inhalation for the sheer pleasure of it, I faced the mirror from behind Grace’s chair and focused on her tension. It was in the fingers that were laced tight in her lap, in the shadow of lines on her brow and the tiny vertical ones between her brows. Her eyes, though, were the hazel I knew to be her own. Their normalcy made her hair all the more striking by contrast.
“This color really is beautiful,” I said in a last attempt to change her mind, but she was having none of it.
“Too beautiful. People notice it. They remember it.”
“But you like that.”
“Used to like it,” she said, her voice almost childlike. “It’s too noticeable now. It gives me away wherever I go.” The eyes meeting mine in the mirror were haunted. “The People article hits this week, Jay says. It’ll be bad.”
“He told you that?”
“Only that it’s coming out, but I know it’ll be bad. All publicity is bad publicity.”
The expression actually was, All publicity is good publicity, but I knew what she meant. “Imagine that issue three months from now. Where’ll it be? Long gone in the trash.”
“After the whole world’s read it.” In her lap, her thumb picked at a cuticle. “At least you were right about Jay. He knows his stuff. He got the prosecutor to agree to waive a pre-sentencing report—family background and all. That,” she said, with a wry twist of her lips, “would not have been fun.” The twist faded, leaving her frightened and bare. “This is my worst nightmare, Maggie. I can’t stand it. I want to disappear.”
Oh, I knew that feeling. “You won’t disappear with raven. It’s too extreme.”
“Okay, but this brown is too rich. I want dirty brown. I mean, dirty—like, mousy.”
“And mousy is you?”
“I don’t want to be me. That’s the point.”
I came around front for the sake of directness. “You can only disappear up to a point. If the press wants to find you, they will. So you go with a different color now, but what happens when they catch on? You can’t change it every few days, and, anyway, if you did that, you’d only give the media something else to write about.”
That seemed to register. “Oh God. Not what I want. But mousy is understated. Isn’t understated good?”
“I’m not sure you could be understated if you tried,” I said with a smile.
Her chin came up. “Excuse me. We can’t all be as dignified as you.”
Leaning in, I closed my hand over hers. “That’s not what I meant, Grace. I love your flair. You’re one of the few people I know who can pull it off. It’s what makes you you.” I gave her hand a jiggle, let go, straightened. “And that’s a good thing. Only a strong person can do it. Only a strong person can stand up to those cameras and say, fuck you, I don’t care what you think, I’m a good mother, my son is a good kid, these charges are bogus.”
Her eyes held mine for a split second before shifting off. Guilt. Ah. So the charges weren’t bogus. Chris had been able to tell me how hacking worked from firsthand experience.
Where to go after that silent admission? I wanted to ask why he had done it or what Grace had said when she learned it, but I couldn’t criticize her when I knew the People story would. For now, “How is he?” seemed safe enough.
“Dense,” she murmured. “He doesn’t get that this goes beyond him to me. He keeps saying it’s no big thing, but he’s not the one whose life is at stake.”
I might have argued. It seemed to me that Chris had more to lose with regard to future choices than Grace, who already had an education, a skill, a job, a home. Chris’s life was up in the air in every regard. I wondered what he felt about that. I wondered if Grace had even asked him, or whether she was too conflicted to talk.
Actually, I wondered if they ever talked about things—deep things—things beyond what time to leave for school or whether to bring in pizza or Thai. My mother and I had often talked about those deeper things when I was growing up. College changed that, like I’d become someone she couldn’t relate to. She hadn’t gone to college. She had married at twenty, at which point my father became her world.
“Maggie?” Grace prompted.
I wanted to yell at Chris, to ask what he had actually thought breaking the