Page 2 of Breaking the Dark

She hits the button, then throws on a black jacket over her stale shirt, pulls on blue jeans and a pair of boots. She can still smell the chicken grease and the old beer on her breath, but it is too late to do anything about that now as the sound of heels clacking against marble echoes down the hallway outside her apartment.

She runs her hands over her hair and makes some kind of a smile with her face as she opens the door.

In front of her is a thin woman in an ankle-length shearling coat. Her hair is the color of butterscotch, and she has a tan that looks like it came from the sort of place that Jessica could never afford to go to.

“Hi,” says the woman, visibly recoiling at the sight of Jessica, her stained clothing, her damp hair and scratched-up arms and face, the broken-down-looking room behind her. “Amber Randall.” The woman looks at the door sign reading ALIAS INVESTIGATIONS, then back at her. “Are you Jessica Jones?”

Jessica nods. “Sure,” she says. “Yes. Come in. Sorry.”

The woman looks about forty but could be fifty. It’s hard to tell with rich ladies.

Amber Randall shakes out her umbrella in the hallway and leaves it leaning against the wall. Entering, she takes off her shearling and folds it in three with the arms turned inward, hangs it neatly on the arm of Jessica’s leather sofa, and sits down. She is wearing a black knitted dress with a white lace collar and black leather boots with rubber soles.

Her eyes roam around the walls of Jessica’s office, searching, Jessica suspects, for one pretty thing. When her eyes fail to find anything pleasing, they come to rest on her.

“You’re not what I was expecting,” Amber Randall says. “I thought you’d be…” Her hands flutter around aimlessly for a moment before coming to rest on her lap. “Never mind. I know you have…I know you are…” Her hands flutter again. “But really, I don’t need that from you. None of that. I need your…contacts. Your insight. You know. Because I think there’s something happening, and I think it’s something to do with your people.”

Jessica blinks. Your people. She doesn’t have “your people.” She only has herself.

“Listen,” she says. “I really don’t think—”

“Hear me out,” the small woman says harshly before softening. “Hear me out. Please. I need you, Jessica. I really do.”

Jessica tilts her head and appraises the woman sitting in front of her. Her bones are so fine her hands are like tiny claws. The big, incongruous boots give her the air of a child, while her mouth sags at the sides where gravity—and life—has come to play.

“Try me,” Jessica says.

Amber Randall smooths down her dress. “My ex-husband, Sebastian, is British. I met him when I was studying Classical Dance in London many moons ago. We got married and he came to live with me here in New York, and we had our twins sixteen years ago. A girl and a boy. Lark and Fox.”

“Lark and…?”

“Fox. Yes.”

“Okay then.”

“After we divorced Sebastian moved back to England, and every summer since then the twins have flown over to London for four weeks to stay with him. He has a mews house in Pimlico.”

“Pim…?”

“—lico. A posh area in London. And he has recently bought a big house in Essex.” Looking at Jessica, she adds, “In the countryside. So, every year the twins fly over for a month and usually they spend time in London. They see their cousins. Sometimes Sebastian takes them to France, or to the Spanish islands. Then they come back to me and go back to school and, look—anyway—this year, they spent the entire time at his new house in Essex, just with him, nobody else, and I just feel very strongly that something happened.”

“Something happened?”

“Yes. They’ve been home for four weeks and the thing is—and I don’t really know how to explain this—but ever since they got back, I’ve grown more and more convinced that it’s not them. That they are not them.”

Jessica feels a rush of energy spike through her, and her posture changes a degree. “How do you mean?”

“Like I say, it’s hard to explain. They look basically the same, they sound the same, for all intents and purposes it is them. But”—Amber leans forward, her pale toffee hair swinging as she moves—“I don’t think it is them. I think something happened over there this summer. I think someone got to them. Someone did something to them.” She leans forward a little more. “Replaced them.”

Jessica lets her eyes close for a moment. She ponders the reality of this type of woman, as observed through the media of TV shows and newspaper articles: a rich woman abandoned on the scrap heap by a rich husband, in middle age. A woman filled with resentment, possibly, of a new girlfriend or a second wife who is bound to be younger and better-looking, and of the new life in which her children have been immersed for four weeks, returning to her, no doubt, with glossy tales of experiences to which Amber Randall is not party. She imagines toxicity in every crevice of Amber Randall’s life, and she sees that toxicity playing out now in this idea that her ex-husband has somehow replaced her children. She opens her eyes again and stares at Amber, openly.

“Listen,” she sighs. “This sounds, I dunno, kind of messy. It sounds like maybe you and your ex—”

“No!” Amber slams her hands down against the leather sofa. “No. This is nothing—nothing—nothing to do with our divorce. Our divorce was amicable. I’m very fond of Sebastian. He’s a very nice man.”

Jessica lifts one brow and nods. “Can you provide me with any examples of your children’s behavior, or particular events that have led you to this point?”

“Yes. Yes, I can. Fox is a good-looking boy and he, well, he’s just starting to know it. He’s kind of vain. And particular. And he has this way of touching his hair. Like this.” Amber prods at her hair with tiny fingers. “Every time he passes a mirror. And he’s always taking selfies, and he always has the same smile and the same pose and the same way of looking at the camera, and since he got back, he just doesn’t do it anymore. He walks straight past mirrors without acknowledging them. He doesn’t use his phone for selfies anymore. He never touches his hair and, I swear, before, he had his fingers in his hair constantly. And Lark—she is a shy girl, she has some nervous habits, chews the insides of her cheeks a lot. Sometimes she pushes her finger into her cheek while she’s doing it, it’s just part of what it’s like being Lark, it’s part of her. She takes the skin off around her fingernails too, and she shreds paper. And since she got back, none of that. Her hands are just…still. Both of them seem so still.”

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