My mom’s voice echoed inside my head: Always do your homework. She hadn’t meant real homework, the kind schools assigned you. She meant learning everything I could about a potential mark so that they’d be easier to exploit.
My mom, a notorious con artist, had been caught the day before my seventeenth birthday. She had been arrested, tried for her many crimes, and incarcerated with a twenty-year sentence. She had raised me and Alice as her partners in crime, teaching me how to manipulate people to get what I wanted before I could tie my own shoes.
I hadn’t known that what we did was wrong. Obviously, there had been no kind of morality in my life other than “take what you can get and don’t get caught.” I assumed that everybody around me lived a life like mine. That other parents were just like my mom. I hadn’t really had many friends growing up because she kept me out of school as much as she possibly could, telling the district that she was homeschooling me. That was a lie—she needed my schedule to be open so that I could be available to help with her schemes.
I’d never graduated from high school. Which in turn made college an impossibility. I wasn’t dumb, and I had always spent all of my free time reading, but I lacked mastery over a lot of the basics. My mother had always hated that I read, which made sense, given that it opened my eyes to an existence beyond my own. That everything in my life was completely messed up and totally abnormal.
Alice got away first, and when she was married and settled, she came for me. She rescued me, and I would always, always owe her for that.
I’d promised Alice nothing but honesty and here I was, about to spend the next few months lying my face off. I knew how disappointed she was, even if she stayed quiet about it.
That slightly guilty feeling returned, since I was ashamed that I’d broken my promise to her. Not to mention the one I’d made to myself—that I would never, ever be like my mom. No matter what. I wiped that regret away quickly by reminding myself that nothing mattered more than Alice getting better.
I wasn’t like my mother. This was different.
Despite wanting to keep the memory of my mom and her instructions at bay, I had actually done some homework. John Crawford was an executive for a huge conglomerate with offices all over the world. He seemed to travel frequently. Sheila Crawford had started up an organic / health food home-delivery service that had exploded in popularity.
Their pictures surprised me, though. My now former roommate Tammy had done nannying for a few years. She had warned me that the kids were almost never the problem; the parents were the people I’d have to watch out for. She’d shared horror stories about inappropriate husbands, demanding and entitled moms, being forced to do jobs she wasn’t being paid for, how she had to fill in for the parents’ neglect. So I was expecting the Crawfords to be horrible. To hate each other.
But in all their photos, they looked genuinely happy together. It was a trick I’d learned early on—to tell the difference between people who tried to appear happy and those who actually were. (Unhappy people were easier to manipulate.) I could tell that the Crawfords weren’t faking it.
And in all their photos with Milo I saw the same thing—parents who adored their child and were loved in return. Tammy’s words hung in my head, though, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.
There was such a thing as being overprepared. I had to believe in myself and my skills, and everything else would hopefully fall into place. Milo and the Crawfords would be won over and they’d be sad when I left in three months.
That was the thing about how I’d grown up—I was this confusing mix of insecurity and distrust, balanced out by flexibility in new situations and a confidence in my abilities that I probably didn’t deserve.
The driver pulled up to the largest hotel I’d ever seen in real life. He opened my car door and I was hit with a blast of frigid air. He ran to the back to get my bag while I got out of the SUV. I pulled my threadbare jean jacket around my torso, wishing that I’d had the funds to buy a real coat before I arrived. I thanked the driver and wondered if I had a dollar in one of my pockets that I could tip him with.
He seemed to know what I was doing and offered me a bright smile. “Don’t worry about it. The Crawfords took care of everything.”
We said goodbye and the SUV drove off. I stood in the snow for a moment longer, steeling myself against what I was about to do. Resolved, I walked in through the massive sliding glass doors. The lobby was all marble and shining chandeliers and had a kind of elegance that my mom had always pretended to possess but had never actually achieved.
I felt completely out of my element.
The man behind the registration counter seemed to agree with me. “Is there something I can help you with?” His tone was dismissive.
“I’m here to work for the Crawfords.” I shivered, and I didn’t know if it was because of how cold my skin still felt or if the full weight of what I was doing had finally settled onto my chest.
“You’re Diana Parker?” he asked, one eyebrow perfectly arched.
“That’s me.”
He frowned, as if not certain whether to believe me. I got it. I didn’t look like I belonged, and I had learned at an early age to view everyone around me with suspicion.
I couldn’t get offended when somebody else saw me the same way. In large part because, in the past, they would have been right.
The snooty man typed some things into his computer and then slid a keycard through a device before handing it over to me. “The Crawfords are staying in the Presidential Suite on the thirtieth floor. Your keycard will give you access to that level. I will call and let them know that you’re on the way up.”
I gave him a brilliant smile and said, “Thanks so much.” Just because he was being rude and dismissive didn’t mean that I had to play his game.
When I got into the elevator, it took me a second to figure out that I had to insert the card first and then push the button marked “30.” I kept up my internal mantra that everything was going to be fine. It was all going to work out. Nothing bad was going to happen.
The elevator opened and I walked down the short hallway and stood in front of the door. I took a deep breath before I knocked.
Sheila Crawford opened the door a moment later. She looked just like her photos but was much taller than I’d thought. As tall as me, and I was pretty tall at 5′10″. Other than that we didn’t look much alike—she had short blonde hair, pretty blue eyes, and tan skin. I was pale with dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. She was Cinderella to my Snow White.
“Diana! I’m so glad you made it. Come in!”
The penthouse suite had the same level of luxury and elegance I’d seen in the lobby. Expensive flooring, a granite fireplace, twenty-foot ceilings. A view of the nearby mountains that was breathtaking. This was no regular hotel room—it was like a massive apartment with rooms far beyond what I could see from this front living room.
Against my will, I found myself mentally calculating the price of the art around us—the Chagall lithograph on the wall, the Lalique crystal vase sitting on a side table, the Piaget clock on the mantel. I wondered if the items I saw belonged to the hotel, or if the Crawfords had brought them.
It doesn’t matter how much anything is worth, I hissed at my mercenary brain.