“It might help.” Liz sounded offended, and I couldn’t blame her. She had the biggest brain of anyone I knew. She was going to use all of hers to fix Mr. Solomon’s. “According to Strouse and Fleinberg, normal interactions, conversations, and activities can stimulate the unconscious mind to…”
Liz went on, citing obscure studies and unproven hypotheses, but I’d stopped listening. I was too busy staring down at a padded manila envelope that had fallen to the floor with the rest of the letters. There were Italian stamps and an airmail sticker from France.
“Who’s that from?” Bex asked, following my gaze.
My voice was tight and low as I whispered, “Me.”
Chapter Nineteen
It happened in a flash.
One moment we were staring at an envelope bearing rows of familiar handwriting and a postmark from Rome. The next, Bex was grabbing the package and running between the tables, bolting through the foyer and up the stairs.
She was practically flying. Something was coming over my roommates, pulling them toward my mother’s office, and it didn’t take a student at spy school to know that that something…was hope.
But Bex hadn’t seen the trustees. Macey hadn’t heard the deep voices on the phone. Liz didn’t know the questions that swirled around me—the ones not even she could answer. They just knew there was a clue, and so they ran faster.
“Bex,” I said just as my best friend yelled, “Headmistress,” and ran past Gilly’s sword in its gleaming case. “Headmistress!” she called again.
“Bex, I think she’s—”
My mother’s office door flew open.
“Busy,” I finished, the word more exhale than whisper.
“What?” Aunt Abby asked, and the look on her face made me skid to a stop, frozen in my tracks. Liz actually ran into me, stumbled, and knocked over a display of hat pins-slash-poisoned daggers that had been used by a Gallagher Girl during the First World War.
Zach reached down and pulled her effortlessly to her feet, but all I could do was stare at Abby, who was coming toward me through the Hall of History. She neither smiled nor joked. “This is not a good time.”
“We need to see Headmistress Morgan,” Bex said. “We need to talk to both of you.”
“Not now.” Abby started to turn and go back to my mother’s office, but Bex thrust the package toward her.
“This was at the cabin!”
Abby’s eyes got wide as she stared down and whispered, “Rome.”
“Show me,” Mom ordered, and Bex laid the package on the coffee table in front of the sofa—the very place where I’d eaten supper almost every Sunday night since I’d started at the Gallagher Academy in the seventh grade. It was a table normally reserved for spaghetti and bad burritos, but that day we all sat staring down at the only real clue we had about my past.
“You found it…” Mom started.
“At the cabin,” Liz said, answering the unfinished question. “It was with the rest of Mr. Solomon’s mail. I guess Cam must have mailed it to him or something.”
I felt the couch shift as my aunt sank to take the seat beside me. “That was good, Cam. Smart.”
The CoveOps teacher looked proud; the aunt sounded prouder. I know I should have said thank you, but it felt like cheating to accept a compliment I didn’t remember earning—like taking credit for somebody else’s hard work.
“Cammie,” Zach said, “are you sure it’s your handwriting?”
For a second, the question seemed strange. Zach had been my sorta-boyfriend for a long time, and yet he didn’t know what my handwriting looked like. I guess we weren’t exactly love-notes-in-the-locker people. We were too busy being terrorists-want-to-kidnap-us people. It’s easy to see how one would get in the way of the other.
“Oh,” Bex said with a laugh, “it’s hers. I’d know that crazy-person scrawl anywhere.”
I ran a finger along the words I had absolutely no memory of writing. The postmark was so foreign, so strange. The stamps seemed like works of art.
“It’s a package I sent from Rome,” I said, then laughed softly to myself. “I’ve always wanted to go to Rome.”
How many covert conversations had my roommates and I had in the past three years? How many hours had we spent staring down at some mysterious clue? I couldn’t even begin to count. It felt somehow like they’d all been leading up to that moment—that place. We seemed a long, long way from my first boyfriend’s garbage.