STELLA
There was a voice mail from Nick on my phone, but the reception in the hospital was so bad that every time I tried to listen, I lost the call. The red notification circle taunted me all day as I went with Roxie to radiology, holding her hand tight and handing her tissues, until they wheeled her off for X-rays in a lead-lined vest. It teased me as I held Ruth’s hand too, as the doctor talked about a compound break and pins and surgeries. It felt like a hot little coal in my pocket while I asked the doctors nine hundred questions, while Ruth slowly put her hoodie up again, and while she stared silently at images of her jagged bones on the computer screen on the rolling cart.
The notification was with me for that whole exhausting day. Roxie was emotional and tearful; Ruth was stoic and quiet. I stayed strong for my girls, but inside I was in knots of anxiety, worry, and uncertainty. Over it all was a looming shadow of disappointment. Without Ruth and Roxie, there was no chance we could pull off our plan to steal the North Star.
Waiting in the hallway for Ruth to get done with yet another set of X-rays, I thought back to the day we’d first begun to think of the plan. It had been a strange sort of kismet—like the planets aligned.
It was a hot afternoon in July. I’d been putting away groceries when my phone had buzzed in my pocket. It was my dad. “Stella!” he said, in his usual whisper-yell, like he was calling me during a hostage situation or from inside a movie theater; his new wife, whom I referred to in my head as Wendy, the Wicked Witch of the West, wasn’t a fan of mine. Or the fact that I looked exactly like my late mom. Judging by the echoes and faint noise of running water, I was fairly sure he always called from the bathroom. It was probably the only time she left him alone. It also meant that I usually only got calls at seven in the morning. But this time, it was late afternoon. Highly irregular. “Dad?”
“Stella, the Big Wide Open is for sale,” he whispered.
I froze with a bag of mini carrots in my hand. The words transported me back to the very spot itself. The Big Wide Open was a horse ranch just outside Flagstaff, Arizona. It was also home, more so than anywhere I’d ever lived. It had always belonged to my family, until my grandparents had been forced to sell in order to pay for their medical bills. And for my mom’s, as well. But that had been years ago, and I’d pushed it out of my mind. It was too painful to revisit, even in dreams—so full of nostalgia it almost made me woozy. “You’re kidding me.”
“No!” he whispered back. “I’d buy it if I could, but . . .”
“Rogerrrrrr!” came a shrill scream from his end of the line. “Are you constipated? Did you forget to eat your prunes? What is going on in there?”
“Gotta go! Love you, sweetheart!” my dad had whispered, and ended the call.
As the line went silent, Ruth came out from her room. I turned to her with the bag of carrots in one hand and my phone in the other. She took the carrots, ripped a hole in the side of the bag, and ate one. “If I were to open a yoga studio for low-income women and do like career counseling and meditation and stuff, do you think that could be a thing? Ten-dollar haircuts? Free meditation classes? I’m thinking I could call it Ohm Sweet Ohm.”
Before I’d even had the chance to answer any of her questions—which I would have answered, in order: That could totally be a thing; Yes; Yes; Ten out of ten on the name!—Roxie arrived home, stomping into the foyer in her heels. She ripped off her Jackie O glasses and said, “My attorney says I won’t have a prayer of joint custody unless I have a yard with grass. Can you believe that bullshit? This is Albuquerque! A yard?”
Ruth handed me the bag of carrots and I ate one, chewing slowly in a kind of daze. All the new developments had left me a little bit gobsmacked. A ranch. A business. A house. So many things, but so far out of our reach.
Roxie kicked off her heels and grabbed the remote from the kitchen table. She was just punching some numbers into the remote when Ruth snatched it from her and pointed at the television. On the screen was a segment from the local news. And to the right of the anchor’s head was an image of a jewel that I would have recognized anywhere.
The North Star.
Ruth turned up the volume, and the anchor’s brassy accent filled the apartment. “One of the largest diamonds in the world has been sold at auction. The North Star, which weighs in at a staggering five hundred eighty-nine carats, has been purchased by Sheikh Saud ibn Nejd al-Aziz . . .”
An image of a somewhat swarthy and youngish-looking guy popped up on the screen.
“Fortunately for all you gemophiles, the new buyer has agreed to leave it on public display at the Gemological Institute of America through November 1. You might want to sneak in a road trip to California before that pretty baby disappears for good!”
In unison, Ruth and Roxie turned to me. And I dropped the bag of carrots onto the kitchen floor.
That was how it had started. And now here we were. But with every X-ray and conversation, it became more and more clear that our dreams and hopes were about to fade away and that our plans to steal the North Star were as badly broken as Ruth’s leg and Roxie’s arm. The planets had aligned to make us think we could steal the North Star. Now it felt they’d spun out of orbit completely.
Worn out and tired of keeping a smile on my face, I left the hospital when the nurses told me that visiting hours were over. In the elevator, where I still had no reception, I looked at myself in the shiny stainless doors. Standing there alone, I was transported to how I’d felt with him standing next to me. And how reassuring that had felt. I’d gotten used to being the shoulder to lean on. But it had been awfully nice to have him there beside me. Even if only for a little while.
As soon as I stepped out of the hospital, I hit play on the message. The brief and wonderful calm that came over me when I heard his voice was immediately replaced by an impending sense of doom. Because though I may not have been as experienced as Roxie when it came to men, I knew that if they asked you to Google them, it was probably a very, very bad sign.
The bus that would take me home pulled up just as I began to walk across the street, so I made a run for it and caught it just in time. As the bus lurched and bumped along, I toppled into an open seat across from an elderly lady with a set of worry beads in her hand.
“Hi,” I panted. “God, that was a close one!”
That was when I realized it wasn’t an elderly lady. It was a nun.
She looked at me sternly and moved a bead on her rosary.
I put my purse in my lap and tried to compose myself. She was still giving me the eagle eye, and I slunk back a little farther in my seat. And opened up my browser.
My dating history was hardly extensive. I’d dated an accountant and a dentist and a very nice if somewhat odd biologist who specialized in a rare minnow. All my relationships had fizzled out like a wet firework—none of those men could have handled knowing what I really was.
But as soon as the search results populated, I realized that Nick Norton was unlike any other man I’d ever dated. The first image that popped up wasn’t a professional head shot—it was a mug shot. I gaped at the image and said, “Holy shhhhhhh . . .” I looked up from my phone to find the nun staring at me with her rosary swinging. “. . . shhhakalakalaka,” I whispered.
Ignoring her terrifying repent, my child! glare, I focused on my phone with all my might. The image led me to Nick’s rap sheet at mugshots.com. I scrolled down past a crazy-making litany of tattoos, recorded in minute detail under Distinguishing Characteristics, until finally I got to the charge sheet. He had a few old misdemeanors for breaking and entering when he was much younger, each noted with a period of parole—but no jail time. But at the bottom was a felony charge for possession of stolen property, worth over $5,000. It had the federal statute linked on one side, but I didn’t have to click it. I was up on my felonies; it meant he had been convicted of willfully possessing the goods, knowing that they were stolen. I backed up to the search results and clicked on the “News” tab. There was a short article from the Albuquerque Journal about his arrest. For possession of five rough-cut diamonds.
It hit me like a Whac-A-Mole hammer on the forehead.
I knew him. Or more precisely, knew about him. The year before, I had heard about a fence with a reputation for being low-profile and discreet, specializing in jewels. We’d been about to seek him out when he’d gotten picked up by an undercover cop in a sting. It had been around about Halloween, I remembered, because Ruth and Roxie and I had discussed it when we were doing our costumes in the bathroom. Roxie had said she’d heard he was yummy. Ruth had said she’d heard there was no safe he couldn’t crack. And I’d heard that along with being a fence, he was a thief.
I dropped my phone in my lap and watched Albuquerque whiz by in a million shades of beige. He wasn’t just some hunky guy who got me all hot and bothered. He was a guy who, for better or worse, could relate to my crazy, unconventional, decidedly not-the-girl-next-door secret life. He was a guy I could actually be myself around.
God, what a relief that would be, I thought, as I slumped back in my seat.
And the nun clicked another bead on her rosary.
As I stepped off the bus, I reached for my phone to give Nick a call. But there, as the haze of bus fumes cleared, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Across the street, pulling out of Mr. Bozeman’s driveway, was a Cadillac. But not just any Cadillac. A white one, with spinning brass rims and a shellacked pair of longhorns wired to the grille.
It was the Texan.
Cue the magenta mist of rage.
I shoved my phone back in my purse and hustled across the street. There were cheesy fingerprints on Mr. Bozeman’s doorknob, and I growled when I saw them. When I walked inside, Mr. Bozeman stashed something under his afghan. Priscilla zoomed around the house, sniffing like crazy because someone new had been in her space. She found a cheese curl on the rug, nudged it with her nose, and sneezed.
I picked up the disgusting cheese curl with a piece of Kleenex, same as I would have done with a dead cockroach, and dropped it in the trash, forcing myself to take some deep breaths to calm myself. Once I had done eight counts of ten and straightened out the garbage bag in the bin, I sat down next to Mr. Bozeman on the sofa and did my best to keep my face absolutely neutral. “Don’t be mad,” he said.
“Of course I’m not mad.” Actually, I was unbelievably mad, but not with Mr. Bozeman. I was mad at the Texan—I detested him for being an opportunist and a fat wolf in even fatter sheep’s clothing. I’d been careful to never cross paths with him; he was like the Joseph Stalin of Albuquerque. You didn’t have to know him to steer clear. And he was just the sort of lousy, nasty SOB that Ruth and Roxie and I sometimes fantasized about taking down, with a handful of too-hot-to-fence diamonds and an anonymous call to the proper authorities.
But we’d never had a reason.
Yet.
Mr. Bozeman’s eyes were bloodshot, and he looked just as worried as I felt. He also looked tired and stressed. Everything an eighty-seven-year-old man deserved not to be anymore. He revealed what he’d stashed under his afghan. It was a betting slip, and he handed it to me. Elvis’s Girl, to win at the Ruidoso Downs Race Track. I closed my eyes. There was no need to panic. All we had to do was cancel the bet. I put my hands to my eyes and rubbed my eyebrows. “When is the race?”
But Mr. Bozeman didn’t answer. I looked up to find him staring openmouthed at the television. A clump of fast-moving horses galloped from left to right, and the bottom of the screen filled up with statistics—the names of the horses, jockeys, and owners, along with the final times. But then the camera zoomed in on a brown filly with pink blinders, with her jockey walking by her side.
“Don’t tell me . . .”
Mr. Bozeman scratched his thinning white hair and stayed glued on the screen. I envisioned his debt to the Texan growing like one of those godforsaken Magic Grow capsules that I played with when I was little, that started out looking like a brightly colored vitamin but ended up being a gigantic slippery brachiosaurus that took over half the bathtub. The Texan was like that—like a creature that became too big to ignore. On the bottom of the screen, it said ELVIS’S GIRL—SCRATCH.
I forced myself to turn over the betting slip. And there I saw an amount that made me gasp. Ten grand. Twice what I’d put in Mr. Bozeman’s Pyrex pans. “You don’t have this money.”
Mr. Bozeman hung his head. “No. He takes my social security checks as collateral.”
A wave of nausea tore through me. He hadn’t said will take, and he hadn’t said took. Instead, he’d said . . . “Takes? As in, ongoing?”
Mr. Bozeman nodded at the afghan in his lap as Priscilla pawed at his leg. “But I was sure I’d picked a winner this time. The Texan told me so himself.”
The magenta mist was swirling around me like a Category 5 highlighter-pink hurricane. As I stomped across the empty lot to my apartment, the possibility of stealing the North Star on my own began to take shape. We needed the money, now more than ever. There would be hospital bills, and God only knew what Mr. Bozeman owed the Texan in total. Roxie’s son was getting older, Ruth had already designed the freaking logo for Ohm Sweet Ohm, and every day that passed was one day closer to someone buying the Big Wide Open out from under me.
We were so close to such wonderful things. We couldn’t back down now. So I revved myself up, imagining myself dressed as Rosie the Riveter—Yes I can! Of course I could! It would be me, on my own, in California. Next week. Can do! It’d be bing, it’d be bang . . .
Was I out of my flipping mind?
“Obviously,” I growled as I trudged across the dusty ground. There was nothing on earth that I hated more than feeling helpless, cornered, and stuck. And I felt all three right then. I hated that feeling. So. Freaking. Much.
With the three of us, it would’ve been a risk. But going from a three-woman job to a solo heist would require an epic overhaul of every last detail. I focused on the cracks in the sidewalk as I rubbed my forehead and tried to decide where to begin.
Something on my front porch distracted me. At first, I couldn’t quite make it out, but as I got closer I saw it was a large, thin box, like a doughnut box, but bigger. Crouching down, I gently lifted the lid, and what I saw made my heart soar. Inside were a dozen beautiful, enormous, perfect chocolate-dipped strawberries. In the warmth of the afternoon, a thin layer of cool dew had gathered on the chocolate, making them look almost too perfect to be real.
Taped to the top of the box was a note. The writing was curly and feminine, belonging to the lady who had taken the order, but I knew exactly who it was from.
I already miss your beautiful face.
It hit me what he must have thought—it had been hours since he left that voice mail, hours since he’d laid himself bare . . . and he still hadn’t heard from me. So now, on top of feeling like I was hemmed in, cornered, and perilously close to giving up on all our dreams, he probably thought I was some kind of coldhearted, holier-than-thou betch who’d taken one look at his rap sheet and gone radio silent.
Nice work, Stella. Superfine. Ten out of ten.
There were a lot of things I couldn’t fix right then, but straightening things out with Nick would be a start. In one hand, I held my phone. In the other, I took one of the strawberries from the box, pinching the leaves and stem between three of my fingers. It was huge and luxurious, with white chocolate zigzags all over it. I sank my teeth into it and let the stress of the day fall out of my shoulders. I leaned against my front door, placing my forehead to the jamb as I chewed. And I gave him a call.
He answered after one ring. “Jesus Christ, I thought I’d never hear from you again.”
“Hi,” I said around my strawberry. “I’m sorry I went silent. Bad reception and then . . .” I envisioned the cheese curl in Mr. Bozeman’s garbage and the Texan’s stupid fingerprints on that stupid betting slip. “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging.”
“I’ve just been here pacing a hole in my carpet. No big deal.”
Cringe.
“Just give it to me straight.” He cleared his throat. “Is this hello . . . or goodbye?”
I let my forehead rest on my front door. It was such a relief to hear his voice—and a double relief knowing that if I didn’t want to, I didn’t have to pretend. I didn’t have to be upstanding or ordinary or act like I didn’t have a secret life. If I wanted to, I could tell him the God’s honest truth—I could say, I had a job all lined up and now it’s turned into a steaming pile of dog shit. Or, What are you up to tonight? How do you feel about some light vandalism? We can deflate all the Texan’s tires and then grab some dinner. Yay or nay? But then again, that might be coming at it a little bit hot. For the moment. So I went for something simpler. The simplest. “It’s hello.”
“Thank God,” he said, inhaling hard. “I’m sorry I dropped that on you in a fucking voice mail. I just didn’t want to lie to you. I like you way too much for that.”
The words made my heart sink. He had been brave and honest. He had laid it all out there. And right then, with that crazy day behind me and that crazy plan in front of me, I wanted—desperately—to just be me. As I was. Without lying or pretending or making up some nonsense. I was tired; my friends had been hurt. My future was a jumble. And I needed someone to lean on.
“Nick, I actually . . . I understand.” Say something honest, say something true. “I’m not . . . see. I . . . you know . . . So I am actually a dog sitter, but I’m also . . .”
“Stella,” he said, his voice firm and steady, with maybe a hint of a smile. “I know.”
I shifted my eyes toward the phone, toward his voice. “You . . . what?”
He cleared his throat. “I saw what you did at the jeweler’s, and then today? Three women? One of them wearing a Converse size nine? News flash: this isn’t my first rodeo.”
My knees became instantly wobbly. Once or twice, I’d imagined telling someone about this secret life of mine—but my secret wasn’t like most secrets. I wasn’t divulging that I liked to drink a little too much, or that I had been married four times, or something not-quite-kosher but generally acceptable. Being a jewel thief was bad. Bad-bad. Felony-bad. It was the dark side of my moon, the thing that no man had ever known about me.
I planted my hand on the doorframe for support. He knew. He knew who I was. He knew who we were.
How did I feel about that? Should I hang up? Should I bolt? Should I pretend?
I looked down at the box of berries. At the note. And thought about how all this made me feel. And when I really boiled it down, I was shocked, I was rattled, and I was also just . . . relieved. “And that’s OK?”
Nick blew out a breath. “I want you. It’s that fucking simple.”
I closed my eyes hard, pinching them shut. Was I dreaming? Was this reality? Was I losing my mind? “You know who we are?”
On the other end of the line I heard the unmistakable noise of him running his rugged and sexy palm over his equally rugged and sexy stubble. And then he said, “I can’t do this on the phone. I’m coming over.” In the background, I heard the jingle of keys. “Even being two miles from you right now is way the fuck too far away.”
As he said it, I looked down at myself. I was in exactly the same clothes he’d seen me in yesterday and this morning. My hair felt limp. My skin felt greasy. I’d dribbled coffee on my shirt. And I hadn’t put on makeup in nearly forty-eight hours. “Hang on. Hold your horses. I need to shower and get cleaned up.”
“Fuck that. I’m just going to get you dirty again,” he said, his voice dark and thick and greedy.
Welp. That was that. For all the things that had been swirling around me in the magenta mist, one thing was very clear: I now knew exactly where my loins were.
However, for whatever else I was, I was—first and foremost—a Peretti. And when the going got tough—or confusing or tiring or overwhelming—the Perettis did one thing: they cooked. And that was exactly what I was going to do. “Let me make you dinner.” I made a mental scan through the fridge and freezer contents. It wouldn’t be fancy, but at least it would be delicious. “What’s your feeling on lasagna?”
He cleared his throat. He laughed a little. And then he said the thing that every cook on the planet wants to hear. “It’s my favorite.”
“Then I’ll see you at seven thirty.”
He groaned a little. “For real. You’re making me lasagna?”
I froze with my key halfway into the lock. “Unless you prefer risotto. Or maybe a nice pesto linguine. Or mussels in white wine?”
“Jesus Christ,” he groaned. “Where have you been all my life?”