Chapter 265 The Topic

Chapter 265 The Topic

APRIL'S POV

Emily Clarke wrote to me in March and asked for twenty minutes, and I said yes before I'd even gotten through it twice. That surprised both of us. For three and a half years the answer had only ever been no. No, through a lawyer. No, through her brother. Once, no in four words on a card that's still sitting in a drawer I don't open.

Then she told me she was leaving the state, and twenty minutes was all she wanted.

She picked the place. A public library about an hour from my mother's house, with a reading room in the back — six long tables and a rule about staying quiet that nobody ever had to say out loud, because nobody in there needed telling twice.

Four other people kept us company without knowing it: a man behind a newspaper, two students, somebody asleep with his cheek on his own arm. Not one of them looked up the whole time we sat there.

Nobody offered to come with me, and nobody needed telling not to. A year and a half ago there was always a man in a car outside whatever building I walked into, and I still catch myself noticing when there isn't one anymore.

I parked. Sat there a second longer than I needed to. Then I went in on my own, the same as any woman just returning a book.

Emily was already at the third table, both hands flat on the wood in front of her. No bag, no coffee, no phone — nothing at all. You don't put your hands out like that by accident. She was thinner than I remembered, her hair different, and the shoulders I used to know from a hundred school bleachers had gone somewhere I couldn't find.

And no glasses. She'd taken those off in my mother's kitchen years ago and never put them back on. Four years of her blinking behind lenses she never needed — in every single photo I ever took of her at that school — and her eyes had been fine the whole time. They'd always been fine. A jury looks at a woman in glasses and sees somebody harmless. That's the only reason she ever wore them.

"April."

"Emily."

"Thank you for—"

"Don't do the thanking," I said, sliding into the chair across from her before I could talk myself out of it. "You've got twenty minutes with me, and I'd rather spend them on something that isn't that."

She took it without a word of complaint, and that was the first thing that told me something in her had actually changed.

"All right."

"How long did you serve."

"Fourteen months. I've been out since the summer before last."

"And your brother."

"Evan's in Ohio. He's fine. He asks about you, and I've told him not to."

I'd typed eleven questions into a note on my phone at four that morning and never once pulled it back up. Sitting across from her, ten of them were things I already knew the answers to — I'd only written them down for the small, ugly pleasure of hearing her say them out loud. So I asked the one that was actually left.

"What were the topics?"

Her hands vanished into her lap.

"You know about the topics."

"I know the word. Four years of having the word and nothing underneath it." My voice came out steadier than anything in me actually felt. "I've never had the list. Four or five times a year, somebody sat you down and told you exactly what to go find out about me, and I want to know what they asked."

Emily looked down at that table for a long time.

"Some of it is stupid," she said.

"Then it's stupid."

"April—"

"Emily. You asked me for twenty minutes."

So she told me, and she never once stopped to check my face while she did it — I noticed that then, and I've thought about it since. What I photographed and what I didn't.

Whether I was still with Asher. Who I ate with. Whether I showed up to away games or just stuck to the home ones. Whether my father still worked at the school or somewhere else by then. Which building I was likely to be in on which afternoon.

Which people would notice if I just stopped being in a room.

There's a clock in that reading room. I heard it on the last one.

"Say that again."

"Which people would notice," Emily said, "if you stopped being in a room."

"When was that."

"The autumn before it happened."

The man with the newspaper turned a page. A chair scraped somewhere at the far end. Sitting there, palms flat on the table just like hers, I finally understood: four years had gone into one single night.

They'd been working on it for four years. I was a project with a schedule.

"Who asked you that one."

"I never had a name. I had an account and a phone number that stopped working."

"Emily."

"I would give it to you if I had it," she said. "I gave them everything I had. It is the only thing I have done in my whole life that I would do again."

No thanks were offered for any of that, and she didn't wait around for one. We just sat there while the clock ticked — fourteen months served, thinner than I remembered, on her way out of state, and still here, one more time, answering for all of it in a library.

"Why did you say no for three years?"

"Because you'd have got what you came for," Emily said, "and I hadn't got anything to give you yet."

"And now?"

"Now I've got the list."

Then she asked about him — and I'd known that question was coming before I even backed out of my own driveway that morning.

"Is he—"

"Don't."

"I wasn't asking you to pass on a message."

"You were about to ask after him," I said, "and I'm not carrying a single word between the two of you, in either direction. That isn't a punishment. I'm just not a road."

She took that one too, same as everything else.

"That's fair."

"It isn't fair. It's what there is."

The twenty minutes were up, and neither of us moved to leave. Her hands were still flat on the table. Through the window behind her, a man out in the parking lot was loading a kid into a car seat, getting it wrong twice before he finally got it right.

"April," Emily said. "One more question and then I'm gone."

"You can ask."

"You've got a daughter."

I gave her nothing at all.

"Her name is not something I'm asking for," Emily said. "I don't get her name. I worked that out a long while back."

The clock ticked. The man out there finally won.

"Has she got your face?"

Nine or so answers were sitting right there, ready to use.

"Yes," I said.