I tell you what it is, you’re totally going to hate me forever.”
I join her by the sink. “I won’t. I promise.”
“You will,” Ingrid says, now using a damp paper towel to clean the back of her neck. “And I totally deserve it.”
“Ingrid, just tell me.”
“That gun cost me everything I had. That two grand I had saved up? Gone, like that.” She snaps her fingers, and I can see the chipped remains of her blue nail polish. “So I asked Leslie if I could get an advance on my apartment-sitting money. Nothing huge. Just a week’s pay early. She told me that wasn’t possible. But then she said that I could have five thousand dollars—not a loan or an advance, but five grand with no strings attached—if I did one little thing.”
“What was it?”
Ingrid stalls by examining a strand of her black-as-pitch hair. When she looks in the mirror, there’s disgust in her eyes. As if she hates every single thing about herself.
“To cut you,” she says. “When we crashed in the lobby, that wasn’t an accident. Leslie paid me to do it.”
I recall that moment with vivid clarity, like it’s a movie being projected right there on the bathroom wall. Me burdened with my two grocery bags. Ingrid rushing down the stairs, her eyes on her phone. Then the collision, our bodies ricocheting, the groceries falling, me suddenly bleeding. In the chaotic aftermath, I didn’t have time to give too much thought as to how my arm had been cut.
Now I know the truth.
“I had a Swiss army knife,” Ingrid says, unable to look at me. “I held it against my phone, with just the tip of the blade exposed. And right when we crashed, I sliced your arm. Leslie told me it shouldn’t be a big cut. Just enough to draw blood.”
I back away from her. First one step. Then another.
“Why . . . why would they need you to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Ingrid says. “I didn’t ask. By then, I had my suspicions about what she was. What all of them are. And I guess I thought it was some kind of test. Like they were trying to convert me. Enticing me to join them. But at the time, I was too desperate to ask questions. All I could think about was that five thousand dollars, and how much I needed it to get away from that place.”
I keep moving away from her until I’m on the other side of the bathroom, sinking into an open stall and dropping onto the toilet seat. Ingrid rushes toward me and drops to her knees.
“I’m so sorry, Juju,” she says. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
A bubble of anger rises in my chest, hot and bilious. But it’s not directed at Ingrid. I can’t blame her for what she did. She was broke and desperate and saw an easy way to make a lot of money. If our roles were reversed, I might have done the same thing, no questions asked.
No, my anger is reserved for Leslie and everyone else in the Bartholomew for exploiting that desperation and turning it into a weapon.
“You’re forgiven,” I tell Ingrid. “You did what you needed to do to survive.”
She shakes her head and looks away. “No, I’m a shitty person. Truly awful. And right after it happened, I decided I needed to leave. Five thousand dollars was more than enough for me. I didn’t want to stay there and see how much lower I could sink.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all of this that day in the park?”
“Would you have believed me?”
The answer is no. I would have thought she was lying. Or, worse, deeply disturbed. Because no one in their right mind would believe there was a group of Satanists occupying a building like the Bartholomew. That, of course, is how they managed to go undetected for so long. The preposterousness of their existence is like a shield, deflecting all suspicion.
“And you certainly wouldn’t have forgiven me for hurting you like that,” Ingrid says. “In my mind, the best thing I could do was try to warn you by giving you some idea about what was going on there. I hoped it would, I don’t know, scare you enough to leave. Or at least make you think twice about staying.”
“Which it did,” I say. “But does this mean you really did run away?”
“Yes, but not the way I wanted to,” Ingrid says, talking so fast now that I