25
REECE WOKE to her phone trilling the symphonic ringtone she used for numbers not in her contacts. This was normally her cue to ignore the call, but who would be calling her at 6:30 a.m.? Her alarm would not sound for another hour, and all she wanted was to disappear back into the soft, plush cave of her bedding. She stared at the phone: a 313 number. What? The phone stopped ringing, only to skip over voice mail and begin ringing again. Now her curiosity got the better of her.
“Hello?” she said groggily.
Laila’s voice was weak and raw on the other end of the phone.
“Reece?”
“Laila, what is it?” she shot up in bed.
Reece later became convinced that she’d known everything in that split second before the words could tumble out of Laila’s mouth. Her best friend, the person she loved most, remained in the land of the living only by a small thread.
The family was clustered in the waiting room of the hospital looking shell-shocked. Cameron was already there; Reece had called him on her way. Laila had spent the night at the police station, answering questions. She’d been the one to find Liberty. Cameron walked silently beside his sister into Liberty’s room.
The sight of her friend nearly made Reece’s knees buckle. Her face was swollen beyond recognition, and a series of tubes ran in and out of her mouth and nostrils; a cacophony of machines beeped and whirred around her. Reece let her brother fold her into his arms.
“I don’t . . . what . . . how?”
“Laila found her,” Cameron choked out in his dry and wasted voice. “She was supposed to be with me, but we’d gotten into an argument . . . about the wedding. Oh God, it was so stupid!”
“Who did this to her?” Reece’s voice was tinged with rage.
Cameron shook his head. “The police have a couple of leads. Laila was up all night talking to them.”
“But why? Why would anyone hurt her?”
Cameron let the unanswerable question hang there.
Reece had a busy day ahead of her at work, but suddenly the idea of being anywhere other than here—by Liberty’s side as she inhabited the unknowable space between life and death—felt ridiculous. She called her assistant and told her that she was in the midst of a family emergency and would be out all that day, possibly the next. That it was a family emergency felt true. She hardly remembered what it was like not to have Liberty as her closest confidante. In many ways, she’d been more of a sibling than Cameron had; they’d been the witnesses of each other’s coming of age. She could not fathom losing her.
The three days that followed were a unique kind of hell, during which the Lawrence and Michaels families shuttled between the hospital, the Jane hotel where they were spending a few fitful hours each night trying to sleep, and the police station where they answered endless questions trying to help the detectives put together a picture of what had happened. A blow to the back of her head had caused an acute subdural hematoma. Given where the police had found her, they surmised that Liberty might have fallen in such a way that her head struck the pointed edge of the kitchen counter. She’d also been struck hard across the face; one of her cheekbones was shattered.
Reece felt comforted by Detective Neely, the officer investigating the case. He was confident and kind, fatherly. Cameron, being Liberty’s fiancé, was questioned especially thoroughly, and he was the picture of polite cooperation. Reece knew that this was standard procedure, but it still made her shiver that anyone could think of her brother being responsible. Her heart broke for Cameron. That his last words to Liberty before leaving her had been ones of anger was a regret unimaginable. She could see it in his haunted expression as he gazed at her in her hospital bed.
Their mother, Elin, rose to the occasion with grace as she was wont to do, speaking to the police on multiple occasions, charming them, even. She acted as a surrogate for Ben and Petra, who were so shattered they could barely speak. Petra seemed to have aged decades in a matter of days. It was as though whatever icy reserve had kept her so pristine had at last given way. She was as beautiful as ever, but all of her hard edges seemed to soften at once, and she collapsed into Ben’s arms periodically. Nora had come to see her sister the first morning but had become so hysterical that she’d had to leave swiftly thereafter. Leo went with her, shooing the hapless Larry away.
“Why, why would anyone do this to my baby?” Petra asked again and again: to Reece, to the cops, to no one. Elin was her champion: the mothers had grown closer since the engagement, and now Elin handily took the lead with the cops. Reece was proud of her mother, admired her strength, her calm at the eye of the storm.
“The poor darlings have been under so much pressure,” Elin told the police, confirming that her son had come to seek her counsel after his argument with his fiancée. “They love each other so much, but being newly engaged, preparing to take on all of this wedding planning, it’s stressful! I remember planning our own, goodness, Thatcher and I never fought half so much. And we just wanted them to be happy, of course. We still do!”
Laila kept a near-constant vigil at her cousin’s bedside. Liberty had gone into emergency surgery to drain the blood from her brain the night Laila had found her, but she had not regained consciousness, and her prognosis was bleak. Reece knew that Laila was on the outs with her other cousins, and she felt for the girl. If she’d made some questionable choices with men since arriving in New York, well, Jesus, who hadn’t? And she was twenty-five, for God’s sake; a hall pass seemed in order. Any grievance seemed so petty in light of what had happened.
“I’m going to go get coffee,” Reece said to Laila, putting her hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. It was the middle of the third—or was it the fourth? The hundredth?—afternoon as they sat with Liberty. “Can I get you some?”
“That’s sweet; you don’t have to.” Laila looked up at Reece with a sad, beleaguered expression.
“You look exhausted,” she ventured. Laila’s red-rimmed eyes had deep purple circles beneath them, and her skin looked sallow, as though she’d not seen the sun in months. “Why don’t I bring you a cappuccino?”
“Actually, that sounds amazing,” Laila said.
Reece’s coffee mission took longer than expected. A helpful nurse warned her away from the drip coffee they served in the cafeteria and told her of an espresso stand in the main lobby that was much better. It felt shockingly good to have, if only for a few moments, a simple and accomplishable task. It was a brief respite from the waiting, the interminable hoping that Liberty would recover. Even if she recovered, there was also the horror of how different she might be following such a serious brain injury: the question of how much of her had already slipped away from the world, never to return.
Horrifyingly, the prime suspect who’d emerged was Sean Calloway, aka Bartender Sean, whom Laila had seen leaving the building right before finding Liberty. There was apparently damning enough evidence that he’d been placed under arrest, and having been deemed a flight risk, he was being held in police custody with bail set at $5 million dollars. Security cameras had him entering an hour earlier. He claimed he’d been there to see a friend, but the woman he named claimed to have no knowledge of him other than from Trapdoor, where she and her husband occasionally went to have a drink. The thought that she herself had flirted with this man horrified Reece. How easily we’ll look past a person’s fatal flaws if their beauty is striking enough. Why he would hurt Liberty was unfathomable; but Reece had been on the earth as a woman long enough to understand that sometimes, this was reason enough. As Reece made her way back down the dreary, antiseptic corridor that led to Liberty’s room, she tried to shake Sean’s face from her mind but found it stayed stubbornly in place. Of course, now that she thought about it, it was eerie the way he looked at her. Obsessive, even. But how was one ever to suspect what dark thoughts strange men might harbor?
As she rounded the door frame, she heard the familiar sound of her brother’s voice, speaking now in a hushed whisper.
“I mean it, Laila,” she heard him hiss.
“Cameron,” Reece said loudly, announcing her arrival in the room where her brother and Laila stood side by side a mere foot from Liberty’s bedside. His face turned toward her, and she caught the tiniest flash of shock before it disappeared, and he came to hug her.
He offered no explanation for what she’d overheard, and the moment disappeared so quickly that Reece wondered if she’d imagined it. She’d barely slept in days; hallucinating did not seem entirely out of the question. Back in the room, the three were once more consumed by their grief over Liberty, who was there in body but already beginning to slip from them.
She did not last the night.