and he folded her hand in his fist. Her skin was icy cold.
He hit pause.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
Luke couldn’t imagine anything more stressful than this. Discovering you weren’t who you thought you were. You were someone else entirely. And now discovering who she really was. Everything about her face was sharper, as if she’d lost weight she didn’t have to lose in the past few minutes.
“I — I don’t know.” She spoke as if having to catch her breath. As if someone had punched her in the stomach. “None of this makes any kind of sense.”
Luke believed firmly in the ripping-off-the-bandage-fast theory of bad things. Get it all over with quickly. “Let’s hear it all,” he said firmly. She nodded and he pressed Play.
“Or rather Cathy. That’s the name on your birth certificate. Catherine Frances Benson. Frances was the name of our maternal grandmother, Frances Caldwell. Our mother married twice. First husband was Thomas Glass and she had me, and second husband was Bob Benson. Both marriages ended in divorce. Mom and Lucy ended up living in a trailer park in Sacramento. Happy Trails Trailer Park. It was temporary and only because Bob Benson cleaned out our mom’s bank account before disappearing. Lucy was 16 and I was 24, trying to put myself through Stanford on a scholarship and working three jobs when Benson lit out. I helped as much as I could but I couldn’t do much. Lucy worked after school and on weekends. She was a really hard worker.”
He smiled and suddenly Luke could see the man he’d been. He remembered now reading articles. In the first flush of success of his new generation of computers and smart objects, he’d been a young god. Tall, blond, good-looking in a nerdy sort of way. Nothing like the stooped, bald sack of bones on the monitor.
“Lucy was really smart and funny. Got straight As in school. The year Lucy graduated from high school, our mom died. She was never the same after Benson left and she just smoked and drank herself to death. Lucy helped as much as she could but mom just wanted to die … and she did. But anyone who was around Lucy for any amount of time knew she was going places. I was going places, too. We were going to make it. She graduated class valedictorian and enrolled in a local junior college, business major. Was doing really well. She was destined for the big time.”
Luke hit pause again, glanced at Hope. “How you doing? Is this all too much for you?”
Hope took a big breath, let it out slowly in a controlled stream. Luke recognized a stress reliever. “It’s a lot to take in. I don’t — I don’t even know if it’s true. That woman, the one who is supposed to be my mother, doesn’t look anything like me. None of this is making any sense to me.”
“Do you want to stop, pick this up later?”
“God, no.” Hope sat up straighter. “No. Whatever Frank Glass has to tell me, I have to know. None of this feels real, but it is real. Real enough to get someone killed. Data is life.”
Luke nodded and pressed play again.
Data is life. Hope was right. Only he called it intel. And intel saved lives, he knew that from painful personal experience. Someone was after Hope. Or Cathy, or whatever the fuck she was called. He didn’t care what her real name was. All he cared about was that she be kept safe. And to keep
her safe he needed intel this crazy dead genius, Frank Glass, was providing.
Glass’s head had been bowed. He lifted it slowly, in jerks, as if it hurt to move. “My dearest Cathy — I can’t think of you as Hope — I’ve been waiting so long to tell you the truth. And now I can’t wait any longer because I’m out of time. My doctors say I’ll be lucky to last another three months, but no guarantees. I must do this now or you will never know the truth. It all goes back to the summer Lucy, your mother, was 22. She’d just gotten her bachelor’s degree and was applying to graduate schools. We saw each other maybe once a month, once every two months. One day she took the bus to Mountain View to spend the weekend with me and she had stars in her eyes. Almost literally. She … shone. I knew she was too pretty and too bright not