Zoey had just eased herself into the tub when she got a call from Carlton saying Will was at the front door. Zoey grunted and decided she wasn’t going to move. Let him come back in the morning. Then Carlton called again and Zoey cursed and dragged herself out of the water, did a cursory job of drying herself, and pulled on pajamas and a bathrobe.
Will wasn’t in the foyer. Instead, she found him standing out on the cobblestones outside the big doors. She went out and let the doors close behind her.
She threw out her hands and said, “What the hell?”
“Can you be more specific with your question?”
“What the hell, Will?”
“Are you asking why I’m here? Or are you asking why I didn’t share all of my information with you about the Tilley situation?”
Zoey answered with a silent glare. He knew damned well what she wanted.
“Look,” he said, “you asked me to find out how to get to Titus Chobb. His weakness was his dead wife and his sick son. If I’d told you the strategy, you’d have vetoed it. So the answer to the question ‘How do you get to Titus Chobb’ was ‘Find a way to exploit those weaknesses and don’t tell Zoey.’ The only way to carry out your order was to shield you from it.”
“No.” She stabbed a finger at him. “You’re the one who got my mom that job at that Freya building. That’s too much of a coincidence. You set that up and you did it months ago. You knew this was coming.”
“I knew that the guy who instigated Arthur’s death and was building a private army was going to eventually be a problem? You think that took some kind of next-level foresight?”
“And you got my mother involved, how?”
“She came to me and asked how she could help. I said she could keep an eye on this guy who was going to be a threat soon, talk to him, take his temperature. The rest, she did on her own.”
“This city is full of absurdly hot twenty-five-year-olds you could have thrown at Chobb. There is no reason you had to pick my mother for that task.”
“You think Titus Chobb wants a hot twenty-five-year-old? You don’t think he can get that whenever he wants? He didn’t need that; he needed what Freya had given him. He needed someone to give him permission to be the better version of himself. By making him feel like, deep down, he can still be a good man, that he could maybe even go off and have a whole new life with this woman, a fresh start. The same thing that captivated Arthur and probably several males your mother meets in the course of an average commute.”
“That shouldn’t be any woman’s job.”
“Fixing a clogged toilet shouldn’t be any man’s job but it’s either that or let the house fill with shit.”
“So you knew all the stuff with Dexter Tilley was going to happen, somehow?”
“What? No. That blew my plan apart. I wanted a rift between Chobb and Dirk Vikerness. The staff was loyal to Chobb, the people on the ground were loyal to Dirk. Nothing I’ve tried since Tilley has succeeded.”
“But it all worked out exactly how you wanted anyway.”
“Because you found a way. You convinced Marti to come clean. You and your mother somehow convinced Titus to abandon his life’s work altogether. I’ll never know how you sold him on that. I made a mess of the situation and you cleaned it up.”
“God, you’re so phony when you’re trying to play humble. I think you’re trying to butter me up to get me to ignore the obvious, which is that the Vanguard of Peace was your Halloween present, your prank gift to me. That this whole thing was orchestrated, by you, in some kind of misguided attempt to … what? Consolidate power?”
“It’s strange how you simultaneously have an impossibly high and impossibly low opinion of me.”
“You keep exceeding my expectations in both directions. You know I promised Titus that I’d keep you in line. Make sure you don’t wind up running the city according to your evil desires.”
“It seems like the first step in doing that would have been not telling me.”
“Which raises a question in my mind that I still can’t answer,” said Zoey. “What do you want?”
“Right now?”
“Just, in general.”
He shrugged. “I want what every man wants. I want to build something. Look around you. This house, all those buildings downtown, what do you think all of that is about? It’s about leaving a mark. Not just the stuff you can see, but the connections, the systems. This guy needs a thing and has money, this woman on the other side of town has the thing and needs money. Find a way to connect those two and you’ve made the world a happier place. That’s really all it is, all of civilization—just organizing those transactions. But the second you set yourself to building something great, a swarm of jackals wash in and start gnawing at it. Grifters, thieves, bureaucrats. Pretty soon, fighting them off is all you get done. What do you want?”
Zoey thought about it.
“I want to be comfortable in my skin. I want a little switch I can flip that decides whether or not people are paying attention to me. I want a daughter. A little nerdy daughter who wears dorky glasses and knows a million facts about dinosaurs. She has a little round face and hates dresses. Her name is Marcy.”
“You think any of that’s possible, in your situation?”
Zoey didn’t answer. They stood in silence for a bit. It was cold, and the remnants of Zoey’s bathwater had dampened her pajamas. She studied the cobblestones and tried to see if she could find dried bloodstains.
“How long ago,” asked Zoey, “did your wife pass away?”
“The accident was four years ago this February, on the tenth. I don’t know the exact time, she was gone before the ambulances even got to the scene. But would have been around three-fifteen in the afternoon.”
Zoey studied her fuzzy slippers and said, “This summer, when I had my breakdown and woke up in the hospital … my mom said the paramedics showed up and found me passed out in bed. Pills and alcohol nearby. Then you called nine-one-one, she said, because Carlton was asleep and I’d sent Wu home. But you were there, for some reason. That’s what she told me.”
Will didn’t answer, because she hadn’t asked a question.
“But that story has never added up. Not based on what I remember.”
Will just looked off into the distance, watching the giant jack-o’-lantern casting its orange glow around the front lawn, as if he was worried it would come to life and start rolling after them.
“My memory from that night isn’t great,” Zoey continued, “but it’s not a total blackout, either. I did send Wu home, against his wishes, then took off in the convertible and found a trashy bar. I’d saved some of the pain pills from my surgery last year and took four of them, then drank a whole lot, really fast. I found this guy, big biker guy with a tattoo on his neck—or maybe he just liked the biker leathers—and dragged him back to the bathroom. So I remember that, that whole … sequence, and then he left me there and I stayed behind. I took off my dress and threw it in the trash, because it had … stains, and I remember that and then I remember that I was then lying on the damp concrete in my bra and panties and in that moment that floor just felt like a big puffy cloud I just wanted to sleep on forever. Then I blinked and I was in the hospital.”
Will said, “If you say so. I wasn’t there for that part.”
“You weren’t? Because that means someone had come and gotten me out of that situation and did it in a way so that no one ever found out about it. No staff at the bar ever talked, no customers talked, neither did anyone passing by outside. Not a single glimpse from a running Blink camera, not a single anonymous rumor leaked to Chopra. Not even the biker talked. I can’t even fathom how that was accomplished. But it happened, and it happened because this mysterious, all-powerful person didn’t want strangers to see me like that. Then that person proceeded to tell absolutely no one the embarrassing truth in the months since, not even my own mother. Not even me.”
“If you say so.”
She sighed. It was like pulling teeth. “You should have been at the party today, Will.”
“Just not my thing.”
“Hey, I hate crowds, too. There’s too many—”
“Variables to control. Yeah.”
“Hating parties, that’s the only thing we have in common.”
He glanced at her for a microsecond before saying, “You think that’s the only thing, huh?”
“Anyway,” she said, turning to go back into the foyer, “for your performance this weekend, I’m giving you a six.”
“I guess I’m getting better.”
She went inside, closing the door behind her.