“That was pretty surreal,” Ellie said, as she and Gabe pushed through the heavy glass revolving door and out into the morning, entering the Monday gloom. A messy-bunned walk-and-talker looked up from her cell phone to glare at Ellie, who apparently had dared to step into her path. This time of morning, the tail end of rush hour, the foot traffic was only post-weekend stragglers, some hurrying against the cold, others tardy and defeated. Everyone carried coffee. “You’re pretty convincing as a lawyer.”
“I am a lawyer.” Gabe nudged her with an elbow as they walked toward his car. “And you’re pretty convincing as pharma Barbie.”
She elbowed him back. “Not pharma Barbie, dude. No detail bag, right?” She pointed to the sleek black leather shoulder bag they’d given her, illustrating her point. “I’m now a briefcase-toting customer service slash public relations representative.”
Heads down and hands stuffed in their pockets, she and Gabe battled up the wind tunnels of the skyscrapered Financial District toward the parking lot. The fragrance of surreptitious marijuana mixed with bus exhaust, and a seagull pecked the ground, stalking someone’s discarded popcorn. Rickety souvenir stands competed for the sidewalk space, offering tourists counterfeit Red Sox T-shirts and Cheers mugs.
She was as counterfeit as those cheap trinkets, Ellie realized, as they descended into the fume-filled underground parking garage. Gabe clicked open his Jeep and opened the door for her.
“Where to now? Should you check out some doctors? You’re already all Nora’d up and ready to go.”
Ellie slid into her seat. Yanked on her seat belt. Closed her door.
“Gabe? What if I see Meg in some office? So much of the time I’m not at Channel Eleven. And no one there knew I was being Nora. That’s part of my deal, that I can research without having to check in all the time.”
Gabe pushed on the ignition. The engine rumbled to life, but he didn’t shift into gear.
“But see, that means,” Ellie raised a forefinger as punctuation, “I also don’t know where Meg’s been while I’m gone. I keep trying to think whether I’ve seen her. You’d think I’d have recognized her, no matter how she tried to disguise herself. I mean, I know her.”
“Or maybe she saw you first and took off.”
“Could be.” Ellie thought about that. “She’s aware—because we discussed it with the news director—that I’ve visited doctors’ offices. She thinks I go as me, though. Ellie. Not Nora.”
“But she knows Ellie-you. Think she’d recognize Nora-you?”
“Impossible to say,” she admitted. “And then there’d be the question of whether she’d keep it secret. Geez. It might be easier if she were Brooke Vanderwald. Listen. Let’s head to Newton. I’ll explain on the way.”
Gabe accelerated up the parking garage’s concrete incline toward the Boston morning, the gloomy daylight ahead appearing as they drew closer to the garage exit.
March in Boston was still the depth of winter, Ellie was learning. Back home, March meant daffodils, and even the floating canopies of cherry blossoms. But the dank Boston days, she’d been warned, stretched until April. Ellie drew her coat closer, chilled not only by the weather but by the path she’d chosen. She could be warm later. Happy later. Satisfied later. At peace—later.
She sneaked a glance at Gabe as he slipped a paper ticket and then a credit card into the parking fee machine. Guy, she thought. But now officially Gabe, after he’d shown her ID in his WorkHere office. She yearned to be furious about his deception, betrayed and deceived, but that was complicated since she’d done the same thing to him. Her feelings about Guy, though—before she knew the truth—had been real. And he’d told her “Guy” had “connected” with Nora. So some things were authentic. Maybe.
“I still get confused about what to call you,” she said. “Gabe or Guy. They both look the same.”
“Well, yeah, the same person was never supposed to see both of us. You’re the only one who did.”
The bright orange-striped metal of the parking garage exit arm clanked to vertical, allowing them into the morning. A brown tourist trolley trundled in front of them, red pennants fluttering and glassine windows flapped down, its bundled-up passengers peering through the smoky plastic at Boston Common and, Ellie figured, at the gold dome of the statehouse beyond.
“But doesn’t it work just fine now?” Gabe asked. “That we’re both who we really are? Most of the time, anyway.”
“And it’s easy for you to remember when I’m Nora.” She pretended to preen, twirled an auburn curl like a cheesy TV villain. “Though, yeah, the same people were not supposed to see both her and me either. That’d never work.”
Gabe pulled out into the street, the silvery morning softening the lines in his face, and pulled up to the zebra-striped crosswalk, stopping for the pedestrians who’d stepped off the curb on their way to the Common. A ballet dancer of a woman wearing a pink watch cap, pink leggings and chunky boots chatted face-to-face with a swaddled infant strapped into the Snugli across her chest, oblivious to anything but their conversation. A twentysomething in a puffy red parka and pushing a stroller grabbed the mittened hand of a waddling child in a matching coat, the child pointing to a scattering of sparrows in the snow.
A stroller. A mother. A child. So random, so unremarkable, so simple. For some. For others the image might bring pain and grief, longing and disappointment. So many women wanted that, needed that, lived for that. Motherhood was a choice, and needed to be as fair a choice as humanly possible. That’s why Ellie—and Nora—did what they did. Risked what they risked. Ellie made a silent promise. She would not give up.
“El?”
Gabe had turned to her—who knows how long he’d been watching her? He’d called her El. “Yeah?”
“I’m still thinking about Brooke Vanderwald.”
“Listen. How about I just ask Meg? I’m happy to.” Ellie offered.
Gabe checked his rearview, then flicked a dismissive glance at her. “Sarcasm is unnecessary, Ellie.”
“No, I’m serious,” she said. “Say Brooke Vanderwald created a new persona as an annoying and incompetent TV producer wannabe. Who just happened to show up where I work, and just happened to work with me, a reporter working on an exposé about her family’s company. But hey, wouldn’t that make our job supereasy? She can get us all kinds of Pharminex secret papers and in-house documents. Awesome. Doing it. Wanna come with when I ask?”
“Wanna get out and walk?”
“But see what I mean? I agree, I do, it’d be great. Even amazing. But … so unlikely.”
Gabe waved her off. “Okay. Fine. No more Meg is Brooke. Meg is Meg. But we still need—”
“A plan.” Ellie mentally reviewed her past appointments, the doctors’ offices, analyzing which ones seemed like possibilities. She had to start somewhere. “That’s why I’m thinking Newton. There’s a clinic on Route Nine there I can check out. And just so you don’t get all focused on what we say we’re doing, let me remind you what we are doing. We’re looking for victims. For information. For documentation of the company’s deception and greed. For the death sentence for P-X. And Gabe?”
“Yeah?”
“No matter what Detta and Allessandra insist, you’ve got to believe they’ll go to any length to stop anyone from exposing them. They rehired me, remember? To spy? And they admitted I’m not the only spy, as poor duped Nora found out. So gotta wonder who else is on their payroll?”
Gabe steered the awkward turn onto Storrow Drive, the patchy faded grass in front of the half-domed Hatch Shell on their right, and past that, the Charles River, with the mismatched architecture of MIT looming in the distance across the white-capped water. Storrow Drive, too curvy, too narrow, and too crowded, was a traffic minefield of potholes and aggression.
“Any ideas? Damn it! Hey! Watch it!” Gabe swerved right to avoid a careening Boston cab, its rear fender dented and trunk taped closed, speeding bat-out-of-hell in front of them. “Moron.”
Ellie’d grabbed the door handle, eyes wide, as a scene—from what movie?—unspooled in an instant through her mind: a flickering half-memory of snow and squealing brakes and skidding tires and a sound that somehow made her sad.
She stared out the windshield as the cab disappeared, thought about how quickly a life can change, one stupid cabdriver or a—
“Gabe,” she said, staring straight ahead. “Kaitlyn Armistead.”
“The one who got killed?”
“Yeah. But Gabe? It was my fault she died.”