not about the space,” Petra argues. “It’s about what belongs to you.”
“Then we’ll sell it and I’ll get half.”
“I want you to stay in New York.”
I walk toward her and give her a hug. “I know,” I say, pulling back. “But you know why I can’t. I need to start over somewhere new. You should come to California. The light, the air…they’re different there. You’d love it.”
Petra looks skeptical. “I’d better finish that bathroom. We’re almost out of time.”
She leaves and I open the last box, sorting through it quickly, discarding most of it. The money from my jewelry will allow me time to explore my options in California. Maybe I’ll keep working events with Kelly. Or I’ll go back to school. I imagine myself taking the BART into San Francisco, perhaps working at the museum there, going out to dinner with the friends I hope to finally make.
After I’d finished the CNN interview, Agent Castro had taken me back to Eva’s house to walk him through my time there. I wasn’t sure what more I could tell him that he didn’t already know. They’d submitted Eva’s DNA to the NTSB and were waiting to see if it matched any of the remains they’d recovered so far.
“It’s possible we’ll never know,” he says. “They tell me there are any number of reasons why she might not have been in your seat. Maybe she traded with someone, or perhaps the impact of the crash caused her to get thrown from the wreckage and carried away with the current. If that’s the case, we may never recover her body.” He shrugged and looked out the window, as if the answer to what happened to Eva might be out there somewhere, visible only to him.
“What about the drug dealer?”
“Dex,” Agent Castro said. “Also known as Felix Argyros, or Fish. We have a lead on him up in Sacramento.”
An agent passed through the living room, carrying Eva’s camping stove bagged in a clear plastic evidence bag. “She must have been so desperate, to have chosen a life like this.”
“I think Eva would argue that this life chose her.” Agent Castro sighed. “She was a hard person to know. I’m not really sure I ever had a good handle on her. But even though she ran, she still tried to do the right thing. What she left behind will be critical in indicting Fish.”
“She sounds complicated,” I said.
“She was. But I liked her. I wish I could have done more for her.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking, that Eva didn’t need anyone. She’d done just fine on her own.
* * *
I pick up a pile of clothes and carry it into the living room, setting it alongside the rest of the things I’ll be taking with me. I check the time. We only have about thirty more minutes. I hear Petra closing drawers in the bathroom upstairs, muttering something to herself, and I smile.
My work mostly done, I walk down the hallway that leads to Rory’s office and peek inside. It’s been completely cleared out. His desk, Bruce’s, even the books on the shelves are gone, all of it confiscated by the attorney general. I cross over to the empty bookshelves, reaching up and engaging the button, and the drawer below opens. As I suspected, it’s empty.
I hear someone unlocking the front door, and I straighten up, feeling guilty because I’m not supposed to be in here. But it’s only Danielle. She stops in the doorway when she sees me. “Looking for ghosts?” she asks.
I smile. “Something like that.”
Danielle had been waiting for me when I first returned to the townhouse. She’d led me into the kitchen and made me a cup of tea. When we’d settled across from each other at the center island, I finally asked the question that had been nagging at me since her first message. “How did you know where to find me?”
She gave a small, sad smile. “Eva was a friend of my mom’s.” She took a tentative sip of her tea and told me a story of an unlikely friendship between two women—one who’d believed she didn’t deserve to be loved, and the other who’d tried so hard to love her anyways. “Although I only met her briefly, there was something furtive about her. She had an edge that felt dangerous.” Danielle set her cup down on the island and traced a swirl of marble with her finger. “But my mother was devoted to her. Swore that