J A D E

6:52 p.m.

It takes me a minute to place him.

Partly because he’s lost weight since the last time I saw him, a good twenty pounds melted off his limbs and torso and hollowing out his cheeks. His hair is different, too. Shorter. Lighter, almost completely gray.

The other part is because it’s been a few months. I haven’t seen him since the spring.

“I remember you. Except your name wasn’t Sebastian. It was something else.”

Though admittedly, that doesn’t explain the other times.

I close my eyes and try to reconstruct the meetings in my mind, but the only one I can come up with with any sort of certainty was this past April. Him, waving at me through the windows as he climbed the front steps. Me, opening the door to invite him in. He introduced himself, but not as Sebastian, as—

Bas. You joked that your wife refused to call you that, that she preferred the name ‘Bossy.’ I laughed and said she sounded like a smart woman.” I pause, the obvious question rising in my head. “Which one is it?”

“The only one who calls me Bas is my mother, God rest her soul.”

“Do you even have a wife?”

He shrugs. “I guess, though I haven’t seen or heard from her in years. She could be dead for all I know.”

I don’t respond, mostly because I still don’t know what to believe. There have been so many lies, and if she’s been gone that long, I don’t see how their estrangement could possibly be Cam’s fault. The stories flicker through my head like a disjointed dream, random bits of information he hurled at me over the course of a couple hours. That he grew up in New Orleans, that he moved here after Katrina, that he married his high school sweetheart. The one thing I haven’t forgotten is that this guy was a talker.

Only one detail matches up to the bits and pieces I’ve heard from him today: “You told me about your daughter. You didn’t tell me what was wrong with her, but you said she was sick. That she was dying.”

My words hit him like a slap. He winces, then nods.

A rising high school junior and budding artist, a genius with charcoal and pastels. A sensitive girl with a pretty name.

“Gigi.”

“That’s right.” He looks impressed. “She was named after my grandmother.”

And then, another memory, one that arrives with a sickening spasm. “I promised to help, didn’t I?”

Actually, it’s worse than that. I made a promise to connect him with one of Cam’s regular clients, a board member at Piedmont Hospital. I wrote down Sebastian’s number and asked for a couple of days to connect the two.

And then?

And then I got busy. Running errands and picking up school uniforms at the mall. Meeting friends for lunches and coffees. Carting the kids to violin and soccer and the movies, cooking healthy dinners for my family. I went back to my busy, cushy life, and I didn’t even think about Sebastian and his poor, sweet, sick daughter until many weeks later, when I pulled a wad of lint from the pocket of freshly laundered jeans and connected it to my broken promise.

But it wasn’t too late. I could have tracked Sebastian down. I could have picked up the phone and called that board member. I could have done something.

And yet, I didn’t.

I swallow down a surge of self-loathing. “Jesus... No wonder you hate me and Cam so much.”

Sebastian barks a laugh. “You think?”

“I’m so sorry, Sebastian. I wish I had an excuse, but the truth is, I don’t. All those things I told myself at the time, all the reasons I justified not following through...of course they’re all bullshit. I mean, of course I could have followed through. I should have. But the more time passed, the more I just figured...” I look up at him and I search for the right thing to say, even though I know there’s not a word that exists to make this right.

“You figured what? Spit it out. What did you figure?”

I wince, closing my eyes. “I figured it wouldn’t matter, since our paths would probably never cross again anyway.”

“Even though they’d already crossed a handful of times.” He grimaces, shakes his head. “But of course, you didn’t remember that, either, did you? I was just a stranger with a sorry face and a sad story.”

“I know. And I hate myself for it. If I could go back and change things, I would in a second. The board member’s name is Gordon Howard. He’s in my phone. Let’s call him together, right now.”

“And say what, exactly?”

“That your daughter is sick. That you need help navigating her options. You didn’t tell me what she had, but tonight I heard you mention cystic fibrosis. You said she needed a lung transplant.”

He nods. “Her doctors say they have four, maybe five months left in them, and that’s assuming she doesn’t pick up B. cepacia, which for someone with CF is pretty much a death sentence. She needs that transplant.”

If I wasn’t convinced before that Gigi is Tanya’s niece, I am now. How many sixteen-year-old girls in Atlanta are facing this exact situation? We must be talking about the same person. We must be.

“And the most screwed-up part is that the insurance will cover the lungs. But only if I can guarantee I have the money for all the therapy and antirejection drugs she’ll need to have after.”

I say to Sebastian what I told Tanya when she told me the same story. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

Beatrix sucks in a breath at the curse word, but she’s heard worse, a lot worse from her father, and if there was ever a situation that warranted the f-bomb, this is it. A girl’s life cut short before it’s really begun, on the verge of womanhood, because her father can’t afford the medication to make her lungs stick.

“Tell me about it,” Sebastian says. “And those drugs are just the beginning. There’s testing and rehab, and do you know they even want to charge me for flying the lungs in to the hospital? Why is that something I should have to pay for? If you can’t afford to live in this country, they’re more than happy to just let you die.”

“But Cam’s right, though. This is not the way to go about getting money for her operation.”

My comment seems to anger him. He puffs up his chest and balls his fists, glaring across the coffee table at me. “You think I wouldn’t give her my lungs if I could? You think I wouldn’t rip open my own chest and yank them out myself if I thought it would save her from wasting away? Knowing I’m a match is the worst kind of torture because it doesn’t do either of us any good. I still can’t help her. She’s still going to die without that operation.”

Despite everything, the gun, and the threats, and my son in the enemy’s house across the street, and my daughter strapped to the chair, sympathy rises in my chest for this man. For a sick girl I’ve never met.

“I’m sorry. That must be so hard.”

I mean every word, too, just like I meant them the first time I said them—in this very same room even, after I brought him coffee and a muffin so he could take a break from installing the nanny cams. Sebastian—Bas—came highly recommended by none other than Tanya across the street. The neighbor who’s always picking up our mail. Bills, junk, bank account statements. What we’ve always assumed was a friendly gesture was her way of keeping tabs.

But the more pressing point is, Sebastian knows about the cameras. He’s known it all along.

Not only that.

He spent an entire day up here, banging around the playroom, drilling holes in the ceiling and walls, pointing out the best placement for maximum visibility, upselling me on products that were top-of-the-line, quizzing me on my security system because “maybe it’s time for an upgrade.” He even installed the nanny cam app on my phone, then dragged it onto the third page, so it would be with all the other house stuff.

And today, he chose this room. He brought us here on purpose. Strapping the kids to the couch, questioning me about Cam, ordering me around. Even where he’s standing now, one foot planted on the corner of the rug, his body pointed into the room, puts his uncovered face in all three shots. Everything about this seems intentional.

He wants Cam to see. He wants him to watch what’s about to happen on his little screen while he’s rushing to get here with the ransom.

“But that won’t help you with your hospital bill. A pile of cash that big will be a red flag. You’ll get caught. What happens when the police show up at your door? They’ll confiscate the money, and then where will you be? Who will help Gigi then?”

“She’ll be fine. At home with a new set of lungs.”

“But how? You just told me her insurance won’t pay for the transplant unless you can pay for the antirejection drugs.”

“It’s taken care of. I’ve taken care of it. And we’re getting off track. Let’s not forget that I wouldn’t be standing here if Cam had kept up his end of the deal. He owes me this money.”

Frustration rises, hot and choking in my chest. “You’ll get arrested! There’s got to be a better way.”

Sebastian’s brows shift into a sharp V. “You don’t think I’ve tried everything? I’ve written letters, I’ve filed a million appeals, I even showed up at Channel 7 and begged that reporter Juanita Moore to do one of those investigative deep dives. She said the story wasn’t ‘fresh’ enough to be interesting to the public. I’m out of options. This right here is the very last one, and I’m prepared to see it to the end in order to save my baby girl. You’d do the same if you were in my position.”

I look at Beatrix, then think of Baxter across the street, and my eyes water. I’d tear my lungs out for them, rip out my still-beating heart. “You’re right. I would. In a heartbeat.”

“So get in the chair.”

I shake my head, planting myself deeper into the one next to Beatrix. “Let me help. Let me call Gordon. Maybe he can help you and Gigi.”

My offer straightens his spine with anger, with indignation. “It’s too late! This isn’t some silly story where you can slap on a happy ending. This is my life, and you can’t even imagine the shit I have to go through. Have you ever stuck your card in an ATM and have it not spit out cash?”

Not since college, I think dully, but it seems like an answer I shouldn’t admit out loud.

I think about where he left the gun, on the table to my right, but there’s no way I could get there first. Not with Beatrix in the way, with Sebastian’s body parked a good three feet closer. Better to keep quiet and wait.

Sebastian’s scowl says he knows the answer. “That’s what I thought. So you keep on living your American dream up here in country club fairy-tale land, but enjoy it while it lasts because life can turn on a dime. Believe me when I say there’s no safety net to catch you when you fall. For people like me, life is not something to enjoy but to survive. Your American dream is my nightmare.”

“It’s true, I can’t possibly understand what you’re going through, and I can’t be your safety net, but I can help you get one. Think what you want about Cam and me, but we have influence. People listen to us. If we call up the news stations and make a stink about what is happening to you and your daughter, we can change your situation. We can start a GoFundMe and make sure everyone who comes through the restaurants knows about it. We can help.”

“A GoFundMe, like we haven’t tried that,” he scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Last time I looked there were six of those things, and maybe we scrounged up enough money to pay for three months of treatment, and then what? On the fourth month her body rejects the lungs, and it’s a death worse than what she’s going through now.”

“There has to be something I can do.”

Sebastian shakes his head, gestures to the empty chairs on either side of me. “You can stop acting like you give a shit and get in the damn chair. Cam will be here any minute.”

The panicky feeling returns, a vibration in my bones, a hot itch just under my skin. “Sebastian, please. Please let me help you.”

I stare up at him, and it’s so obvious to me now, the violent loathing in his eyes. The ugly anger, a hatred that all afternoon I thought was meant for me, but it’s not really. It’s for Cam. And the second he gets here, the instant he barrels up those stairs and into this room, the bullets will start flying.

And Sebastian won’t be aiming for Cam.

He’ll aim at me. At Beatrix.

An eye for an eye. Our daughter for his.

Today—all of it—it’s about getting even.