Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(26)

“What are you telling me, exactly?”

She hesitates, unsure herself, it seems. “I guess I’m telling you that … he might be the one.”

“The one? Do we really believe in that?”

“I do,” she says. “You know that.”

“Do I, like, need to look for a new roommate?”

“No,” she says, sounding slightly irritated. “I mean, maybe, eventually. But … I’m trying to tell you something happy. And kind of scary. Like, what if this is the guy I’m gonna have babies with?”

“And I’m being selfish.”

“A little.”

I exhale and lean forward to hug her. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m happy for you.”

What I don’t say is that I worry I may have forgotten what happiness feels like. I’m not a zombie like I was a couple weeks ago, but what she’s going through—falling in love … I can’t even fathom such a thing.

“Thanks,” she says, getting up. I can tell I’ve hurt her. I can tell that the way I reacted has made a mark, maybe even a permanent one, on our friendship. I am ashamed and afraid at the same time. But I don’t know what to do.

“I’m sorry, Iris,” I say again.

“It’s okay,” she says. But I can tell she’s shut me out. She rinses her glass and grabs her keys.

“So, I’ll see you tonight?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says. “We’ll be here.”

After Iris leaves, I stay curled on the couch for a few minutes, trying to think my way out of the pain in my stomach. You haven’t lost your best friend over one selfish reaction, I tell myself. You haven’t.

Ten minutes later, I send Iris a text that says “I love you” and then I call Saul and tell him about Nechemaya.

“He wants to meet in Roseville,” I say. “Any chance I could borrow your car?”

“Sure,” he says. “You’re in luck. I’m staking out a nightclub in Greenwich Village but there’s a bench on the sidewalk outside. The Doom Room. Do you know it?”

“The Doom Room? No. What are you doing there?”

“My client thinks her husband is seeing a dominatrix,” Saul says, chuckling.

“It sounds like we’ve switched jobs.” I staked out a fetish place in Queens last year when we got a tip that a local politician was into S&M. The Trib paid day rates to keep a photog and a reporter sitting outside for almost a week, around the clock, to get that story. But none of us saw him coming or going. I don’t miss that kind of work at all, but I know that I have to prove myself capable of coming up with headlines on my own if I have any hope of getting a staff job—and thus some freedom—at the Trib or anywhere else. Coming up with headlines means having sources, which are basically impossible to cultivate sitting at a desk rewriting copy. I’ve been hiding in that office since Aviva called. It’s time to get out.

“I went to a chulent last night,” I say. “And I met a guy who knew Pessie. Listen to this: the Sam she was engaged to is Sam Kagan. Aviva’s brother. I found a number for him in Roseville and when I called the woman said he hadn’t been there in years. I asked for Aviva, too, and the woman got all upset. She definitely knew her.”

“How old is this Sam?”

“The readout I got from the library at the Trib says he’s my age, almost exactly.”

“You know,” says Saul, “I believe Aviva’s mother died in childbirth while she was in Florida…”

“What? Wait, how long have you known that?”

“I guess I’m just remembering,” says Saul. “I wonder if Sam is that child?”

My mother is motherless. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this before.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m just…”

“We need to talk,” I say. “It’s time.”

Saul takes a moment to answer. “Okay. I will be in the Village starting at about nine tonight. Why don’t you come join me?”

Right before I leave for my shift, I call Larry at the Shack and inform him I have a meeting tomorrow with a member of the Roseville burial society about the Pessie story. He says I can put in for my day rate and get paid for mileage.

“If I stay overnight, do you think I can get reimbursed?” I ask. “I’ve got a couple leads on addresses related to the ex-fiancé.”

“Okay,” says Larry. “Run ’em down. Just one night, though. And make sure the room’s cheap. Less than one-fifty. I can swing that.”

On the subway to Manhattan, instead of listening to a WNYC podcast to pass the forty-five-minute ride, I do something I haven’t done in months: I think about a story. When a woman dies, the first suspect is always the husband. But if Levi Goldin killed his wife he wouldn’t be begging a reporter to pay attention to her death, so I feel safe assuming he’s not the perp. It sounds as though Sam was the one that dumped Pessie, so jilted lover doesn’t fit, either. Unless she had another ex-fiancé, or lover, which Levi isn’t likely to know about. Her family probably wouldn’t know either—though even if they did I can’t imagine they’d tell me. So far, Sam seems like the best possible source for information on what was happening in Pessie’s life. Sam and maybe this Nechemaya. The fact that Nechemaya called me is, frankly, a huge coup. If he didn’t hate me, I’d call Tony and brag: Scoop’s got a scoop. I wonder if he’d even want to hear from me again. He probably thinks I dumped him because I got bored or hooked up with someone else. He doesn’t know that I’ve never had a relationship that lasted more than four months. He doesn’t know that the only time I didn’t run when I felt like I might be in danger of falling in love was when I was pregnant in college and imagining that my boyfriend and I would make up for where my dad and Aviva went wrong. He doesn’t know that that boyfriend was also sleeping with two other people, and that Iris was the one who took me to Planned Parenthood. He doesn’t know that I haven’t been able to make myself come since we broke up. He’s probably with somebody else by now, anyway.