinguished because of it, at the hands of a man Maya had been foolish enough to put her own trust in.
And her father not only knew about it. He let that man, John Watson, walk away.
“Maya,” her father started. “Please just—”
“You don’t get to speak!” she snapped. “She’s dead because of you!” She surprised even herself with the intensity of it, and was then surprised again that her dad did not have a burst of anger in response. Instead he clammed up, staring down at the table like a kicked pup.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here,” Greg said gently, “but I think I’m going to bow out…”
He started to rise, but Maya stuck a threatening finger in his face. “Sit down! You’re not going anywhere.”
Greg immediately lowered himself back into his chair as if she were a drill sergeant ordering a private. Maria regarded her aloofly, one eyebrow arched slightly, as if waiting to see how this was going to play out. Her father’s shoulders slumped and his chin nearly touched his collarbone.
“Goddammit,” Maya muttered as she ran her hands over her short hair. She thought she was past all this, past the emotional surges that crashed on her like an errant wave, past the attempts to reconcile the smiling, humorous professor that she called Dad with a deadly covert agent who had been responsible for the trauma she would carry with her for the rest of her life. Past the late-night sobbing bouts when she changed her clothes and saw the thin white scars of the message she had carved into her own leg, back when she thought she was going to die and used her last ounce of strength to give him a clue to her sister’s whereabouts.
Don’t you dare cry.
“This was a mistake.” She rose and started for the door. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
She was too angry to cry, she realized. At least she was past that.
Maya slid behind the wheel of the rental car and turned the key in the ignition before Greg came jogging out after her.
“Maya!” he called. “Hey, wait!” He tried to pull the handle of the passenger side, but she’d already locked the doors. “Come on. Let me in.”
She started backing down the drive.
“This isn’t funny!” He slammed a palm on the window. “How am I supposed to get back?”
“Your mom sounds useful,” she shouted at him through the closed window. “Try giving her a call.”
And then she drove away, down the street, with a tiny version of Greg standing in the rearview mirror with his hands on his head in disbelief. She knew she’d catch hell for that back at the academy, but in the moment she didn’t care. Because as the foreign house of her father grew smaller behind her, it felt like a weight was lifting from her shoulders. She’d gone there that day out of some sense of family, a sense of responsibility. A burden, really.
But now, she realized, if she never saw them or that house again, it would be okay. She was fine on her own. There was no closure, and there never would be. Her mother was dead, and her father was dead to her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Karina Pavlo sat at the furthest corner of the bar, obscured by beer taps but with a clear view of the front entrance. She’d chosen a place that no one in their right mind would ever think to look for her, a seedy dive bar in the southeast quadrant of DC, not far from Bellevue. It was not the best of neighborhoods, and the day was quickly becoming dusk, but she was not concerned about petty thieves or would-be muggers. She had bigger problems than that.
Besides, she had just done some petty theft herself.
After eluding the Secret Service agent and hiding out in the bookstore for a short while, Karina risked heading back out onto the street for less than a block before ducking into a department store. Aside from the fact that she was shoeless, she was still well dressed and, holding her head high and walking confidently to avoid scrutiny, looked the part of any upper-middle-class businesswoman.
She headed straight to the women’s department and grabbed some casual clothing off the rack, items that wouldn’t draw a lot of attention. She left her skirt and blouse and blazer in the dressing room, pulled on a pair of sneakers, and walked back out a different entrance of the store without anyone looking twice at her. Two blocks later she stopped in at another store and, after pretending to browse for a few minutes, walked out with a pair of stolen sunglasses and a silk scarf that she tied over her dark hair.
Back on the street, she targeted a chubby man in a striped polo with a camera hanging around his neck. He couldn’t have been more of a tourist if he was wearing a sandwich board that said so. She bumped into him roughly as they passed, gasping and immediately apologizing. His face turned red and he opened his mouth to shout at her, until he saw that she was a slight, pretty brunette. He muttered an apology and scurried along on his way, unaware that his wallet was missing. Karina had always been quick with her hands. She did not condone stealing, but this was a time of necessity.
The wallet had a little less than a hundred dollars in cash in it. She took the money and dropped the rest of it, ID and credit cards and photos of kids, into a large blue postal box on the next corner.
Finally she took a cab east, across town, where she headed into the dive bar, its windows darkened and the place smelling like cheap beer, and took a seat at the bar and ordered a soda.
The television suspended over the beer taps was on and tuned into a news station, the current story an update on sports scores from the night prior. She sipped her soda, calming her nerves and wondering what she would do next. She couldn’t go back to the hotel; that would be a fool’s errand. Besides, there was nothing for them to find there but clothes and toiletries. She had one phone number memorized, but she was hesitant about finding a pay phone. They were getting rarer, even in the cities. The Secret Service had her cell phone, and they might be watching the pay phones.
She was considering asking the bartender to use their phone, but her contact was an international number and that might draw undue attention.
The
