I wanted to laugh at the joke, to smile, to do as my mother asked and just let it be over, but all I could do was search the doctor’s eyes and say the thing that, until then, I hadn’t admitted to a single soul. “This feels different.”
“Does it?” the doctor asked.
Sitting there in only a tank top and shorts, I felt nak*d as I said, “Yes.”
“I see.”
The doctor placed a hand on my shoulder and answered the question I hadn’t quite had the strength to ask. “If your memory comes back, Cammie, it will be on its own time. It will be when you are ready. Now, why don’t you go get settled in? I’ll tell the kitchen to send a tray to your room. You should try to get some sleep.” Dr. Wolf smiled. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
I hadn’t forgotten my mother’s words—my mother’s warning—but in spite of them, I had to ask, “Is there anything I can do…to make myself remember?”
“You can rest, Cammie.” Dr. Wolf smiled. “And you can wait.”
Waiting. Like it or not, it’s a skill all spies have to master eventually.
Walking through the halls, I closed my eyes and tried to test my memory. I knew there was a squeaky floorboard on my right and a nick in the base of the bookshelf on my left. I could have made it all the way to my room like that, eyes closed, memory guiding my way. Everything felt and sounded and smelled so familiar that the convent seemed a million miles away—like it had happened to some other girl.
But then I heard the music.
It was coming from the west, I was certain, filling the corridor. Soft and low but too clear to be a figment of my mind.
It was real, the notes clear and strong and drifting through the hall.
It was almost like a waltz, but I didn’t want to dance.
It sounded like an old-fashioned organ. But there were no organs in the mansion. Or at least I didn’t think there were. All I knew for certain was that, right then, the pain in my ankle subsided; my head stopped swirling, and I followed the sound until it was suddenly replaced by the opening of a door and heavy footsteps. Voices.
“I can’t go to the room. She’ll be there.”
It was Bex, but the tone was one I’d never heard before. I hated it. And, most of all, I hated how sure I was that “she” was me.
I felt myself creeping closer to the cracked door, and peeking into the nearly abandoned classroom, listening as Zach told her, “You’re going to have to talk to her eventually.”
“I can’t do it,” Bex said.
Zach laughed. “I find that hard to believe. I’m the guy who was with you and your parents all summer, remember? I was in Budapest. I saw you in action in Greece. So don’t pull that on me. I know exactly what you’re capable of.”
“Budapest was an exception,” she told him, but then she laughed too. She was sitting next to him on top of a desk, her bare leg pressing against his khakis, and I thought I might be sick.
“What about Macey and Liz?” Zach asked.
“They think we have to act like nothing’s wrong—that we have to pretend so maybe she’ll get her memory back or whatever.”
My breath was coming so hard I feared it might betray me as I stood there realizing that Liz and Macey had been pretending. Pretending what, I didn’t know. Not to hate me? To be happy I was home? That my mother was right and it was over? Whatever it was, they were good at it. Bex, evidently, wasn’t even going to bother.
“She looks so different,” Zach said, and Bex leaned against his shoulder, closed her eyes.
“She is different,” Bex said.
And then, despite everything I’d been through, I wanted to forget what I was hearing. What I was seeing. Amnesia seemed like a welcome release, so I turned as quickly and quietly as I could and rushed back the way I’d come.
Halfway down the hall, I heard a door slam. Zach and Bex were in the hall behind me, talking and coming close. So I pushed down a narrow corridor, groping for a light fixture I’d first discovered in the seventh grade, praying it would still work, just as the bookshelf in front of me slid aside and I darted through the opening, disappearing into the dark.
Here’s the thing you need to know about secret passageways: they’re…well…secret, so that means they don’t exactly get cleaned. Ever. At the Gallagher Academy, I was the only one who used them, and I’d been gone for months. The bookcase closed behind me, blocking Bex and Zach away; but I had to keep moving, so I pushed farther and farther down the dusty corridor until I realized…Wait.
It wasn’t dusty.
Usually in the first weeks of school, my uniforms were covered with grime, my hair full of cobwebs. But that narrow passage was totally free of all the things that were supposed to be there—no dust or spiders, just a well-worn path that led to a door that I had never seen before.