baby, looking up at me adoringly, and something fiercely protective rises in me. I know I won’t be able to do it.
I can’t sleep. I lie awake as Michael snores soundly beside me, thinking I can hear the spiders weaving their webs in the bed’s velvet swags, the limbs of the trees tap-tap-tapping at the windows. I am having a child with this man; he will be the father of my child, in my life forever. I know less about him every day; as if the person I thought I loved has been vanishing, and soon all that will remain will be the outline of a man with a void at the center.
I lie there thinking: I should kick him out, right? This is my home, not his. But why am I so afraid to confront him? Why do I find myself curling my hand protectively over my belly, as if anticipating a blow?
Who is he?
I didn’t get a prenup. We have a child coming. He could take me for all I have. He could take Stonehaven!
I am so alone in this.
And then I realize: There is one person who could answer my question.
I want to laugh out loud in the dark room, because I can’t believe what I’m thinking. Desperation drives you to do unlikely things; what was once unthinkable becomes the one hope that sustains you.
This might be a wild-goose chase. She might really be in Paris, or anywhere, it’s true. But deep inside, I know. There’s a reason I memorized that address in Los Angeles, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Something about the house, with the scarlet vines out front—I knew who lived there, from the very start. I know where I need to go now.
I’m going to go find Nina Ross.
33.
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN a sound sleeper, at rest in my convictions, but jail turns me into an insomniac. The need for constant vigilance, plus an unsettling awareness of my own culpability, conspire to keep me in an endless twilight state: never asleep, but also never quite awake, either. I float here, in limbo.
The cacophony of county jail is deafening: That’s what happens when you jam thousands of women into concrete rooms that were intended to house a population half our size. We sleep in bunk beds in the common areas, feet away from the tables where we play cards and read all day. We urinate in overwhelmed toilets that clog and overflow. We stand in lines for showers, meals, haircuts, telephones, meds. At all hours of the day and night, the concrete echoes with screams and prayers and tears and laughter and curses.
There is nothing to do here but wait.
I mill around the common room in my canary-yellow prison suit, watching the hands of the clock in the cage on the wall slowly ticking away the minutes of the days. I wait for mealtime, though I have no interest in eating the gray slurry that slides around my tray. I wait for the library cart to come around, so I can pick out the least offensive romance novel on offer. I wait for lights-out, so that I can lie in my upper bunk in the semi-dark, listening to the snores and whispers of my fellow inmates while I wait for sleep to come.
It hardly ever does.
But mostly, I wait for someone to come help me.
* * *
—
My lawyer is a harried public defender with gray corkscrew hair and orthopedic shoes, who I meet only once, before my bail hearing. She sits across the table from me and pulls a folder off the top of a stack and examines it with purple drugstore bifocals. “They’ve got you for grand theft,” she explains. “Your name was on the lease of a storage unit that was filled with stolen antiques. They traced a pair of chairs back to a robbery that had been reported by someone named Alexi Petrov, who then made a positive ID of you in a photo lineup.”
So much for my theory that billionaires are too rich to be bothered with police reports. “How soon is my trial?”