Page 58 of Ira

“It’s going to be fine,” I repeated under my breath, somewhat for Verner’s benefit, but mostly for mine as a sleek, navy vehicle pulled into the lot. “This is fine. No going back now. I’m not worried.”

I turned to face Verner, giving him a firm nod that he mirrored back to me, before I headed over to unlock the door, ushering Adela in.

She looked rightfully wary as she peered around the room, her human eyes skipping over Verner entirely. If she got too close to him, she’d definitely be able to feel his presence, though. The hairs on the back of her neck would raise, and she’d be overwhelmed by a general sensation of something being not quite right.

It was a handy tool to have on my side if I needed to make a quick escape.

“So, Meera,” Adela began with a tight smile, taking a seat kitty-corner to me at the small table. “You’ve got a real talent for disappearing.”

I opened my mouth, trying to come up with an explanation for my absence before closing it again. On reflection, I probably should have come up with an excuse before she’d gotten here, but it didn’t really occur to me that she’d ask.

Adela sighed. “Look, I understand that I probably spooked you. This isn’t my first rodeo—I get that you want to just leave this part of your life in the past, but it’s still affecting you to this day. Financially, if nothing else. You’re paying for his crimes. Imagine how good it’s going to feel to get that burden off your shoulders.”

“I’m more interested in him finally seeing justice for the things he’s done,” I admitted.

Adela crooked a smile. “Yeah? Maybe I approached this all wrong. What I should have been saying is imagine how good it’ll feel when we nail this fucker to the wall.”

I let out a laugh of surprise, some of my nerves abating. “I wasn’t ready to hear that then, but I am now. Provided what I have is going to be of any use, I guess.”

The shoebox was already sitting there on the table with my notebook of recollections on top, and I slid the whole thing across to Adela. I’m sure there’d be something valuable in there that Adela could use to build her case, but I didn’t know if it would be enough to build awholecase on. It was several years old at this point—Jackman’s operation had probably changed significantly in that time.

Of course, it was too much to ask that Adela merely collect all the things I’d given her and be on her merry way so I could go home. Instead, she leafed through the notebook for a moment before carefully lifting the lid of the nearly decade-old shoebox to examine the documents inside.

I sat there in awkward silence as she held them up to the light, leafing through the stack and occasionally glancing over at me with an unreadable expression on her face.

“How on earth did you get hold of the bank statements?” she murmured.

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t want to say I wasentrustedwith a lot of stuff, because that’s not quite right. It’s more like…he saw me as too small and stupid to be a threat. Sometimes, I’m not sure he saw me as a person at all. Just another object in his collection.”

The pitying look Adela shot me made me wish I’d never said any of that. The exhaustion was clearly getting to me if I was spilling my guts to strangers like this. I wanted to go home.Homehome. Shadow realm home.

“This is a gold mine, Meera.”

“Good. I don’t mean to be rude, but you have my number and I’d really like to get out of this grimy motel.”

“Of course,” Adela agreed, putting everything back inside the box with the notebook on top. “I do have your number. Though, I get the feeling you’re going to disappear again.”

“If you contact this phone, I’ll make sure the message gets to me,” I assured her, wondering if I could bribe Harlow with fresh vegetables since I had nothing else to barter with. “Good luck with the case.”

Adela tapped her nails on the box and smiled. I imagined it was the kind of smile that lawyers who were described as sharks had. “I don’t need luck anymore. I’ve got this.”

Chapter 20

Ifelt jittery and paranoid the entire drive back to Harlow’s apartment. I’d used the phone to take pictures of all the evidence, just in case, and the device felt like it weighed several tons in my pocket. What was I even going to do with it? It wasn’t going to be usable in the shadow realm.

Could I really ask Harlow to help out with this? Latika had already figured out that the van belonged to Harlow, and I was confident that my half-assed excuse didn’t convince her that Harlow wasn’t involved.

I drove as slowly as I could without drawing attention to myself, acutely aware that keeping up with the van wasn’t easy for Verner.

“Nearly there,” I assured him, fretting about how he was holding up. While there were definitely things I needed todiscuss with Harlow, I’d already told Verner to walk us right back into the in-between if he was feeling even a little bit low on power. I could figure out how to get a message to Harlow later—after Astrid had ripped me a new one for going behind her back.

To my surprise, Harlow was waiting outside the ground-floor apartment for us when we pulled up, and I wondered if she’d had a tracker on either the van or the phone the entire time. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask, though I couldn’t exactly be mad about that, considering all she’d done for us.

“You were gone a wholetwenty-four hours,” she exhaled, shutting the door behind me and locking it while Verner hovered next to me. “What the hell were you even doing?”

“Did anyone come looking for me?”

She shook her head. “They wouldn’t come here anyway, would they? It’s not like we knew each other. You’re basically a stranger who walked into my closet.” Harlow pursed her lips, looking thoughtful for a moment. “The Hunter, the Shade, and the Wardrobe.”

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