WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN I DECIDED I WAS DONE. FUCK IT. My mother was ineffectual, my father pathetic. I was the idiot child who thought I could mold myself into their image, that it was a worthwhile endeavor.
I had taken them sporadically at first. The pills. When all the white crushing nothing got to be too much. When a new book or a game of chess with my brother couldn’t take me from myself. I had a sort of dread all the time, a feeling that an ax was going to fall, and if I could hide myself behind a buffer, why wouldn’t I do that? I halved them. To be safe, I told myself, but I knew really it was to make them last, and when my mother slipped at work and fractured her leg, I knew they’d send her home with more, and it was lifting those from her bathroom cabinet that finally got me caught.
“Caught” is a prosaic way of saying it. Really I was sent to rehab. The nuclear option, my father had said, the man who’d taught me to spot a lie and clean a gun and make myself into another person because I myself was never quite right, would never be. Better then to be another girl. He always was so disappointed that I was still his daughter underneath the disguise.
At Paragon Girls San Marcos I learned how to play five-card stud underneath the bolted-in television playing Days of Our Lives. I developed an interest in Days of Our Lives. At night, discussing Days of Our Lives with my current roommate, Macy, we taught ourselves how to fill a syringe and then how to flick it to expel the excess air. The syringes themselves were from the married orderly who was sleeping with the team’s lead psychologist (unbuttoned fly, ten minutes late from lunch; I cheerfully blackmailed him for months); the contents were from my former roommate, Jessa (a hole cut into the heel of her boot, a trick I soon adopted myself) who visited us every Sunday when not filming the detergent commercials that were her bread and butter. This arrangement lasted for four rather transcendent weeks. They weren’t friends—to make friends, one had to share oneself and one’s past, and I would do neither. Conspirators worked with you in the moment. We were conspirators, and good ones.
Then Macy ratted us out and was rewarded with a single room. Jessa was readmitted. I was summarily thrown out, and I took my habits with me.
I thought, like a child, that I’d be allowed to go home.
At This Generation Now! Petaluma, I tried. I did. I did everything to keep myself off it, the thing that crept under my skin like a pulse. Wanting, wanting, wanting. I was never anything if not in control of myself and now I was a current for something else’s electricity. I took up smoking; it was, as they said, an acceptable alternative. I was forced into yoga classes, which made me both limber and furious. I cried for the therapists who wanted me to cry. I wanted so badly to escape into myself, felt it like an itching in my gums, in my skin, a real burning fire in my blood that was not in the least metaphorical and instead of crawling under my bed to die I lined the girls up from my hall and told them each their shoe size just by looking at their feet. I told them what sort of pets they had at home. I looked at their palms like a fortune-teller and told them if they’d ever had a job. None of us had, never, in our lives. Modeling didn’t count.
I did it, all that they asked.
But my parents never came to visit. My uncle never called. My friends rotated in and out, and it wasn’t friendship, it wasn’t even conspiracy, it was them looking for an ear and I was the silent sort who would listen. The Funfetti cake they’d eat when they got out, the radio station they’d play on the way to the beach, the prom, the ex-girlfriend, the ex-boyfriend, the relentless pushing toward a future that they could see and I couldn’t. What future? If I “got better,” where would I go? What did my next year look like?
My resolve faded. I am, of course, human. I couldn’t find a reason to change without any conceivable reward, and anyway, the teachers in rehab were wretched. I didn’t need to relearn the periodic table. I had mental energy to spare. I put it to use. Taught the other girls how to palm their pills, how to cut holes into their mattresses. Did it in plain sight. I wanted to feel bigger, louder, stronger, so I took stimulants. Took cocaine. It was the easiest thing to find. It was the most obvious drug I could do. I had a mission: at Petaluma, as with most places, it was far easier to be dismissed as a destructive influence than to ever “graduate.”
So I was dismissed. I went back to Britain for my mother to evaluate my progress; as with all things, I’d been given an opportunity to go home right after I’d stopped wanting to. They didn’t send me away this time. At home I had my lab. At home I had my violin. I had Wi-Fi and a driver and silence, so much silence, and no one to speak to and no lessons, no school. Demarchelier had gone off to work at a lab in Tunisia. No one thought to replace him. I took an online organic chemistry course. I finished it in three weeks, studying sixteen hours a day, and then when I finished I had four college credits and still the itching in my veins. I took a week to paint my walls black. I repainted them navy. Black again. Bone white. I ran endless miles on my mother’s sad little treadmill, and there were good things, too, there were the plants I kept, there were the uninterrupted hours with my violin, and the plants again, the lab table, the sifting and mixing, the motions of my hands. Doing my work reminded me of my body. It gave me a modicum of control. Then I’d look down and remember my skin, the fact of it, and the burning would begin again.
I woke up one morning to find I was content. I would feel this forever, I told myself, stretching my arms above me in bed. I could be alone. I could stop being a creature made of want.
The next day, I began feeling the itching inside of my mouth.
In short order I had a supplier in Eastbourne. It was easier than breathing.
I had my tells. Watson could never see them, though he looked for them every day. Maybe they were only there when I was using. Maybe without the drugs I was a blank. My mother always knew when I was back on; she raised the alarm straightaway. She was “done,” she said, watching the housekeeper empty my drawers; she would never touch my things herself. My father, of course, wasn’t there. He was consulting at Whitehall, now, in London; one of his contacts from Milo’s school had finally wrangled him a position. When he’d been caught out at MI5 double-dealing information, his reputation had suffered, and without his good name he had had no work. My father had steadfastly refused to take any job that didn’t make him the lion at the top of the food chain. The charismatic megafauna. He had chosen not to work, for years, rather than feel that lack of power. We had suffered for it.
And now he had wriggled his way back in. He was being groomed for office. It would be the first thing written down if he were vetted: junkie daughter a liability.
I would get help. Or, at least, the appearance of help.
I was sent to the cheaper places, the stranger ones, the ones that threw all of us addicts in together indiscriminately. The one in Brighton—I couldn’t think in all that white. Girls in sweats with dirty hair, painted nails, and none of us allowed sharps so our leg hair grew long. There was nothing to do so I taught myself German. All day and night I spoke it in my head: nichts, danke, nichts, danke, nichts, danke. I told myself I’d go to see my brother and I would know the language. I graduated. I went, and he looked at me like I was an object to wrap in glass. Went back. I had my schoolgirl French; now I was fluent. It was easier to learn since I still had my Latin. Learned euchre, whist, cribbage, Texas hold ’em, played cards all day at a table full of girls trying not to want.
I wanted. I couldn’t stop. I took it and buried it in the ground beneath me and when I couldn’t I found another way. I would try anything so I didn’t feel like I was wrong. I grew like a plant would in the dark, twisting in on itself in search of any bit of light.
I kept my own company. That was a polite way of saying that I was my only friend and if I wanted to be alone I’d have to get rid of myself.
I didn’t.
The money ran out, or their patience did, and my parents finally pulled me home to stay. There was about to be a scandal. They were marshaling their forces. They’d hired August Moriarty, you see.
I SPENT THAT EVENING IN A LUXURY HOTEL IN MIDTOWN Manhattan taking money from dilettantes.
The girls I was playing poker with tonight, Jessa Genovese and Natalie Stevens and Penny Cole, were actresses. They were also models, and hawkers of diet tea on social media, and girls who had very expensive athleisure wear gifted to them by brands. As Watson would say, they had a hustle. I could respect that. For some, the most thrilling chase had a bag of gold at the end, not a criminal.
If I sound disdainful, it was because I was jealous of them.
There was the matter of the acting. Any good detective worth her salt knows that to winnow information out of someone, you need to play a part. The all-consuming roles I’d been playing, like Rose, the fashion vlogger, were the extreme version of this; as I didn’t have a badge and so couldn’t compel answers, I had to resort to more underhanded ways of learning information. But even when being “themselves,” a good police detective needed to know when to intimidate, when to cajole, when to make promises, when to lie.
I’m also sure that if you asked those police detectives late at night, when they were wistful and a little bit drunk, if they thought they’d do a bang-up job at some Shakespeare given the chance, the majority of them would say yes. (I’d often thought I’d make a good Cordelia. But I digress.)
The other girls at poker night were doing something I’d always longed to do. They could play poker passably well. They were very beautiful and rich and no one wanted to kill them, at least not that I knew of, and so yes, I was a little jealous.
I was there because I needed the money.
Jessa Genovese was hosting us in the junior suite she’d been living in while filming The Hollows, her new art-house horror movie. She’d moved up from the detergent commercials she’d been doing when I first met her, back when she was my roommate at Paragon Girls San Marcos. Jessa had been three years older than me, which I’d known from the orderlies letting her smoke, and she was an actress, which I’d known because, when she talked, she talked quite loudly and with her hands, projecting her voice, watching her plosives, scanning to see who was looking and changing her presentation accordingly, and she was Italian, yes, which would account for some of the volume and vivacity—I quite liked Italians, actually—but did not account for the way Jessa jumped at any small noise when she thought she was alone. She jumped also when she was reading and one surprised her, and as she was reading constantly, endless romance novels set in Scotland, she was constantly spooked. One might assume she had a quiet home growing up and was used to silence. But no—she smothered her reaction, kept it to a jerk of the lips, a stuttered hand on the bed.
As though she was habitually afraid of someone creeping up on her, and whatever they’d do to her then. As though she’d had to hide that fear in the past.
One night, stoned in our room, I’d told Jessa the full extent of what I’d learned just by looking at her. She cried. She told me some things about her mother. And then she began to sketch out a plan for how my abilities would keep me in cash and her from ever having to go back home.
Hence, the poker.
In New York or London, whenever Jessa and I overlapped, we would meet for a game. She would bring along some friends; different ones every time. I would win their money, slowly, and then very, very quickly. And Jessa would make sure they were having enough fun that they didn’t really care.
Then, after they left, I would tell Jessa every last scrap of information I’d gleaned about them that night, for her to do with what she wished.
Six months ago I had had quite a bit of fun pulling this scheme in London. Tonight . . . it made me feel a bit ill. But I was broke, and Watson was in danger, and there was currently two thousand seven hundred dollars on the table, and Penny Cole and Natalie Stevens, the two girls tonight, could leave whenever they wanted to.
And they didn’t want to. Jessa was seeing to that. She’d ordered champagne and chicken fingers and fries and foie gras, and she was playing the kind of cool-toned, echoing hip-hop that made one feel sort of sexy and important, and she was telling endless stories about bad behavior by musicians I hadn’t heard of but that made Natalie and Penny howl.
“Then he zipped up. And by zipped up, I mean the back of his unicorn costume. It was incredible.” I didn’t really understand this story, but I could tell Jessa was telling it well.
“And was that how you guys met?” Natalie was giggling. “At a show like that?”
“No, Charlotte and I go way back,” Jessa said. “Rehab.”
The girls shot each other a look. Penny had her own Disney channel sitcom. Natalie was a Lifetime movie veteran turned Christian recording artist. If Jessa and I were drug addicts and this night of ours went public, their public image would suffer.
“Eating disorder,” I said, to make myself seem like a safer prospect. It wasn’t exactly a lie. Still, I hated the implication that that was intrinsically “better” than the addiction, or “less my fault.” “I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m doing better now.”
Penny relaxed completely. “Oh, you guys,” she said, and it was genuine. “I’m so sorry.” But Natalie looked more troubled, a sort of troubled I was familiar with, and that put together with the state of her right index finger gave me more information for the file I was building on her in my head.
My phone chirped. I looked at it under the table; it was from my source at Sherringford. Things are getting worse for him, it read. How soon can you come to Connecticut?
I realized, dispassionately, that I would rather be nearly anywhere else. Even my old boarding school. But it was the final hand of the night, and I was closing in on my kill.
“The river,” Jessa said, while Penny dealt. The game was Texas hold ’em. “And it turns! Final bets, ladies.”
Penny raised, but she was bluffing; she was tapping her foot under the table, the way she had the last three times. Natalie had better cards than Jessa did, to be sure—she had a way of too-nonchalantly eating fries when she was sure she was going to win—but I had better cards than Jessa, too, who was big blind. Since she had to put money down, she’d stayed in. (And anyway, she’d split her winnings with me at the end of the night.)
My phone sounded again in my pocket. It would be poor manners for me to duck out now.
But I looked, despite myself. Jamie needs you, it said. It’s only going to get worse.
I gripped my phone under the table.
I needed to win this round rather desperately.
Natalie studied her cards. “Charlotte Holmes,” she mused. “That’s so funny. I’ve been thinking about this all night—you know, I loved the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was a kid.”
People liked to add that tag, “when I was a kid,” as though there was something childish about them. “That’s great,” I said, because while I didn’t particularly want to hand her secrets over to Jessa, I also didn’t care about her, or what she had or hadn’t read. I only wanted her to bet, so I could leave and contact my source in private.
I tried not to think about the implications of that last text. Watson, dead. On his dorm room floor. Watson dead, shot in the snow, like—
“You know, I met a Moriarty recently.”
My pulse quickened. No one noticed, of course, except for me, as I have a very good poker face. “It’s a common Irish last name,” I told Natalie. “You meet a lot of them.”
“No,” she said, and she tapped her cards against the table. “Like, a real, storybook Moriarty. I go to the Virtuoso School—you know, for working young actors and singers or whatever—and he was getting a tour. They had him sit in on my songwriting class. I guess he’d invested some money in the program.”
Lucien Moriarty’s consulting firm’s client list. The new additions: a large posh hospital in D.C. A wilderness rehabilitation facility for teenagers in Connecticut. And a Manhattan prep school for the arts.
“You gotta bet, lady,” Jessa said, sensing the turn in the conversation. “Then we can order up more champagne. Maybe I can call DJ Pocketwatch, see if she wants to come over.”
My phone chirped again.
“Did you ask him if he’d committed any crimes recently?” I asked lightly, but with just enough edge to let Natalie know I was bothered. It was a tone that drew people in, made them want to know the story behind your upset. It rarely failed.
It didn’t now. She leaned in, fascinated. “Whoa, do you guys still have run-ins?”
I shrugged. “Of a sort. What was he like?”
“Not very interesting. He had on a slouchy hat, like he thought he was cool. Big glasses. He liked the song I played.”
“Are there a lot of people in your songwriting class?” I asked. “I mean, anyone I’ve heard of?”
Natalie snuck a peek at her cards. “Not unless you follow folk-rock? I mean, Annie Henry’s a big-deal fiddler. Penn Olsen and Maggie Hartwell have been playing together for a while—”
“Come on, guys,” Penny said. The music had stopped, and she was staring at all of her money piled up in the middle of the table. “Can we, like, get this over with?”
I pulled my chips toward me, and I found I didn’t care about my winnings.
Maggie Hartwell.
Michael Hartwell was one of Lucien’s fake identities.
My phone chirped. You know you can stop this before it happens, it read, and just like that I was elsewhere, gone. August’s eyes taking me apart on the plane back to England. August ducking his head into my room in Greystone, my violin in his hand—Will you play for me? August in the snow.
Things I could have stopped before they happened. I could get on the train. Tonight. I could be at Penn Station in an hour. I—
You need to feel it, DI Green had said. Or else, every now and then, it’ll happen anyway. And you’ll continue to do very stupid things.
I forced myself to breathe.
Jessa and I had played together enough at this point that she could read me across the table. A distant part of me thought it was a pity she and I weren’t bridge partners. “Penn Olsen and Maggie Hartwell?” she asked, picking up my slack. “Are they on YouTube?”
Natalie laughed. “I guess. They’re not big or anything. They do covers, mostly. Maggie’s a sweetie, but Penn has a really big head.”
Breathe. I was breathing. “Huh,” I said, and it didn’t sound strained.
“She has nothing on you, girl,” Jessa said to Natalie. “Have you heard Natalie’s new single, Penny? It’s so effing good.”
“It is so. Good.” Penny kissed Natalie’s head. “You need to talk to the producers of my show. Maybe we can write you into an episode? I think we’re doing a musical one soon!”
They were looking at each other, so they didn’t see the flash of jealousy in Jessa’s eyes.
We sorted the money quickly, changing out the chips for cash. The champagne had run out. “God, I’m tired, and now I’m super broke,” Penny said, packing up her bag, “and I have call at seven tomorrow morning. We’re shooting a pool scene first thing. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten those chicken tenders, oof. Love you, love you”— she kissed her hands and blew at us—“but let’s not do this again till I get paid, okay?”
Girls could be so profligate with their love, as though by spreading it wide, they would induce the world to love them back. As though the world wasn’t going to take that love and beat them with it. Still, I blew a kiss at Penny. I waved good-bye to Natalie. I checked my winnings carefully—nearly three thousand dollars, I had taken almost the whole pot—and then faced Jessa across her notebook.
In that moment, I worried that I would open my mouth, that it would all come pouring out. How horribly I had behaved, and for how long. How much damage I had done. As though I would confess to the first person who asked.
Jessa saved me from myself.
“That was useful for you.” When alone with me, her way of speaking had begun to mirror my own. She was clipped, precise, hoarser. It was clear that she was taking a new acting class, and that I was the current object of her study.
At that moment, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to pretend to be me.
Imagine your father is sitting across that table, I told myself. Be bloodless, and just like that I was again. “The information about the Virtuoso School? Yes, it was useful to me.”
“Did you learn anything about them? Penny and Natalie?”
In fact, I had learned quite a bit. I opened my mouth, then hesitated. “Is it too much for me to ask how you plan to use this information?”
“I imagine the way you use money. As currency.” She waited for effect, then blinked her blue eyes rapidly. I wondered if I did that too before launching into an explanation. “These girls are my competition. A rumor can be useful. Knowing their flaws, their foibles. I hoard the best ones, though, and if I’m short on money, I sell those secrets to TMZ.”
We regarded each other. To be honest, her imitation of me was unsettling enough that I was having trouble thinking.
Was this what I seemed like to strangers?
I put that idea on to simmer while I told Jessa what I’d learned. That Natalie believed in God and prayed silently when she felt she was losing at cards; her faith was personal enough that she kept a small cross necklace not around her neck but in her pocket, where her hand returned to it like a worry stone. Penny had an older sister she worshipped. It was clear that the boots she was wearing had a previous owner, and they were (1) half a size too big; (2) made too recently to be vintage; (3) five years out of fashion. The sister had worn the boots for something practical, perhaps horseback riding (the sole was worn in the place where something like a stirrup would go) but Penny wore them for love. Perhaps the sister was dead. I couldn’t tell from the data at hand.
“That’s it?” Jessa said, when I’d finished. She was frustrated enough to revert back to being herself, much to my mixed disappointment and relief. “No habits, or addictions, or exes, or . . . ?”
Natalie was bulimic. Penny had a girlfriend back home she wanted no one to know about. Natalie, at some point in her life, had lost over a hundred pounds, and quickly; she had stretch marks, slight ones, when her crop top rode up over her pants. Penny wanted to quit the business after her contract was up, perhaps (this was a surmise) to spend more time with her beloved sister. (Perhaps the sister was not dead, but dying? I needed more time to observe her.) Neither of them ever wanted to play poker with us ever again.
Jessa made her own money now, through royalties and residuals. She was not “short on cash” in any meaningful way, despite what her selling secrets to tabloids would suggest. At the very least she didn’t need me to ruin two girls’ lives to keep herself away from her mother and her own ruined past.
“No,” I said to Jessa’s disgruntled face, “that’s everything,” and I knew I would never play poker with her again either.
How much damage I had done. How much damage I would continue to do.
On the street, I checked my phone again. My Sherringford source had written me one last message. It’s on your head, it said. As though that was a new thing.
My heart rate had slowed. I wouldn’t go to Penn Station tonight. I wouldn’t head into Sherringford, guns blazing, on some supposition. I would go home and force myself to “feel things” about my past for thirty minutes, on a timer, and I would continue with my plan, as it was the best way to keep Jamie Watson safe.
Safer than August had ever been.
Safe from me.
I lit a cigarette, the first I’d allowed myself in weeks. I had money. I had eaten food I hadn’t had to pay for. It was late, and I was actually tired, and in the morning, I had an interview with Starway Airlines. I had quite a bit of prep to do.