When she and I first arrived, she stayed with me in the house and got a waitressing job in one of the campus coffee shops. She saved up just enough to buy herself a ticket to France and then she kissed me on the cheek and said goodbye.
I didn’t hear from her again for almost eighteen months. Then she sent me a glossy European magazine in the mail with her face on the cover.
Way to lie low, Isabella.
But by that time, all the people from High Court, with the exception of the Chairman, were dead. And he was on his way to prison.
All the girls make themselves at home in the small gallery, keeping each other company, drinking box wine and eating cheap cheese and crackers, while I play hostess and woman of the hour to the faculty members in the art department. The award I won that landed me this gallery show came with a scholarship and assistantship in the MFA program.
I don’t know if I want to stay though.
I like it here. I like my house, and my friends, and my life.
But part of the reason I stayed put was because I had hoped… that one day…
One day. Maybe. He’d come back.
But he didn’t.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - COOPER
He really liked my tie.
Those were my father’s last words to me that night Monrovian Estates burned down.
I couldn’t get to my car because of all the police and firemen. So I walked across the frozen lake and I had every intention of sleeping at the inn that night—but then I remembered it was crawling with FBI.
So I went to my dorm room. I stood out there on the bridge over the interior courtyard and watched my home go up in flames.
Eventually, I went inside, took the tie off, and held it in my hands, trying to figure out where the message was. Because there had to be a message.
There was. I ripped the seams out and opened up the folded fabric to reveal a long list of numbers written on the inside.
Banks and account numbers for every single Fang and Feather member. I spent the next several hours making phone calls and by noon the next day the fires were out and I had moved more than ten billion dollars into new offshore accounts.
I ended up sleeping in the dorm for three days before Lars finally found me and dragged me into the city to stay with him.
I never told him about the money.
I never told anyone about the money.
I tried to convince myself there was no money.
Then I stopped being a dick and started giving it all away. Anonymously. It won’t make up for the past, but it’s not a bad way to move forward into the future.
Ax went missing for a while. Probably afraid he was gonna be busted for killing his father, but there were so many dead bodies in those woods, literally… no one fucking cared.
Eventually, he showed up at our apartment and we just settled in to this weird new life where Lars became a day trader and started an elite investment firm, Ax started writing a book about what it was like to be an offering for the High Court Cult, and I started working on a master’s degree in geological engineering.
Unlike the girls—Lars, Ax, and I didn’t get new names and we did graduate from High Court College.
Being a part of that sick place was something we needed to remember.
It was something we needed to live with.
It was something we needed to regret.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - CADEE
The gallery show turned into a nice night out with the girls, but it didn’t last.
None of them—not even Isabella—stayed in Fargo for the weekend. They didn’t even stay for the night. They had people waiting for them—real people who are part of their real lives.
Elexa is engaged to a cowboy she met in school last year and she spent the whole night talking about the sheep they entered in the State Fair.
Sophie, a music major, started a hip-hop band and was in the middle of moving to LA to start her club career. I was like… what?
Natalie started using her marketing degree last year and is now a major influencer on the hottest new app for teens. She talks about make-up and pushes products for three major cosmetics companies.
Maddie had turned into a travel blogger and was on her way to some fancy tropical island to document good times for the benefit of the internet.
Valentina and Selina had joined Isabella in France three years ago. Valentina was selling luxury real estate in Monaco and Selina was Isabella’s booking agent. Their story is kinda sweet. BFF’s to the very end.
Good for them.
And of course, Mona and Dante got married and are now running the new High Court College.
We all got a brand-new life. And I guess that satisfies my friends, but it never felt like enough for me.
Something is missing.
Something has always been missing with me.
I don’t think any of my old friends were in love with their partners back at High Court. Maybe Sophie is the exception, and even that is questionable because she walked away from Michael. These boys were always a business arrangement to those girls.
Cooper and I were not a business arrangement.
I still believe that, even though, when I look back on that semester I spent as a real High Court student, it feels both fake and real at the same time.
The whole thing was an act.
It was all spelled out in the envelope I found in the back seat of that first getaway car Cooper put us in. And it all started with the North Dakota lie that one day up in Chairman Valcourt’s office.
Who am I to him? Anyone?
Surely I must be someone.
Everyone on that campus was someone. I was not the exception. I just grew up on the edge of things instead of in the middle.
Dante was more of a nobody than I was. His family had a lot of money but not a lot of respect. They fought for that, from what I can tell.
His parents are dead now. Everyone’s parents are dead now. A whole bunch of murder suicides in the woods during the raid at the tomb.
Jack and Leela were found in the woods too. He shot her in the back of the head and then killed himself. Every single husband in the Estates killed his wife, and then himself, that night.
It’s sick, really. The way they tried to keep those secrets right up until the very end.
I don’t know what really happened that night since Isabella and I were driving west. But I imagine it was mass hysteria.
Dante knew the Chairman had a project out at the tomb for Cooper because his aunt was Laurie, the Chairman’s assistant. He didn’t know exactly what the project was or what it meant, he just knew it was secret and, of course, everything runs on secrets. He bet everything on that project, and even though his plan went off the rails pretty much immediately, and we were truly on our own the moment we walked into the Fang and Feather welcome brunch, it worked out in the end.
Divide and conquer.
Split up and take them down from all directions.
Fang and Feather has been exposed.
High Court was shut down and then reopened under the direction of Mona and Dante.
Everyone involved—with the exception of the Chairman, who is in prison, and the underage children of the Monrovian Lake Estates, who were shipped off to estranged relatives—is dead. Even the ones who didn’t go down in the raid.
The whole experience taught me a lot of lessons.
One. There are people out there who are very fucking sick.