If I thought I was in panic mode, I’ve got nothing on Lila.
Her voice is getting high, her face has gone from red to pale as death, her eyes are so wide she might’ve seen a ghost, and her chest is rising and falling like she’s on the train to Hyperventilation Town.
She sinks to the bottom stair and sticks her head between her knees. “I’ve never told anyone that. Uncle Guido says—he says it’s not safe for people to know when you’re related to spies, and paranoia dies hard.”
Forget the steak and wine.
I need vodka.
Straight vodka.
And I don’t even like vodka.
“He won’t hurt your kids.” Her voice is so small, it’s like she’s someone else. And as her words permeate the lingering panic racking my body, I realize something I never thought I’d acknowledge.
I’m a fucking mess.
But I’m not the only one.
My phone buzzes again.
It’s Levi’s former bodyguard. The one I hired to watch Lila.
Everything okay in there, boss?
I shove up from the top of the stairs and step into my bedroom to make a couple phone calls. Lila’s security detail didn’t see Uncle Guido, but they’ll search the grounds and keep an eye on things. And my remote security company does a full reset of the system for me. That’s weird. Looks like there was a glitch, they tell me.
And now I need to look at getting an in-person security team for myself and my kids when I can’t even find a fucking nanny.
All while I process Lila’s story.
Google won’t tell me anything new.
But it does explain how little I can find on her.
When my knees finally feel more like chunky peanut butter than runny jelly, I leave my room again. The door was cracked so I could see my kids’ doors.
Lila’s still at the bottom of the stairs, head down on her knees while she hugs them.
Her curly red hair’s tumbling like a curtain, shielding her face.
No doubt, she heard every word of every conversation I had while I was in my bedroom.
I stop at the bottom stair and sit down next to her. Never gave much thought to how narrow the stairs are until now, with my thigh touching her elbow.
“Talk. More.”
I wait for the don’t forget who’s the boss here, Mr. Wilson, but instead, I get the small voice again.
“I thought Mom worked at a bank. Dad was an artist. His head was always off in the clouds, which probably made it easier for Mom to keep her cover. But Mom—she was constantly telling me things about blending in and not standing out and how to listen to people and really judge what they were saying. I remember her tucking me into bed one night, and she said, people lie sometimes, Lila. Trust your gut, and don’t ever apologize for not wanting to let someone close enough to know you. That’s how you stay safe. And Uncle Guido repeated it all the time through my teenage years. And…longer.”
My pulse is racing again, and there’s a tinny taste in my mouth, but it’s not adrenaline this time.
Not fear adrenaline.
It’s heartbreak adrenaline.
She said it herself.
Trust your gut.
My gut doesn’t know what to believe, but that voice—her voice is breaking me.
And the very first thing I did when I met her was to lie about who I was.
No wonder she’s high-strung.
“When they were formally declared missing a few days after they left, the courts appointed Uncle Al as my guardian. But he didn’t know anything about taking care of a pre-teen girl, so he shipped me off to boarding school.”
I know about boarding school, but knowing why has me unable to do much more than stare at her.
The smiling, confident woman who wasn’t fazed at all by having a drink thrown on her the night we met looks like a lost little girl.
She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I know. Why would you believe me? The CIA can falsify anything.”
“Why were you in the ceiling?”
“Uncle Al left me a letter.” She shifts, leaning into me, and I want to wrap my arms around her, but I also don’t know if she has any germs on her—yes, I need help—and I’m still struggling to catch up with everything.
But a moment later, she’s pulling up a picture on her phone.
Sure enough, it’s a letter.
I scan it quickly, realizing that if this is the legacy her family would leave her, this insane letter written by a guy who didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a teenage girl, then it’s a wonder she’s made it this far in life, much less succeeded so much.
“I don’t have much of my parents.” She takes her phone back and tucks it into her pocket. “The CIA cleaned out our house in Germany, looking for clues. Uncle Guido snuck me a few things at boarding school, but even most of our candid family photos were confiscated in case they had clues in the backgrounds about if Mom was a double agent or if there were known spies from other countries that might’ve been spying on them. So when Uncle Al’s letter said that he used to climb around in the ceiling with her, burying their treasures up there…I just wanted to find something.”
My tongue is thick, and my emotions are a train wreck. “Do your friends know?”
She blinks quickly and shakes her head. “Not about the CIA. You know what it’s like to be betrayed?”
“Ironic question, don’t you think?”
This time, her glance at me is full of spice. “Me not telling you my life history when we met isn’t betrayal. You hadn’t earned it. You still haven’t. I’m not telling you for you. I’m telling you for Uncle Guido.”
“How do you know he’s who he says he is?”
“Because I trust my gut. And because he’s done more for me than any other person in this world.”
“All selflessly, I’m sure.”
“No one’s perfect. Your friends have never done things that make you irrationally angry and disappointed in them?”
“My friends aren’t spies.”
“You can look me straight in the eye and tell me you don’t believe Davis Remington is capable of being a spy?”
My turn to do that open-jaw, close-jaw, contemplate things I don’t want to contemplate thing. And it ends the only way it can, with me looking away in complete silence, because all of us from the neighborhood sometimes ask the same thing.
“I know he’s been trying to hack his way into learning all of my secrets.”
I glower at her, because I don’t want to think about the fact that she’s probably right. At least about the extracurricular hacking. “Leave my friends out of this.”
Her eyes pinch shut. “You have normal friends, Tripp. I have Uncle Guido.”
“And Parker and Knox.”
“Whom I’ve known for less than two years, because I never keep friends long enough for them to really dig into who my parents were, and everyone always wants to know, especially this time of the year with the holidays coming when everything’s all about family, and it’s not freaking safe to say that your mom was a spy who disappeared.” She looks down again, but I don’t know if she’s looking at the toys that have magically re-appeared all over the room, or if she’s disappearing into her own head. “I know, okay? I know I shouldn’t have been such a pain in the ass about you telling me you were Levi when my own friends don’t even know all of the truth. I’ll be the pot and the kettle, okay? You can be the plate. Nobody ever hates the plate.”