“I’m not breaking up with you,” I interrupted them. “Here, why don’t you sit down?”
Jesse hesitated. “No one tells you to sit down when it’s good news.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “Okay, stand or sit, do whatever you want.”
Jesse crossed his arms over his chest and right then I would have given everything to be back in Gramercy Park with him. “I have something to tell you,” I began, “but you might not believe it. Roux can tell you it’s true, though.”
“It’s true,” Roux said.
Jesse looked from her to me. “Okay, what is it?”
My mouth was trembling but I wasn’t crying. “You were my assignment,” I whispered.
“I was your what?”
“My assignment. My parents and I are spies and your dad’s going to publish an article about us. My job was—is—to stop it.”
Jesse started to laugh. “Are you nuts?” he said. “You scared the shit out of me!” He came forward and wrapped his arms around me, kissing the top of my head. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
As much as it killed me to do it, I stepped away from him, taking his hands and holding him at arm’s length. “It’s true,” I told him. “I crack safes and open locks. That’s what I do. And if I don’t find out where that article is, my family and our whole operation will be exposed.”
The smile started to fade from Jesse’s face. “What are you talking about?”
“Last night, when you were telling me about how your dad was upset about that one article? I think that’s the article I need to stop.”
“Wait, so …” Jesse dropped my hands and backed away from me. “You’re a spy? I don’t believe it. You go to school, you can’t be a spy! You take calculus!”
“Do the passport thing,” Roux piped up. “That’s really effective.”
I went to my purse and started pulling out the passports again. “See these?” I said. “These are all mine. All twelve of them.” I fanned them out on the bed and Jesse picked one up, looking at it with a mixture of disgust and amazement. “Jess, I need your help,” I told him. “I really do.”
“I told you things!” he suddenly exploded. “Do you even care what you do to people?”
He looked so upset that I thought he was going to throw something, but instead he just sank down on the bed next to Max. “I can’t believe I thought you were for real,” he said.
“I was—I am—for real!” I protested. “When we were out together, ice skating and talking and sitting in the park, that was all me. I wasn’t lying about that!”
“But you were still lying!”
“You know what?” Roux said. “I’m just going to go use the restroom.”
We both waited for her to leave before even daring to look at each other. “Maggie, what the hell?”
“I didn’t know how this was gonna end,” I said. I wanted to sit next to him, touch his hand, his hair, something to bring him back to me, but I didn’t dare. “You were just an assignment in the beginning. I didn’t realize that I would like you so much.”
“So this whole thing? This whole time? The party, the date, everything?”
I gave him a rundown of the whole assignment, starting from my first morning in New York and leading up to the morning after our first date. “So you broke into my dad’s safe?” he asked at the end, incredulous.
“Yes,” I admitted. “That’s why I was here.”
He cursed under his breath, then stood up and ran his hands through his hair. “I think you need to leave,” he said. “Like, right now.”
But I stayed sitting. “Jesse, I know you don’t believe me and I get it. I do, I swear. And the last thing I want to do is hurt you. But if I don’t stop this article, then everyone in my family will be in jeopardy and our lives ruined. We think it’s going to name names.” I took a deep breath and shoved my hair behind my ears. “And if the Collective thinks that your dad’s going to run this story and I can’t stop it, they’re just going to send someone else to do the job.”
“But you don’t even know if he’s going to run it!”
“That’s why I need your help.” I stood up and went over to him, trying to hold his hands again, but he jerked them away from me. “You can be as pissed at me as you want. That’s fine, I get it. Hate me. But right now, if you don’t help me out, my family and I are going to be destroyed and possibly put in a lot of danger. Then we’ll never be able to be together, you and me.” I swallowed hard, hoping he would still even want to be with me.
Jesse exhaled and dropped his head into his hands, running his fingers through his hair before they got tangled midway. “So this Collective,” he said. “Do you, like, smuggle arms and drugs?”
“More like the complete opposite. We stop it.”
Jesse glanced up at me.
“We do things that make the world better. I was in Iceland all summer, cracking the safe of a human trafficker.”
He froze. “You were?”
I nodded. “We’re not the bad guys. We stop the bad guys. And if we can’t do that anymore, you don’t want to know what the world will look like.”
Jesse looked down at me like he was seeing me for the first time. Which, in a way, he was. “You told me,” he said after a minute, “that we would always be honest with each other. Do you remember that? Because I think about it every damn day.”
I nodded even as my eyes filled with tears. “I remember. I said that we should be as honest as we could. And I was. And now I’m telling you everything because there’s a lot at stake.
“I’ll leave if you want me to,” I continued. “But if you want to help me, then I need your dad’s laptop.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to read his work e-mails.”
“You’re going to hack into my dad’s computer?” Jesse cried. “You can’t do that, that’s illegal!”
“Well, I think we can all agree that bidets are weird,” Roux announced as she strolled back into the room. “What’d I miss? Are we fighting evil together or what?”
Jesse and I glanced at one another before looking away at the same time. “I’m not sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “That’s Jesse’s decision.”
He looked away and started petting Max. “I think you need to leave,” he said again. “Both of you. Right now.”
No one spoke for a few seconds, then Roux tugged at my arm. “C’mon, Maggie,” she said, as serious and somber as I had ever heard her. “Let’s just go. It’s a lot to take in.”
I nodded even as tears swam in my eyes and I gathered up my coat with fingers so nearly numb that they tingled. “I was as honest as I could be,” I told him.
“Mags, c’mon,” Roux whispered.
Jesse was quiet, and for a minute it felt like my life hung in the balance of his silence. And then he spoke.
“I didn’t know that honesty had a gray area.”
The tears in my eyes spilled over. “Neither did I,” I admitted, and then I let Roux guide me out the front door and take me back to her home.
Chapter 29
The next morning I was in study hall, still puffy-eyed and swollen from the night before. Roux had sat next to me in her foyer as I cried and cried about what a terrible girlfriend and horrible spy I was, and she even brought me a small glass of water. However, when I started to sip the water …
“Roux! This is vodka!”
She looked confused. “You don’t want it?”
I wiped my eyes and handed her back the glass. “Water, please.”
“Fine, fine, suit yourself.”
Study hall was a more muted kind of misery. My exhaustion was tempered by the espresso that Roux had somehow managed to produce that morning, but my sadness was still raging and had nowhere to go. I had ruined everything and now it was rubble, unable to be put back together.
I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even hear the library doors open, so when someone dropped a bag on the table in front of
me, I nearly fell out of my chair. “What the—!” I gasped, clutching at my chest, then looked up into Jesse Oliver’s eyes.
“You better hurry,” he said. “I snuck it out while he was at work. I have to get it back before he comes home.”
I blinked at him. “Are you serious?”
“Can I sit here?”
“Um, yeah, of course. Yes, sit, sit.” I shoved a chair toward him and he sank down.
“So, you’re really …?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“My whole life.”
“You realize how crazy this sounds, right?”
“Yes.” I was so scared he would leave again that I could barely form polysyllabic words.
He chewed on his bottom lip. I’ve noticed he does that when he gets upset. “I’m still mad at you, you know.”
“I know. I’m mad at me, too.”
“I’ll help you, but I’m not sure I can get over this.”
“Can I … can I just say one thing?”
Jesse nodded.
“Two things, actually. First, I am so, so sorry that I wasn’t honest with you, but sometimes, it’s literally a matter of life and death. If I could have told you everything from the very beginning, I would have, I swear to God. But I couldn’t.”
“And the second thing?”
The second thing was a lot harder.
“My feelings for you,” I started, and I could feel the tears rising again. “My feelings for you were not part of the assignment. They were real. One hundred percent, honest-to-God, absolutely real. They have been since that night at the party. I know that’s hard to believe, but I’m standing here in front of you, risking every single thing that I have, and I’m telling you that I love you. I’d love you even if you’d never come back and hated me for the rest of your life.”
“What about all those other girls on your passports? What would they say?”
“They would say the same thing because they’re all just me.” I wiped at my eyes before a tear could escape and attract a teacher’s attention. “All those girls are me. Different names, same feelings. The same girl who loves the same boy.”
Jesse was silent for a long time, alternately looking out the window and down at the table. My hands were shaking so I tucked them into my lap.
“So,” he finally said. “How are we going to hack this computer, anyway?”
I looked at him. “Are you saying you’ll help me?”
He nodded, his jaw tight.
I flung myself out of my chair and straight into his arms, nearly knocking both of us backward onto the floor. “Um, excuse me!” I heard the librarian protest, but I was too busy clinging to Jesse, and he was too busy hugging me right back.
“I’m still mad,” he whispered.
“I know,” I said. “It’s all right, I know.”
I just held him tighter.
“—but not mad enough to let you go.” Jesse pulled away after a minute, gesturing toward the now-furious-looking librarian. “She might explode.”
“Yeah, okay.” It was hard to let go of him, though, and I kept my hand fisted in the back of his jacket, not ready to lose him again.
“So what do we do now?” he asked, as soon as everyone’s attention was diverted back to their work and the librarian looked a little less red.
“First things first,” I said. “We find Roux.”
Jesse sighed. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Love connection!!” Roux yelled when she saw us walking in the hallway hand in hand. “Oh my God, I just knew you two wouldn’t break up! My psychic friend totally called it.”
I held up Armand Oliver’s laptop. “We gotta go.”
Roux’s eyes widened. “Yes. Let’s go.”
Once we were settled at a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan, we opened the laptop and started it up. “Tell me again why we can’t just do this at my house,” Roux said. “We have WiFi and our tables aren’t so small and sticky.”
“Because,” I said, “I don’t want anyone to trace this back to your house. Whereas there’s probably at least a couple thousand people a day who use the WiFi here.”
“Crafty. I like.”
“Don’t you need more gadgets?” Jesse said. “You don’t have anything that looks very impressive.”
(Honestly, I loved Jesse and Roux dearly, but I was starting to understand why most spies worked alone.) “Gadgets?”
“Yeah, for hacking.”
“I’m not the hacker,” I protested. “That’s my mom’s job.”
“Your mom?” Roux said. “Wow, it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it.”
“And I’m not going to break into his computer,” I told Jesse.
“You’re not?”
“Nope. You’re going to do it for me.”
“I am?”
“Yep,” I said, then passed the laptop across the table to him. “What’s your dad’s e-mail password?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Jesse asked. “It’s his e-mail, not mine.”
“Okay, we’ll have to guess.”
“E-mail is so archaic.” Roux sighed, but Jesse and I ignored her.
“It’s usually kids’ names and birthdays,” I told him. “Or a combination of that. Or maybe an anniversary.”
“Can’t you just plug something into the computer that’ll download it?” Jesse asked.
“That’s not exactly how it works,” I replied, taking over the keyboard. “Our jobs would be a million times easier if it did.”
We tried several combinations of Jesse’s name and birth date that we could think of, but they didn’t work. “Told you,” Jesse said after our fourth attempt.
“What’s your mom’s name?” I asked him, and he looked stricken. “I’m serious. What is it?”
“Meredith,” Jesse said. “Meredith May Oliver.”
I typed “Meredith May” and the in-box opened up.
“People are so predictable,” Roux said, as if she had spent her life trying to crack passwords. “Good job, Mags.”
“Thank you, thank you,” I said. “Okay, let’s start searching.”
Chapter 30
We were a trio obsessed.
At first I couldn’t find any e-mails about any article. I searched “Collective,” “Maggie,” “Angelo,” “spy,” whatever I could think of that might give us a hit. Nothing came up. But when I tried words like “story,” “cost,” or “secret,” it gave me thousands upon thousands of hits. “Your dad really needs to organize his in-box,” I told Jesse at one point. “He’s an electronic hoarder.”
“This is way more exciting in the movies.” Roux yawned after the clock passed five and we didn’t have anything. Tiny tendrils of panic were starting to wind their way around my throat, and I knew that if we didn’t find anything, this whole deal was over. I had blown my parents’ cover, Angelo’s cover, and my cover, all within the span of a day, and pretty soon, the rest of the world would know who we were. There would likely be government inquiries, arrests, and I’d probably be separated from my parents and put—
“What’s that?” Jesse asked, interrupting my depressing train of thought. (I guess he had a point with the whole apocalyptic-thinking thing.) “Go back, go back.”
I scrolled back up and saw an e-mail titled, “Re: auction.” “My dad was talking about an auction on the phone the other day,” Jesse said. “He was angry that someone was trying to sell a story after they said he could have it.”
“That would have been good to know two hours ago!” I said, clicking on it as fast as I could.
“Sorry, I didn’t think it was important! We don’t all do this for a living, you know.”
I let it slide because, fair enough. At that point, I was just glad that Jesse was still talking to me.
The e-mail was short and to the point: “‘Due to your request, I can no longer participate in our discussion regarding the International story. We at Meredian Media—’ Did he name it after your mom?”
“Yeah,” Jesse admitted.
“Awww!” Roux and I both squealed.
“Where was I?” I continued. “Oh, yeah. ‘We at Meredian Media have a longstanding policy not to pay for information relevant to our articles. To do so would violate our journalistic integrity, as well as our moral code.’” I paused again. “Your dad has an eloquent way of telling people to take a hike.”
“He does,” Jesse said. “Where’s the trail, though? No forwards, no replies.”
We searched for the recipient’s e-mail address next and found a slew of e-mails, nearly thirty in all. “Gotcha!” Roux said, sitting up so she could squint at the screen. “Can you guys even read that? I think I need glasses.”
I shoved over and pulled the computer onto my lap so that all three of us could look at it. “He was selling the story,” I realized. “Your dad agreed to run it at first, but then the guy turned around and offered it to another magazine to try and get a bidding war going. He wanted your dad to pay for the info.”
“How much did he want for it?” Roux asked. “That’s a lot of zeroes.”
“That’s Egalité magazine,” Jesse said. “My dad hates their publisher because he used to work for my dad and then left and took half of his reporters with him. Seriously, don’t say Egalité around my dad.”
“But it doesn’t say that he bought the story, just that he wanted to buy it.”
“Can’t you look at his bank accounts?” Roux said. “See if he made any big withdrawals?”
“I could if I were working at the Collective’s headquarters right now.” I sighed. “They have all the technology for that. But out in the field, all I do is open the safes.” I was starting to realize how far out of my depth I was.
“Roger didn’t buy it,” Jesse said. “Trust me.”
Roux and I turned to look at him. “If he bought it, two things would be happening. One, my dad would be ripping his hair out and swearing up and down the halls. He hates Egalité so much that, trust me, we’d know if they got the story.”
“I recommend anger management,” Roux said.
“And two,” Jesse continued, ignoring her, “if they did already buy the story, everyone would know. He’d be leaking bits and pieces to the press on a daily basis.”