always love you.
Maggie
I read the note again, feeling like a wheel yanked out of alignment, steering me in a new direction as I remember that dinner from so long ago. Maggie wanted us to get away for a quiet weekend. To reconnect and really talk without the distractions of the city.
But Maggie didn’t want a weekend away to reconcile. She wanted to break up. And I know firsthand how Rory reacts when a woman tries to leave him.
It’s a gruesome irony that both Maggie Moretti and I had to die to finally be free from him.
Eva
Berkeley, California
October
Four Months before the Crash
It didn’t take long for Liz to start asking questions. First, it was a comment about a smell in the backyard she couldn’t place, which forced Eva to work at night, after she was certain Liz was asleep.
“Are you sick?” Liz asked her another day, after three consecutive all-nighters, dark circles under her eyes. Eva had tried to deflect the questions as best she could, blaming the neighbors across the alley for the smell and a sinus infection for her haggard face.
In the few weeks she’d been on hiatus, the landscape of Eva’s life had shifted, and she was struggling to navigate back to normal. She began thinking about her life as two parallel tracks, the one she was living, with her late-night lab work and the demands of Dex and Fish taking up her time, and the life she’d had just a couple weeks ago. Dinners with Liz. An uncomplicated window of time that had felt lighter and brighter than she’d ever imagined.
And now, as she wove her way through the crowds dressed in blue and gold, up the hill that led to Memorial Stadium, her mind was fuzzy, her eyes gritty. She waited in line at the gate, her eyes trained on the security guards asking everyone to open their purses and bags for inspection. She pressed her arm against her side, feeling the outline of the package of pills, safely tucked into an inner pocket of her coat.
Eva hadn’t contacted any of her clients to let them know she was back to work. She would make the drugs for Fish, but as far as her clients were concerned, she was still on hiatus and would remain so indefinitely. Her singular goal was to gather as much information about Fish and the way his organization was structured as she could, not make money she didn’t really need.
When she reached the front of the line, she opened her purse and watched the guard’s eyes scan the contents—a wallet, sunglasses, and small voice recorder—and held her breath as she always did, waiting for someone to finally see through her act, to finally see her for what she really was.
But that wasn’t going to happen today.
As she passed through the entrance and into the stadium, the field spread out below her, each end zone painted with a yellow California set against a dark blue background, the trademark script Cal centered on the fifty-yard line. Eva ignored the people in the seats around her, instead staring across the field as the marching band played and students filled the section next to it, feeling more isolated and alone than she’d felt in years.
As an undergrad, Eva had only been to one game, and the memory of it haunted her every time she returned. Meet me in the north tunnel afterward, Wade had said. She’d been shocked to see the number of people lingering there, waiting for players. Hangers-on, followers, sorority girls flipping their hair and checking their lip gloss. She’d hung back, watching as she always did, from the perimeter. When he came out, his eyes scanned the crowd and landed on her. As if she glowed. He passed through the crowd of people and claimed her, putting his arm around her and leading her away, the smell of his soap mixing with the redwood trees that surrounded the stadium. She knew then that she was lost, that Wade Roberts had chosen her, and she was bound to follow whether she wanted to or not.
She’d first met him in the chemistry lab she was TA’ing. At the beginning, she’d assumed he was just another jock, trying to flirt his way to a better grade. But every time Wade had looked at her, she felt an electric zing pass through her.
Early in the semester, she’d been walking them through some basic chemical reactions when Wade had said, “Why are we doing this? When are