Page 66 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

Behind me, one of the elevators dings and opens. For a split second, I wonder if I can rush into the elevator and hit the button before the receptionist can stop me. But before I can do anything, someone calls out, “Jane, wait!”

I freeze. Thalia’s come down here to see me after all. But when I turn around, it’s not Thalia who’s hurrying after me, but Ani. The receptionist is watching us with wide eyes, probably confused. That makes two of us, I want to tell her.

“Ani, I need to see Thalia, I—”

“For fuck’s sake, Jane,” Ani snaps, “could you please stop the Thalia obsession, just for one fucking second? My brother is dead.”

She might as well have smacked me in the face. For a few seconds, all sounds are muted, as though I’m listening to them underwater. Everything moves slowly. I see Ivan the way he had been in Oxford, full of life, sunshine coursing through his veins. “Ivan’s dead?”

Ani’s eyes fill with tears and her chin trembles. “Come on,” she says hoarsely, leading me out of the building. Outside, next to the heavy New York City traffic, she turns to me and says, “Yes. Ivan’s dead. And I think Thalia had something to do with it.”

It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, and I hate that it does. I hate that despite everything, Thalia still shocks me. Dimly, I’m aware that Ani is leading me down the block and onto a side street. The noise of the traffic recedes dramatically as we stand in the alleyway.

“Sorry, I don’t know where else to go to have this conversation,” Ani says.

A shocked laugh burps out of me. She’s right; I mean, it’s not really the kind of conversation you have over a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. “I—yeah. Wait, so. Uh. Ivan’s dead?” I know I’ve asked this already, but my mind is still refusing to comprehend it. “And Thalia? You think she...”

“Yes. She fucking killed him, Jane!” Ani cries, grabbing my arm.

My mouth opens but nothing comes out.

“You need to help me,” Ani says. She’s gripping my arm so tight that it’s starting to hurt, but I cling to the pain because it’s the only thing anchoring me at this moment.

“Help you?” I echo uselessly.

“Look,” she says, sighing. “I know you’re part of the Thalia fan club—god, why do people fall for her act?”

“I’m not.” My cheeks burn. “I mean, I used to be, but not anymore.”

Ani pauses, and slowly, like honey, her lips stretch into a smile. “She did something to you.”

I swallow the lump in my throat and nod. “I think—um, I think she killed Kurt.” It sounds so ridiculous. Alien words tumbling out of my mouth, unrecognizable. “And she’s framing me for it. I think,” I add. How many times can I say “I think”? But it just sounds so crazy I can’t help but try to soften it. Despite what Ani said earlier about Ivan being dead and Thalia possibly having something to do with it, I still half expect her to laugh at this and tell me I’m nuts, that my obsession toward Thalia has led to me completely going the other way.

Instead, she nods solemnly. “I believe you.”

Those three words are so far from what I’m expecting that I feel a surge of warmth toward her, this woman I have hated for so long. I look at her, dressed impeccably as usual, her hair sleek, her makeup flawless, and I see the anger simmering behind it. She’s lost her brother, and I suddenly feel such sorrow for her. We’re both Thalia’s victims. “What can I do to help?”

Ani takes in a shaky breath. “I need to find evidence of her killing Ivan. I think I know how she did it. She’s been poisoning him for years—”

“What?” I try to wrap my head around it, try to digest the words, but they sit like a rock in the center of my brain, defying all logic. “Poison?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s been slipping him caffeine without him knowing it.”

“Caffeine? That’s not poison.”

“It is in the right amount. And my brother has—had—a heart condition. The caffeine triggered a heart attack.”

“Oh my god.” I shake my head, blinking several times. This can’t be real. But then I think of Thalia, past that gorgeous, innocent facade she wears so well. I think of the little glimpses of her that I’ve caught, the way she sometimes smiled just a split second too late, as though she only just realized that something was meant to be humorous. And then I think of her using those long, elegant fingers to sprinkle caffeine into Ivan’s food, and my body turns cold. I can picture it all too easily. “But I don’t know how I can help. She’s blocked my number, she didn’t allow me to go up to the apartment—”

“Yeah.” Ani nods. “I was hoping we could brainstorm something together, maybe find out where she keeps the caffeine, or how she even got it to begin with. It’s not like you could get it over the counter, you know? So she must’ve ordered it online. I tried looking through her credit card bills, but I couldn’t find anything.”

A sense of hopelessness washes over me. Thalia’s been ahead of us by so many steps this whole time. We’re two beginners playing against a master. “She would’ve thought of everything. She—” Then the thought strikes me. “Wait, you got access to her credit card bills?”

“Yeah, in Indonesia, we have a family account and all our cards are registered to the same account, so we can see each other’s purchases. There are no secrets in my family,” she says with a bitter laugh.

“Did you see a charge for Golden Years Estate?”

She frowns and takes her phone out of her pocket. “Hang on, let me open up the bill—” She taps on it and scrolls down. After a while, she shakes her head. “Nope. What is it?”

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