🌁 chapter fifteen: the chamber [let me be your ghost]

“One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —” -Emily Dickinson

“One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —”

-Emily Dickinson

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen

Kira’s own firm handled the press for her death, and I couldn’t decide if that was the saddest thing I’d ever seen or precisely what she would have wanted, and then I realized it was both, and that she would have been the first to say so.

The statements went out in her house style—warm, deft, ahead of every question. A private service. A foundation announced before the news cycle could invent one. Somewhere in an office she’d built, people she’d trained were scrubbing the manner of her death down to tragic accident with the tools she’d given them, and the machine ran so beautifully without her that you could watch it and forget there was a body in it.

TRAGIC FALL AT TECH GALA, the acceptable outlets said. Homicide hadn’t closed anything—I knew that from Devi Raman, who now called me twice a day now, whether I picked up or not—but the investigation had gone quiet and internal in a way that smelled of budgets and reach. Nine minutes of missing footage from Crane hardware, and nobody in print had ever heard of it.

Dorian sent flowers to the funeral home. Of course he did—everyone did—but Dorian’s arrangement was the size of a door, white orchids and black ribbon, and the card read, in fountain ink, For the keeper of everyone’s secrets. May they keep her now. I stood in front of it for a long time. He hadn’t come. Men like Dorian never come. They send something expensive and unsettling and let you do the wondering, and I did the wondering, all through the service—about a man who collected vanished things, whose business deal had been refused by Eze, who had told me in a prison cellblock that he arranges things without trying. Kira had known something about the sale of the machine’s eyes. Dorian had bought the machine’s eyes. I built the case against him step by step through the eulogies, and it assembled so smoothly, so willingly, that some quiet professional voice in the back of me noted how much I wanted it to be him—because every road that led to Dorian was a road that led away from the people Eze loved.

The funeral was on a green hill in Marin, closed casket, two hundred people in beautiful black. Eze stood at the front with his jaw set to carry weight, and Conrad stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder the entire service, openly weeping, blowing his nose like a foghorn, grief pouring off him in sheets—and I stood three rows back doing the thing I hate myself for at funerals, which is watching the crowd. Everyone Kira had warned me about was there. The people here are not your friends had come to bury the woman who said it.

Afterward, in the receiving line, Conrad wrapped me in a bourbon-smelling bear hug I couldn’t escape and said, wetly, into my hair, “She liked you, you know. Told me at the party—came and found me by the bar, said, your boy’s writer sees everything, don’t let him scare her off. Last thing she ever said to me.” His voice broke on it, honestly and completely, and he held on to me the way big men hold on to furniture in an earthquake. “Take care of him. She’d want—” He couldn’t finish. He moved down the line and folded the next mourner into his grief, and I stood on the green hill in the wind, ashamed of every suspicious thought I’d ever filed under his name, and went back to building my case against Dorian, where suspicion felt clean.

…

The panic attack caught me that night, and it had been stalking me long enough to know my habits.

It waited until I was alone in the lighthouse with my armor in a pile—dress, shorthand notebook, the black heels of a funeral—and then it came up the well shaft all at once, the way it does—heart first, a fist opening and closing in my chest at some new tempo, then the air going thin, then the walls of my round cornerless room beginning, gently, to rotate with the beam.

Okafor asked questions and vanished. Kira knew things and died. I do both for a living.

And under the fear, turning like a second storm system, the question I couldn’t put down. Did I believe him? I had a client who had lied to the police, whose hardware went blind at fatal moments, whose grief read true in every light I’d tested it in. I had spent six weeks assembling reasons to trust Ezekiel Crane, and they were all—every one of them—things he had shown me on purpose. That was the fact I kept hitting in the dark. Everything I knew, he had chosen for me to know. And my tapes were already out there working against him, dressed up as a federal review, and if he was innocent, then I wasn’t just falling for my target. I was the only knife actually in him.

I know the protocol. I built the protocol, in motel bathrooms and safe houses, across three books and nine years, out of gin and physics. Flask from the suitcase—two swallows, the burn something to hold on to. Ice pack from the freezer I’d stocked my first week, because I always stock the freezer, the way other women stock pepper spray. Then down onto the rug, flat, the cold pressed to my breastbone like a hand from someone steadier, and count.

Freeze the panic before it freezes you.

One. Two. The ceiling turned. The beam swept. Five. Eight. Kira’s shoes, still on. Twelve. Two champagne glasses, one drinker. The fist in my chest opened, closed, stuttered—would it just—thirteen. Fourteen. The gin arrived, slow warmth spreading under the cold pack, the ancient stupid animal chemistry of it, and somewhere around forty the boulder rolling toward me in slow motion—Indiana Jones, every time, my whole personal cinema of dying—rolled past instead, and I lay on the rug sweat-soaked in the sweeping dark, alive again, furious again.

And there, flat on my back on the floor, with my heart still hiccuping and the ice going soft over my sternum, I finally let myself think the whole thought, the one I’d been keeping in the drawer:

I might be falling in love with a man I cannot rule out.

Because that was the fact under the fog. I had a client who knew about gaps before the gaps came for Kira. Who was provably capable of lying to police. Whose hardware kept going blind at fatal moments, whose hand had felt like certainty on a cliff path eleven seconds long. Everything I knew about his innocence, I knew from his mouth, his files, his jawline, his grief—all of it curated, all of it deliverable, and I of all women alive knew what a good man’s costume weighed, because I laundered them professionally.

I needed the forty minutes. Geneva. The footage everyone said didn’t exist—and if it existed anywhere on this planet, it existed in the sealed archive of the most paranoid building in California, behind walls that opened for embedded chips and nothing else.

If it exonerated him, I could love him with my eyes open.

If it didn’t, I’d hand Matthew his product, collect my freedom, and spend the rest of my life somewhere quiet, learning to live as the woman who kissed him back first.

I peeled the ice pack off my chest and got up off the floor to go commit some crimes.

…

Hayden had turned on me weeks ago—since the whisper campaign found the front office, and completely since the party, since the alibi made me somebody instead of staff. The sunshine was all for Eze now. What I got was the other channel, the one the org chart never sees—meetings that moved without notice, badge requests dying of clerical error, the sweet little “ask your boyfriend” filed where HR couldn’t subpoena it. She ran Eze’s doors the way Tini ran the kitchen—every wall in that tower opened for the chip in the back of her hand—and she had decided, in a hundred bloodless administrative ways, that I was the enemy.

Which, as of tonight, became mutually convenient. If anyone was going to get me through the sealed side of Crane Industries, it might as well be someone who’d enjoy hating me afterward.

I’d done my homework the way the Bureau taught me—Thursdays she drank at a wine bar in Redwood City with two friends from her spin studio, always the corner high-top, always three glasses of Sancerre across two hours, always the last to leave because she closed the tab to harvest the credit card points. And the chip rode in the back of her right hand—I’d watched her lay it against the sandstone walls a hundred times with the little flourish of the anointed.

I arrived at the wine bar looking like an accident—oh my god, Hayden? You’re here, too?—in my one good blazer. Hayden’s face when she saw me could have kept oysters fresh, but her spin friends lit up and squealed like I was an exhibit—the writer, the one from the tabloids, it’s you, please sit!—and there is no force on earth like a hostile woman’s friends deciding they adore you. I bought a round, told three stories about celebrity clients that were both true and legally fictional, apologized to Hayden—publicly, warmly, for “getting off on the wrong foot,” a masterpiece of vagueness her friends cooed over—and was begged to stay when the spin studio peeled off at ten.

“One more,” said Hayden, to her glass, not to me. Then, after a silence exactly as long as her pride, “You bought three rounds. Sit.”

“You don’t like me,” I said, sitting.

“I don’t like unvetted people,” Hayden said. “There’s a difference. Everything in that building gets vetted except whatever walks in on Eze’s arm, and my whole job is what happens when that goes wrong. And then you went and got alibied. Do you know what my inbox looks like since the party?” She drained half the glass. “Also the dress was Rodarte and nobody warned me, which I consider a workplace injury.”

“I’ll file the paperwork.”

“See, that.” She pointed at me, wobbling only slightly. “That’s the problem. You’re funny. It’s very hard to run a proper freeze-out on funny.”

Just us girls. Hayden thawed by the glass, and I hated the work tonight, hated it in a new way—because under the bitchiness was a grievance with real bones in it, and she showed it to me by glass four. Six years at Magnus Crane’s elbow, then Eze’s. Chief of staff dangled twice and given to men who lasted eight months. The whole life poured into that tower, you don’t understand what this job means to me, and the day they embedded the chip—it’s stupid, she said, laughing, but it felt like being chosen. And I sat there being chosen by her, nodding, warm, my client’s smile on, while the crushed half of a sleeping tablet dissolved in her Sancerre like a cloud dissipating in the night sky.

She got sleepy fast and gracefully. Everyone just assumed. I’m her friend from the tower, I’ve got her, I’m calling her sister. The bartender helped me pour her into a rented Jeep, wished us both well, comped the last round out of sympathy.

In the dark of the parking lot, with her snoring against the window like a woman finally getting the sleep that tower had been eating for six years, I held her manicured right hand in mine under the dome light, a scalpel I had found in one of the house’s large first aid kits sterilized in vodka, and I want it recorded somewhere that I hesitated—that even now, nine years and three monsters deep, there is a version of me that sat in that Jeep begging for any other door.

There wasn’t one. There was a chip the size of a grain of rice under the skin of a lonely woman’s hand, and a recently dead friend, and forty minutes of Geneva.

The cut was smaller than a paper cut. She didn’t stir. Butterfly bandage, antibiotic, her hand tucked back in her lap like a sleeping bird—she’d wake with a sting and a story about a wine glass, and I had, at a guess, one day, maybe two, before the sting became a question and the question reached Kessler’s desk and every door in that tower changed its mind about her chip at once.

I drove her home, walked her in, left water and aspirin by her bed like the world’s worst guardian angel. In my pocket, wrapped in gauze, the future ticked like a swallowed watch.

“I’m sorry, Hayden,” I said from her doorway, and meant it more than anything I’d said to her all month, and left.

…

The mountain tried to collect me on the way home.

I noticed it first as softness—the brake pedal on the 84 switchbacks going vague under my foot, a longer push for the same slowing, the specific mushy wrongness that anyone raised on Ohio winters and homestead trucks knows in her spine before her brain gets the memo. I was two turns into the descent, the dark coming down through the redwoods in walls, headlights carving twenty feet of tunnel out of a hundred feet of curve.

Third turn—the pedal went to the floor.

Nothing. A cable pulling on absence. My brakes were out. The Jeep gathered speed with the cheerful obedience of physics, forty into the curve, guardrail flashing silver, the black gap beyond it where the canyon breathed, and my hands did trained things while the animal in me screamed—downshift, second gear, engine howling, e-brake, easy, easy, don’t lock it—the rear stepping out, gravel spraying off the shoulder into the void—

Headlights filled my mirrors.