No One Knows Us Here(88)

“Trust me, Rosemary, everyone knows you’re here.”

“I came in hours ago, and they’ve just been ignoring me.”

“It just broke on the news.”

“What did?”

She gave me a strange look, as if she couldn’t quite figure out what to tell me. “They found Leo Glass dead in his apartment.” She looked at her watch again. “Oh, thirty minutes ago. Social media was all over it. They’re saying you did it, and then some reporter claimed a young woman had turned herself in for this very crime, and—”

I sat there, stunned, taking it all in. Leo Glass, dead in his apartment. When she said it, I had winced, shocked. I wasn’t acting. In a strange way, it had shocked me. The last couple of days had unspooled like a fever dream. Nothing had seemed real. I had tried to confess, and no one had cared.

“Stop crying,” Priya was saying.

I reached my hand up to my face. It was covered in hot tears. I wasn’t crying for Leo Glass. I was crying from exhaustion. Relief. This would be over soon. I would confess and they would lock me up and I would get what I deserved. I had been wrong, wrong about everything. I hadn’t been able to save Wendy. I hadn’t fixed anything. I’d made everything worse. Locking me up would be the best thing for her, really. They needed to keep me away from her for good.

“Listen, she’s going to help you. Just sit tight, okay?”

I made an attempt to dry my face with my hands. The tears had stopped. “Who?”

“Another lawyer. She’s flying in from LA. She jumped on the plane the minute she heard the news. She made me run over here before—I don’t know. Before you did anything stupid. I ran here. Ten blocks.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Look, Rosemary. This doesn’t look good for you. It looks like you’re going down for this. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitating.

She flopped back in her chair, defeated. “Just wait until she gets here, okay? She’ll talk to you. She might change your mind.”

Once again I examined her. She gazed back at me calmly. Her face revealed nothing. “I doubt it,” I said.

We sat there waiting for hours, until the door to the interrogation room finally opened again and another woman walked through. She came in breathless, as if she’d run miles to get here.

“Thank god,” Priya said.

I straightened in my chair, staring in disbelief. My mind was having a difficult time processing the image before me. While we’d been waiting, I’d had plenty of time to imagine who would show up to save me, to rescue me from my own mess. Mira, maybe? She had started this whole thing. Maybe she knew, maybe she’d flown in from wherever she was now to sweep me away from here. It wasn’t Mira.

“Rosemary.” She held out her hand for me to shake. “Do you know who I am?”

I nodded and cleared my throat. I knew exactly who she was. “Jamila Heath-Jackson,” I announced, unable to disguise the awe in my voice. She was older now, but she was instantly recognizable. Her hair natural, tight black curls that jutted out around her head. That same cool bohemian look she had in the pictures from her college days, back when she was Leo Glass’s girlfriend. Narrow face and large hazel eyes. No makeup except for lipstick. She was wearing a suit but didn’t look stuffy at all, with a colorful silk scarf tied around her neck.

She nodded back, opening her eyes a little wider, as if to say, Right. Good. “Priya and I, we’re lawyers. We went to law school together, here in Portland. We know people, we have connections—we can help you. Whatever happened, we can get you out of this.”

“She doesn’t want to get out of this,” Priya interjected.

Jamila leaned in and took both of my hands in hers. Her fingers felt warm and smooth. “Is that true?”

I hesitated this time, disconcerted. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. She held up a hand. “Don’t answer that,” she said. “Let me tell you why I’m here.”

She told me they met their first year of college, she and Leo Glass. “We fell in love,” she said, lifting her hands up, like it was an admission. “Seventeen years old, two nerdy computer science majors. Leo knew about that international prize I’d won, back in high school, for this code I’d written. He said it was brilliant. I was brilliant.”

“Jamila had plans for that code,” Priya interjected. “She was going to develop it into a neighborhood watch program, keep people safe—”

“He said he could help. By our junior year, we had it all ready to go on campus. We had investors lined up. As soon as we graduated, we would be co-CEOs of our own company.”

“He screwed her over,” Priya said flatly. “To make a long story short.”

Leo wanted to make changes, Jamila continued. He wanted to name the company Lookinglass. Lookinglass, for a neighborhood watch program? It didn’t make sense. Jamila wanted to take a step back. It wasn’t about money at all, not for her.

It had all happened right under Jamila’s nose. He’d been taking the company in his own direction for months. He had even flown to Japan without her. The Japanese investors were old-school, he had told her. He knew how to handle them. “You know what he told me? That they didn’t respond to women in power. Especially not Black women in power.”