Ana

She didn't go back to the apartment.

There was nothing in the apartment she needed badly enough to go back for — her cards were in her bag, her phone was in her hand, the jacket she was wearing was warm enough. Everything else was just things. She'd learned a long time ago the difference between things and the things that actually mattered and the things that actually mattered fit in a bag she was already carrying.

She walked to a hotel three blocks from the detective's precinct — a mid range chain, the kind that existed in every city, anonymous and functional and exactly what she needed — and paid cash for two nights because cash left nothing and she was done leaving things.

She sat on the edge of the hotel bed and called the detective.

He'd been to the apartment. He told her what she already knew in the careful measured voice of someone delivering confirmed information — Lucas Cain, twenty six, single gunshot wound, deceased at the scene. No sign of the shooter. Building security footage showed a figure in a dark jacket entering via the service entrance at approximately seven twelve pm and leaving via the same route at seven nineteen.

Seven minutes.

Jacob Cain had taken seven minutes to go up to the apartment, find his son, and leave.

She sat with that.

"Ms Derby," the detective said. "I need you to come in. Tonight if possible. We need to talk about protection arrangements and—"

"I'll come in tomorrow morning," she said. "Nine o'clock."

"Ms Derby I really think—"

"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Nine o'clock."

She hung up.

She sat on the edge of the hotel bed in the anonymous room with its anonymous furniture and its view of the building opposite and breathed.

Lucas was dead.

She held that. She didn't push it away and she didn't let it pull her under. She just held it the way you held things that were true and heavy and didn't have anywhere to go yet — carefully, with both hands, with the full acknowledgement of the weight of it.

He had lied to her for three years. He had fed information to a man who had used it to kill people she loved. He had known what his father was and had done it anyway.

And he had been sorry. And he had loved her — or something close enough to love that the difference was academic. And he had not been able to do the one thing his father had sent him to do.

She thought about that last part for a long time.

Then she put her phone on the nightstand and lay down on the hotel bed fully dressed and looked at the ceiling and waited for morning.

She went to see Anastasia first.

That was the decision she made lying on the hotel bed at two in the morning when sleep wasn't coming — that she needed to see Anastasia before she went to the police, before she did anything else, because Anastasia was the last person left who had been there, who knew, who understood the specific weight of what was happening in a way that didn't require explanation.

She needed that. Just briefly. Just once more.

She texted her from the hotel at seven in the morning. Can I come over. Today. It's important.

Anastasia replied in under a minute. Yes. Come now.

Anastasia and Max lived in a third floor walkup in Bushwick — the kind of building that had been cheap when they moved in and was now only relatively cheap, the neighbourhood having done the thing New York neighbourhoods did. Indigo had been here a handful of times over the years, enough to know the particular smell of the stairwell and the way the third step from the top creaked and the sound of Max's music coming through the door before you knocked.

She could hear the music now, coming down the stairwell as she climbed. Something low and rhythmic, a bassline she half recognised.

She knocked.

Max opened the door.

Max Cristen was twenty four and had the particular energy of someone who was fundamentally comfortable in their own skin — easy and warm, the kind of person who made a room feel less complicated just by being in it. She was wearing paint-stained overalls and had something blue on her left hand that she hadn't noticed yet and she smiled when she saw Indigo the wide uncomplicated smile of someone who was genuinely glad to see you.

"Hey," she said. "Ana's in the kitchen. Come in."

Indigo came in.

The apartment was the apartment she remembered — lived in, colourful, Max's canvases on every available wall in various states of completion, plants on every surface, the organised chaos of two people who had made a home together rather than just a place to live. She'd always liked it here. It had the quality of somewhere that had been chosen deliberately, built carefully, the specific warmth of a space that knew what it was.

Anastasia was at the kitchen table with two cups of coffee already poured, which meant she'd been watching for her from the window. That was Anastasia. Still always watching.

She looked good. That was the first thing — she looked like herself, which was not something Indigo had been certain of on the way over. Five years had been kind to her in the specific way of people who had done the work. The shadows under her eyes that had been permanent for the first two years after Vicrock were gone. She sat in her kitchen in Bushwick and looked like someone who had built something and was living in it.

Indigo sat down across from her.

"Tell me," Anastasia said.

So she told her.

All of it — Jacob in the street, the office, Rebecca, Ben Kowalski, Lucas, the phone, the gunshot from three blocks away. She told it the way she'd learned to tell things she needed to say — straight through, no pausing, no managing the other person's reaction, just the facts in order and the truth underneath them.

Anastasia listened the way she'd always listened. Completely. Without interrupting. Her face doing the cataloguing thing, the filing thing, the particular attention that had always made Indigo feel simultaneously seen and slightly exposed.

When it was finished Anastasia was quiet for a moment.

"Lucas," she said.

"Yes."

"You didn't know."

"No."

"For three years."

"No."

Another silence. Anastasia looked at her coffee cup.

"I'm sorry," she said. "About Rebecca. And Lucas. Both of those things are true at the same time."

"I know," Indigo said.

"What are you going to do."

Indigo looked at her. "I'm going back."

Anastasia looked up.

"Vicrock," Indigo said. "He's going to follow me there. He'll follow me anywhere but there is where I want it to end." She paused. "I want it to end where it started."

Anastasia was quiet for a long moment.

"When," she said.

"Soon. Today probably." Indigo wrapped her hands around the coffee cup. "I needed to see you first."

Something moved across Anastasia's face. Not fear — she'd stopped doing fear in the obvious way years ago. Something more complicated. The expression of someone doing a very fast calculation about something that mattered.

"I'm coming," she said.

"No," Indigo said immediately.

"Indigo—"

"No. Ana. This isn't—" She shook her head. "I'm not bringing you back there."

"You're not bringing me anywhere. I'm choosing to go."

"I know you're choosing. I'm asking you not to."

"And I'm telling you—"

"Please." Indigo looked at her. "Please don't. You have—" She looked around the kitchen. At the plants and the canvases and the two coffee cups and the sound of Max's music from the other room. "You have this. You built this. Don't bring it back here."

Anastasia looked at her for a long time.

"You built something too," she said quietly. "That didn't protect it."

The sentence landed and neither of them said anything for a moment.

"That's different," Indigo said.

"How."

She didn't have an answer for that.

Anastasia reached across the table and put her hand over Indigo's.

"Come back," she said. Simply. Just that.

Indigo looked at her hand over hers.

"Yeah," she said. "That's the plan."

She stayed for another hour. They talked about other things — Max's work, Anastasia's job search, the small ordinary details of a life being lived. Indigo let herself have it. The coffee and the kitchen and the sound of music from the other room and her oldest friend's hand on the table between them.

She let herself have it and she held onto it and she filed it somewhere safe.

Then she stood up and said she had to go and Anastasia walked her to the door and they stood in the doorway for a moment the way they had at the farmhouse five years ago, in the dark, before everything.

"Come back," Anastasia said again.

"I will," Indigo said.

She went down the stairs. She heard the door close behind her. She heard the third step from the top creak under her foot.

She came out onto the street and started walking toward the subway.

She was on the Manhattan Bridge when Anastasia called.

She picked up immediately. Anastasia never called right after — she was a texter, always had been, the call meant something was wrong.

"Ana—"

But it wasn't Anastasia's voice.

It was Max. And Max's voice was doing the thing that voices did when the person speaking was trying to hold something together and not managing it and Indigo stopped walking in the middle of the bridge and put her hand on the railing and listened.

Max said she'd gone to the Walmart on Fulton. She said she'd gone twenty minutes after Indigo left. She said Anastasia had texted her that she needed a few things and not to worry and Max had said okay and now Max was at the Walmart on Fulton and the police were here and Anastasia wasn't answering her phone and there was — Max's voice broke on it — there was something on the news and Max didn't understand and could Indigo please come, could she please—

"Max," Indigo said. Her voice came out steady. She hated that it came out steady but it came out steady. "Max listen to me. Where are you right now."

"Outside the store, the police won't let me—"

"Are you alone."

"Yes—"

"Get into a police car. Right now. Tell them you're connected to the incident inside and you need to be in a car. Don't stand alone outside. Will you do that."

"Indigo what happened to her—"

"Will you do that Max. Right now."

A sound. Movement. Then: "Okay. Okay I'm going to the car."

"Good. Stay on the phone."

She stood on the Manhattan Bridge with the East River below her and the city on both sides and the wind coming off the water cold against her face and listened to Max walk toward a police car and she breathed.

In. Out.

She thought about Anastasia in the kitchen twenty minutes ago. Her hand over Indigo's. Come back. Just that — come back.

She thought about the last time she'd seen her properly — not counting in a kitchen in Bushwick this morning but really seen her, the Anastasia from before, the one who'd been through it with her. Running through a forest. Anastasia's grip on her wrist, iron, pulling her up. Her voice in her ear: he's buying us time, we have to take it.

Always steady. Always there. Always the one who noticed things and did what needed doing and held on until she could hold on no longer.

She closed her eyes.

One second.

She opened them.

"Max," she said. "Are you in the car."

"Yes," Max said. Quieter now. The car door closed.

"Okay. Tell them your name and that you're connected to the incident and they need to take a statement. Tell them Jacob Cain. Say that name. Can you do that."

"Jacob Cain," Max repeated.

"Yes. Say it to the officer right now."

She heard Max say it. Heard the officer's response — the particular quality of attention that name produced in anyone who knew the Vicrock case.

"Good," Indigo said. "You're safe. I'm going to hang up now but you're safe. Okay."

"Indigo—" Max's voice broke again. "Is she—"

"Stay in the car," Indigo said. "I'm sorry Max."

She hung up.

She stood on the bridge for another moment.

The wind came off the river and the traffic went past and the city went on around her and she stood very still in the middle of it and let the full weight of it arrive — Anastasia, the kitchen, the hand over hers, come back, and now this, and now the last person from Vicrock was gone and she was the only one left and she had known, she had known when she walked out of that apartment that this was the shape of it, this was always going to be the shape of it, Jacob Cain taking everything until there was nothing left to take except her.

She stood with it.

Then she straightened up.

She took her phone out and looked at the trains north.

She bought a ticket.

She started walking.