Chapter 14: I finally did

I sat with the phone in my hands for a long time.

The bedroom was dark except for the screen light and outside the window the city made its usual low nighttime sounds, a distant siren, someone's music two floors up, the occasional drag of a car along the wet road below.

I'm trying to help you.

I read the message four more times looking for the angle in it. Looking for Richard's voice inside Mara's words the way I had learned to look for it from everything that came near me. But the phrasing was wrong for Richard.

Richard never warned people. He informed them.

I got up and went into the living room.

Bruno was on the couch with his eyes open. He hadn't been asleep. He looked at me and then at the phone in my hand and sat up.

I handed him the phone without speaking.

He read the message. Read it again.

"The number is new," I said. "She's not using her regular phone."

"She's scared," Bruno said.

"Of Richard."

"Yes."

I sat down on the opposite end of the couch and pulled my knees up. The apartment was cold in the way it gets in the early hours when the heating has cycled off and the walls have given up all the warmth they collected during the day.

"She's warning me about him," I said. "Which means she knows what he's planning."

"And she's telling you without telling you directly," Bruno said. "She doesn't want to be the one responsible for what happens if you don't listen. But she's not willing to stay completely quiet either."

"That's a very convenient position for her."

"Yes."

I looked at the screen again. Six AM. Ninety minutes from now.

"She knows where he is," I said. "She knows what he's going to do and she's giving me a window to undo it. That's not nothing."

"It's also not enough."

"I know." I set the phone on the cushion between us. "If we return the documents we lose everything. Richard keeps the leverage, the fraud case stalls, my name stays attached to a ten million dollar theft with no explanation, and Cassano's deadline runs out."

"Yes."

"But if we don't return them and Richard moves before morning—"

"Then we deal with what he does," Bruno said.

I looked at him. "You're very calm about that."

"I've been waiting for Richard to make a move for four months. At least now I know the timeline."

"That's not reassuring."

"It's not meant to be reassuring. It's meant to be honest."

I stood and walked to the window. The street below was empty except for a cab moving slowly through a puddle left over from earlier rain. The black car that had been parked across the road for two days was gone.

That bothered me more than when it had been there.

"He's not watching anymore," I said.

Bruno came to stand beside me.

He looked at the empty space where the car had been and said nothing for a moment.

"He doesn't need to watch anymore," Bruno said quietly. "He already knows what he needs to know."

"Mara."

"Yes."

I pressed my forehead briefly against the cold glass and then straightened. "We need to move the documents."

"Where?"

"Not here. If Richard knows this apartment, he knows this apartment. We can't sit here until morning with the originals and assume that's safe."

Bruno was already thinking. I could see it in the way he stood, weight shifted slightly, eyes not quite focused on anything in the room.

"My lawyer's office is twenty minutes from here," he said. "There's a night security desk. He can authorize access."

"Call him."

"It's two in the morning."

"Call him anyway."

Bruno looked at me for a half second, something that might have been the beginning of a smile if the circumstances had been different, and picked up his phone.

The call lasted four minutes. I listened to Bruno's side of it, short and precise, and when he hung up he was already moving toward his jacket.

"Fifteen minutes," he said.

I went to the bedroom and put on shoes and grabbed my own jacket. When I came back out Bruno had the envelope under his arm and was checking his phone one more time.

"Reply to Mara," he said without looking up.

I stopped. "What do I say?"

"Whatever is true."

I picked up my phone and stared at the message thread. The single M sitting at the bottom like a signature on something she wasn't fully prepared to own.

I typed.

"I can't return them. You know why. If you want to help me do it properly, call me in the morning. I'll answer."

I sent it before I could revise it into something more careful.

We left the apartment quietly. The corridor was empty and the building made its usual settling sounds around us as we went down the stairwell rather than the elevator. Old habit for Bruno, I suspected. Exits and entrances that didn't announce themselves.

The night air outside was sharp and damp. We walked to the borrowed car and got in without speaking and Bruno drove in the direction of the city center with the kind of deliberate unhurried focus that made everything feel slightly more manageable than it was.

Halfway there my phone buzzed.

Mara.

Not a message this time. A call.

I answered.

"I didn't think you'd still be awake," she said.

"I haven't slept."

A pause. I could hear her breathing. The small background sounds of wherever she was sitting. Something that might have been a television turned very low.

"He knows you have them," she said.

"I assumed."

"Phoebe." Her voice was smaller than I had ever heard it. Mara had always been the louder of the two of us. The one who filled rooms easily. This voice belonged to someone sitting very still in a dark space. "I'm sorry."

I looked out at the city moving past the window.

"I know," I said.

"That's not enough."

"No."

"He told me it was just paperwork," she said. "In the beginning. He said he needed someone to sign an authorization and that it was standard practice for overseas accounts. He made it sound boring."

"And then?"

"And then it wasn't boring anymore. And by the time I understood what I'd signed I was already in it." Her voice broke very slightly on the last word and then steadied itself. "He told me if I said anything the documents would surface with my name on them. That I'd be the one investigated. Not him."

"He said the same thing to me," I said. "In different ways. Over many years."

"I sent you that listing," she said.

"I know."

"He asked me to. He said he needed you somewhere specific and I told myself it was because he wanted you somewhere safe and I knew that wasn't true while I was telling myself it." She stopped. "I'm so sorry, Phoebe. I know that means nothing."

I sat with that for a moment.

Bruno kept his eyes on the road.

"It means something," I said. "It doesn't fix anything. But it means something."

"What are you going to do?"

"What I should have done a long time ago," I said. "Tell the truth and let it land where it lands."

She was quiet for a long time.

Then, very quietly, she said something I hadn't expected.

"I'll testify," she said. "If it comes to that. I'll tell them everything."

I closed my eyes briefly.

"Get a lawyer first," I said. "A good one. Tonight if you can."

"Okay."

"And Mara." I paused. "Don't call Richard. Don't tell him anything. Whatever you think that buys you, it won't."

She said she understood and I ended the call and sat in the moving car in the dark with the phone pressed against my thigh.

Bruno glanced over. "She'll testify?"

"She says so."

"Do you believe her?"

I thought about the voice on the phone. The smallness of it. The way she had said sorry like someone who had been holding it for a very long time.

"Yes," I said. "I think I do."

We pulled up outside the lawyer's office building. A man in a security uniform was already waiting at the glass door with a key card in his hand.

Bruno reached for the envelope on the back seat.

And then every light on the street went out at once.

It was just this building.

Bruno went very still beside me.

"He knew where we were going," I said.

"Yes."