Page 45 of We Are the Match
A pause.
“Is he allowing this?” Hana asks me gently. “Even after the unsettling business at your party? We had assumed you were the target, poor dear, unless?”
Her voice ends in a lift, a question waiting for me to answer.
“I make my own decisions about my movements on this island,” I tell her smoothly, but her words rankle—both the insinuation about my powerlessness here, true as it may be, and the thought that my mother’s friend could be playing a game like this. “Our fixers will leave no stones unturned, of course.”
“Of course,” Hana says. “I’ll see you—would Thursday do, then?”
She blows a kiss through the phone, and hangs up before I do, a subtle gesture, but a gesture nonetheless.
I watch the dying flames reflected in my mother’s bracelet, illuminating the words inscribed there while I think of Paris.
Of kisses and storms and stepping off the edge into the unknown.
Méchri thanátou.
Unto death.
Chapter 15
Paris
It is harder to dress the next day with an aching, swollen hand. I could call Perce or Thea, and they would help, but Thea’s words—leave my husband out of this—echo in my head all the same.
Thea’s warning to leave this island, too, sits heavy on me.
You can have a better world than this, if you want it,Kore had told me once, when we were young and fresh-faced and flying across the harbor away from Troy on a stolen boat. There had been six of us from the group home that night—Kore and Cass and I, twins named Milena and Yara, and a girl named Eris with night-black hair who was good with a gun and an explosive, so good she was snatched up by one family or another around the time Thea left.
It has been years since I dreamed of a better world. In the world I have, we burn and no one comes to save us.
In this one, my hand aches and rescue does not come for me in any form.
I spend the first half day after my injury changing the bandages, cursing the gods, and drinking. I spend the rest of it on the phone with Helen—who thinks it is “unwise” for us to be seen together daily, whatever that means.
In the days that follow, I dig through my own connections, such as they are: I ask a woman I knew from Troy—someone who left long before the bombs fell—about an old warehouse, which was once used by bomb-makers and may be worth exploring.
On Thursday evening a black SUV pulls up in front of my apartment building, later than Helen had promised when we spoke.
Helen steps out of the car, taking Tommy’s offered hand, and my heart stutters in my chest. This woman is never what I expect: the other day, dressed in silk, today in a simple dress that hugs every curve and pulls my eyes down her body before I can help myself.
“May I come in?” Helen asks, though not as if she expects an answer.
I jerk my head to the door and walk ahead of her without a word. If she compels me this much, I can at the very least not let her see it.
Tommy checks me—and the apartment—at length, for weapons, though despite his skills he misses the knives at the back of the cupboard.
“Really, Tommy,” Helen says, settling onto my love seat as if she owns it. “That is unnecessary. Can you give us a moment?”
Tommy nods, pausing before he goes, his gaze falling on my arm cradled against my chest. “You all right, kid?”
“Sublime,” I tell him flatly. “No thanks to you.”
“That sounds about right.” Humor flickers in his look, though it is threaded heavily with grief and guilt. “I brought you some fresh bandages, and a wound cream I used when I first got this.” He gestures to a long scar that runs the length of his arm, from his elbow almost to his wrist—and he does not apologize for what happened to me, but this is as close as we come. “You two behave yourselves.”
Helen flushes a little.
When the door closes, I meet her gaze. “He told you what your father did.” When Tommy had half carried me to the car after, I told him I did not want to see her—but the truth was that Ionlywanted to see her, and that was somehow worse.
