But I had a job to do.
“There’s an egg,” I said. “A Fabergé egg. It’s … I don’t know if it’s fake or real. It just stood out. Dominic has seven of them, but this one is different.”
“That’s good, that’s very good.”
“But there’s also tons of books and figurines, too. The whole house is like a museum, Angelo. Those coins could be anywhere.” Someone jostled my shoulder as they walked past me and I flinched, instinctively turning to protect myself and my backpack.
“And he never saw you leave?”
“I’m sure he felt the air when I opened the door, but no. He didn’t see me.” I closed my eyes briefly, forcing myself to focus. “Listen, Angelo, I have to go. Jesse’s been waiting for me for over an hour. I was supposed to have dinner with his mom and him.”
“Wait, Maggie,” he said, but I interrupted him.
“No, Angelo. I need. To go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And then I hung up and yanked out my SIM card before tossing my phone into the trash as I stepped out into the street and raised my arm. A cab sidled to my side, the one stroke of luck I had had all night, and I casually dropped the SIM card on the street as I climbed in and began hurtling toward downtown to find my boyfriend.
Chapter 16
It was 9:30 by the time I made it to Bond Street, the sushi restaurant where Jesse had wanted me to meet him and his mom. I was breathless after leaving the cab stuck in traffic and running the last two blocks, shoving my way through crowds of people and throngs of bridge-and-tunnel tourists, and when I got inside the restaurant, I completely ignored the maître d’ and stormed into the elevator to take me to the second floor.
It was dark and moody upstairs, the air heavy with the sound of silverware clinking and clattering against plates, the snap of chopsticks echoing right behind. “I’m meeting someone,” I said to the second maître d’ (seriously, how many do they need?) and went into the dining room.
Jesse was sitting at the table alone, a coffee cup in front of him. The plates had been cleared, a little soy sauce stain on the tablecloth the only evidence that dinner had been eaten, and I came to stand next to him. “Hi,” I said. “I am so, so sorry.”
He looked up at me with angry, hurt eyes. “You missed her. She left to catch her train ten minutes ago.”
I sank down into the chair across from him, adrenaline leaving my body with such a whoosh! that it felt like it had taken my bones with it. “I’m so sorry,” I said again. “I got stuck, I couldn’t call. I’m so sorry. Did you have a nice time?”
“No, I didn’t have a nice time!” he exploded, and the table next to us glanced over. “You were supposed to meet me here ninety minutes ago! You didn’t return any of my texts! I didn’t know if you just didn’t care or if you were working—!”
“Of course I was working!” I shot back. “Why else would I have missed this? I didn’t have a choice, Jess! You think I didn’t want to be sitting here with you and your mom instead of being trapped in some guy’s house?” I bit my lip, stopping myself from saying too much.
Too late.
“Wait, you went into someone’s house while they were still there?” Jesse said. “Do you know how dangerous that can be? You’re not invincible, Mags! People could really hurt you!”
“You,” I pointed at him, “do not get to tell me about danger, okay? I know. I’m all too aware of how dangerous this is. That’s why I can’t tell you anything!”
“Your eyes are huge, do you know that? You look like you’ve been dropping E all night.”
“It’s just adrenaline,” I told him, wondering how disheveled I looked next to all of the other classy diners. “It’s fine, it’ll go away.”
“So you couldn’t answer just one text?” he asked, ignoring my response. “Not even one? I even called your parents and they had no idea where you were!”
“You called my parents?” I screeched, and now diners really were paying attention to us. “You know what? We need to go outside. I can’t have this conversation in here.”
“Fine by me,” Jesse said. “I was just getting ready to leave anyway.”
We both stormed downstairs, my boots very loud and heavy on the floor compared to all of the high heels, and I was all too aware of my T-shirt and messy hair. I’ve never been embarrassed by how I looked before, but now I stood out for all the wrong reasons.
The minute we got out on the street, our fight resumed.
“You can’t just call my parents!” I yelled. “They don’t know about this, either! Oh my God, they’re probably freaking out right now.”
“What do you mean, they don’t know?” Jesse said. “Shouldn’t you tell them, Maggie? I thought that was your deal with them! The last time you tried to do something on your own, you almost got all of us killed!”
The air left my lungs. If Jesse had punched me in the stomach, I don’t think it would have felt worse than what he just said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his face immediately apologetic. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “You don’t just say something like that and not mean it!” I felt hot tears pricking at the backs of my eyes, but I ignored them. I was too angry to cry. “And I can’t tell my parents because this involves them, okay? If they knew what I was doing, they would try and stop me and if they stop me, then we’re done.”
“So you’re willing to risk your life and their lives just to be right?”
I took a deep breath, steeling my nerves. “If memory serves,” I told him, “you were just fine with me risking my life when I was saving your dad’s ass. And now that I’m trying to save my parents, you suddenly have a problem with it? Wow, thanks, Jess. Thanks for being such a supportive boyfriend.”
I spun on my heel and started to walk away, but Jesse caught up with me in three steps and took my arm to turn me around to face him. “That is not fair—” he started to say, but I cut him off again.
“This isn’t about fair!” I yelled. “If this was about fair, then I would be a seventeen-year-old girl having dinner with her boyfriend and his mom, not spending my Friday night squeezed into a crawl space on the Upper West Side, okay? You don’t get to talk to me about fair! All you have to do is be normal! I’m the one who has to do all the work here!”
“And you think it’s fun to just sit around and wonder if your girlfriend’s going to wind up dead or missing?” Jesse yelled back. “You think that’s fair? Because it’s not, Maggie! It’s hell. You’re out there doing God knows what and I’m just hanging out. I can’t even help you and it makes me crazy!”
I pressed my fingers against my eyes, so mad that I wanted to punch something. “This is how it is,” I told him, and my voice was so cold that it scared me a little. “You’ve known this from the very beginning. This is who I am. I can’t change and I won’t change, especially not right now.
“And if you can’t handle it, then you need to go.”
I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth.
Jesse’s eyes widened in surprise, and then his face smoothed out into something I had never seen before. “That’s the thing, Mags,” he said, his voice strained and sounding nothing like him. “I can’t go. I’m always going to worry about you. Even if we break up tomorrow—”
“You want to break up?”
“No, I’m just saying! Even if we did, I’d still worry about you. I’m going to worry about you for the rest of my life because of this insane job of yours. I can’t stand that you’re out there risking your life and I can’t protect you!”
“Why? Because I’m a girl?”
“No, because I love you!” Jesse suddenly covered his mouth with his hand and turned away from me. His shoulders were bunched together, the tension running down his spine. When he turned back, there were tears in his eyes.
“That’s what people do when they love each other, Mags. They protect each other. You looked out for me and Roux, and now you won’t let us do the same for you
and it makes me crazy.”
Now the tears were starting to fall and I was too exhausted to try and stop them. “Jesse, wait,” I said. “We’re both tired. We’re both angry. Let’s just talk about this tomorrow, okay?”
“When? Can you make time in your busy, world-saving schedule for me? Or do you want to leave me hanging and making excuses to my mom for ninety minutes while you risk your life around town?”
“You didn’t tell your mom, did you?” I asked. “Oh, my God, Jesse.”
“Of course I didn’t!” he cried. “That’s what I’m talking about! You can’t even trust me and all I’ve ever done is trust you and worry about you and—”
“I can’t tell you because it’s dangerous!” I exploded. “It’s really, really dangerous, Jesse! I shouldn’t have even told you and Roux about any of this in the first place, but I did and it was my stupid mistake and now I have to protect you because if I don’t …” The words stuck in my throat and I couldn’t get them out for a few seconds. “If I don’t and something happens to you …” They were stuck again, not going anywhere this time.
“You don’t have to protect me this time,” Jesse said, stepping toward me.
“Yes, I do!” I cried. “If you don’t have any information, then no one can get it from you. That’s what I keep trying to tell you!”
Jesse went quiet for almost a minute as we stood across from each other, both of us trying to catch our breath. He was the first to speak.
“So if you can’t trust me and I can’t protect you, then how the hell are we going to make this work?”
It’s a special sort of pain when someone voices your exact fears, when someone tells you that all the dark thoughts you have about yourself are not only real, but that everyone else can see them, too. It’s the sort of pain that drives the tears out of your eyes and shuts down your heart and drops a steel wall in front of it and makes you realize that yes, being alone is terrible, but it will never be as painful as this.
“Maybe we don’t,” I said, the tears stuck in my throat. “Maybe this is how it ends.”
Jesse just blinked. “You seriously want to break up?”
“I don’t want to,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do! No matter what I do, I’m going to hurt you!”
Jesse bit the inside of his cheek, his jaw tightening. “Nothing hurts worse than this,” he said, echoing my own thoughts.
“Maybe we just need to take a break,” I said. “Not break up, but just figure things out.”
If a nod could be sarcastic, then that’s what Jesse did. “Cool. Fine. Okay.” He put his arm up to signal a cab turning the corner, then pulled open the door when it glided to the curb. “Get in,” he told me.
“I can hail my own—”
“Just.” Jesse took another deep breath and I saw his chin quiver a little. “Just let me do this for you,” he said. “In case this doesn’t work, let me do one last nice thing for you.”
My hands were shaking as I climbed in. We had shared a cab together last Halloween, hauling a very drunk Roux back to her apartment and then heading back downtown after sharing a kiss on an Upper East Side brownstone stoop. It had been our first kiss, and I remembered feeling the cracked pleather seats on the cab ride home, the smell of Jesse’s cologne, and the buzzing feeling that I had from kissing someone for the very first time. I had been in love with him then, but now it was deeper. Now I loved him.
And I had to let him go.
He shut the door after I got in and I pressed my palm against the window, wondering if I could feel his touch through the glass. He looked away, and I felt my heart sink, but then he wiped at his eyes before pressing his hand up against mine. There was only cold between us, no contact, and when the cab driver pulled away, Jesse’s fingers slipped along the glass, leaving tearstains on the window, sending me home alone.
Chapter 17
The scene was no less explosive when I got back to the loft.
“Where have you been?” my mom yelled as soon as the fingerprint scanner beeped to let me in. “We have been waiting here, calling your phone—”
“The SIM card in that phone is in pieces somewhere on Ninety-Fifth Street,” I told her, then held up my hand. “I cannot fight with you right now. I’m not going to.”
“Yes, you are, because we’re your parents and we’ve been in the dark for the past two hours.” Now my dad was entering the fray, a small smear of peanut butter on his cheek, a telltale sign of his stress-eating. “Two hours, Maggie! We can’t even get ahold of Angelo! You need to tell us everything, right now!”
“Can’t,” I said, opening the refrigerator. I was suddenly ravenous, not having eaten anything since two granola bars at lunch. “You’re part of the case, I can’t tell you about it. We’d be compromised.”
Cue the hysteria.
“We’re your parents!” my mother said. “We are not just your assignment!”
I grabbed a yogurt, slammed the refrigerator door, and whirled around. I knew I was being unfair, but it was too late and I was too tired to care. “Angelo’s orders,” I told them. “He’s the only person I can talk to about this.”
“Jesse thought you were lying dead in a gutter somewhere!” my dad yelled. “And so did we!”
“Well, I think Jesse and I might have just broken up, so don’t worry about him anymore,” I said, tearing off the lid. It was strawberry-banana flavored, which I personally think is one of the most heinous flavors imaginable, but I was too starving to even notice. “And I’m not dead, obviously, so you don’t have to worry about that, either.”
“When did you become so flippant?” my dad asked, just as my mom said, “You and Jesse broke up? Why?”
“I don’t even know if we did,” I said, licking the yogurt off the lid and going to find a spoon. “But if we did, it’s probably because he’s tired of me lying to him. Yeah, that’s probably why. Frankly, I’m tired of lying to him, too. It sucks. And I became flippant, Dad, when I spent two and a half hours stuck in a crawl space while trying to save both of your reputations. You’re welcome, by the way. The pleasure was all mine.”
My parents stood there dumbstruck, and to be honest, I felt a little dumbstruck, too. I had never spoken to them like this before. We had never fought like this, this fast and hurtful. It was like the power had shifted and now I was the one in charge, holding information and making decisions. Fighting dirty had apparently become one of my strongest talents, and now I wanted to do it all the time.
The problem with fighting dirty, though, is that it makes you feel dirty. I was arguing with the wrong people for the wrong reasons: I was fighting with my parents because they cared about me, I fought with Jesse because he was worried about me, and I was angry at Angelo because of bad intel. But the truth was that I wanted to fight myself. I wanted the two sides of me to clash and only one to win. Either I was a spy or I was a normal girl. I was lashing out at everyone else but in truth, the battle was happening inside me.
And no matter what happened, part of me would end up losing.
“I’m going to my room,” I said, very aware of how my voice was shaking.
“No, you’re not,” my mom said. “What do you mean, you got stuck in a crawl space? Did you walk into a trap?”
“Can’t talk about it,” I said.
“You will talk about it,” my dad said.
“No, Dad,” I replied, “I can’t talk about it. I can’t, okay? I just …” I took a deep breath that sounded more like a sob. “I want to go to bed. I want to sleep and wake up and figure out what the hell I’m doing, and then we can talk. But I just can’t talk tonight because I don’t have words for how I feel.”
That seemed to hit both of them in different ways. My dad’s face softened and he just said, “Okay, baby, we’ll talk in the morning.”
My mom, though?
“Did Jesse say something to you?” she asked. “Did he hurt your feelings?”
Moms, man. How do they alway
s know?
“Mom, this isn’t kindergarten,” I started to say.
“He did, didn’t he. Oh, I knew it. I knew it. Did he say something about you being a spy?”
“Of course he did!” I cried. “What else do you think we argue about? It’s the only thing we fight about! It’s not like you and Dad! At least you two work together and can share information. You didn’t have to start off your relationship by lying to each other in Paris. Which, by the way, is still a sketchy story, and I’m really pissed that you won’t tell me more about it and about Dominic.”
My parents looked stricken. “We don’t tell you everything for the same reason that you don’t tell Roux and Jesse everything,” my dad murmured. “We were keeping you safe.”
“Safe from what?” I cried. “Does anyone ever just tell the truth anymore?”
I was crying now, really crying, and my dad moved to comfort me, but I stepped back and put out my arm, keeping him at bay. “No, please,” I said. “Just tell me the truth or don’t do anything.”
My mom sank down on a stool at our kitchen island, resting her elbows on the concrete top. “We told you we used to go through the tunnels, right?” she said, and I wiped my eyes and nodded.
“In Paris,” I said. “You and Dad.”
My dad sat down next to my mom and picked up her hand. “We stumbled across this map when we were around your age,” he explained. “It showed all these underground tunnels, so we started exploring, just us and a few other kids from school, and we realized that we could use these tunnels to get into different sites in Paris. We could break into museums or the Pantheon, whatever we wanted, so we started to fix up some of these old building and relics. We didn’t steal anything,” he added quickly. “Your parents aren’t those kinds of criminals.”
“I love that you have to clarify that,” I said, but my tears were already drying. “Did Dominic go with you?”
“No,” my mom said. “We didn’t tell him about them. We wouldn’t tell him, to be more specific. Dominic was always … different from us. He was sneaky. A couple of students accused him of stealing things from their dorm rooms. He could take things at noon and return them at two and no one would see it happen.”