Reynolds’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked at her with new interest. “You’re Leda Cole, aren’t you?”
“I—” She opened her mouth, but her throat was sandpaper-dry. Did they already know she was guilty?
“Thanks for coming by so quickly,” he said, with an energy that surprised her, “but we aren’t quite ready to gather supporting testimonies. Honestly, after what Miss Fuller told us, we may not need it.”
Avery? What did she have to do with any of this?
“Supporting testimony?” she repeated.
“When your friend said you would be coming by, I didn’t realize she meant this morning,” he told Leda, almost genially.
“Avery was here?” That explained why the station was more awake than it should have been this early in the day: the frisson of electricity sizzling throughout the place, as if someone very important had just come through, causing quite a stir.
“She left barely half an hour ago,” Reynolds informed her, and then, more softly: “None of us had any idea what that girl was hiding.”
His words caused something in Leda to snap. “They aren’t even related, okay? Leave her alone! She’s already heard enough of that—that filth!”
Reynolds lifted an eyebrow. “I wasn’t talking about her family situation. I was talking about what she did. She just confessed to the deaths of Miss Dodd-Radson and Miss Valconsuelo. Her parents took her home on temporary bail.”
What? Leda felt suddenly dizzy. She pressed her hands against the desk to keep herself from toppling over. “Avery didn’t kill those girls,” she said very softly.
“She confessed to it. We have it on record.”
“No, she wouldn’t . . . Avery never . . .”
Reynolds gave a delicate cough. “Miss Cole, I’m sure you want to help your friend, but she’s already being helped quite a bit. Don’t forget who her father is. It’s too early for me to take your testimony, and anyway, you look tired,” he said, not unkindly, and gestured at her uniform. “Why don’t you go on to school?”
Leda nodded numbly. Her throat felt closed up, her mind still roaring and blank all at once. She walked out of the police station with dazed steps, like someone who was drunk, or very lost.
What was Avery doing, confessing like that? “Ping to Avery,” she said into her contacts, and when that went to voice mail, “Ping to Atlas.” Atlas would know what was going on, would tell her what was happening up there on the thousandth floor . . .
But Atlas’s contacts never rang. All Leda got was a flat single-note tone, and a command not valid error.
Leda stumbled forward, leaning against a nearby bench, trying to regain her balance. This didn’t make sense. Atlas was gone. Atlas, the only real tether holding Avery in place. Had he run away again . . . Or did his parents get rid of him?
Leda thought of Avery yesterday, insisting that Leda had always been the brave one, looking out for everyone around her. And she realized what had happened.
Avery had confessed for Leda’s sake.
She was taking Leda’s guilt onto herself. Letting herself be dragged down beneath it all, so that Leda could go free. Avery was giving Leda her life back—sacrificing herself for Leda’s sake—in one last, ultimate gesture of friendship. And if she was doing that, Leda realized in a panic, it could only mean one thing.
She turned and sprinted toward the nearest upTower elevator, hoping she wasn’t too late.
AVERY
SEVERAL HUNDRED FLOORS upTower, Avery was putting the final pieces of her plan in action.
“Avery Elizabeth Fuller!” Her father’s words echoed furiously off the polished marble floors, the high arched ceilings, the mirrored walls of their apartment’s two-story entryway. “What the hell is this about?”
Of course Pierson Fuller was angry, given the way the past forty-eight hours had gone, at least from his perspective. All the glamorous victory of the inauguration ball had been followed by the revelation that Avery and Atlas loved each other—a fact that came to light in an ugly and very public way. The Fullers had gone from being the most celebrated, most envied family in New York, to the butt of a vulgar joke.
He’d gotten rid of Atlas, hoping that would solve the problem, only to be confronted by something even worse—the police pounding on his door in the early hours of the morning. I’m sorry, sir, Avery imagined them saying, but we have your daughter in custody at the station.
“Why didn’t you warn us? You just went down to the police station alone?” Elizabeth threw her arms around her daughter, her voice breaking. “Is this about Atlas?”
Avery pulled herself roughly from her mom’s embrace. “No, you think?” she demanded.
“This isn’t about Atlas,” Pierson bellowed. “It’s about you, Avery! You violated our trust. As if learning about you and Atlas wasn’t hard enough, now we have the police coming for us at six a.m. saying that our daughter has gone down to the station and inexplicably confessed to killing someone?”
“Two people, actually,” Avery couldn’t help reminding him.
“Avery didn’t kill anyone,” Elizabeth pronounced in the same tone she would have used to say, This tablecloth shouldn’t be blue. As if by saying it, she could will it to reality. “She didn’t even know that Mariel girl.”