The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #3)(67)

“Natural for Daniel,” I said as I took a bagel from a bag on the counter. “Is there any peanut butter?” I asked Jamie.

Jamie made a face. “Peanut butter on a bagel?”

“Yes?”

“Who are you, Mara Dyer?”

I ignored him. “And what exactly is your big plan, then?” I said to my brother before taking a too-big bite of my peanut buttered bagel. “Are you going to bum-rush him at the podium?”

“I’m going to go to the lecture and then follow him. I want to know where he’s staying, where he lives, everything about him.”

“And then, after your Scooby-Doo mission is complete?”

“Then I’ll force him to tell me how to fix you,” Daniel said.

His words brought me up short. I’d wanted that, once upon a time. To be fixed. To be saved. I’d begged Noah to do it. He couldn’t, he’d said, because I wasn’t broken.

I turned to Stella, who had been noticeably quiet during this entire conversation. “Stella? What say you?”

“I want to see him,” she said firmly. “I want him to fix me, too.”

Hmm. Back to Daniel. “How do you think you’re going to be able to force Lukumi to do anything? He holds all the cards.”

“If he’s really behind all of this, then he has gone to great lengths to keep his identity a secret. We’ll threaten to splash his face, his name—”

“His fake name,” I corrected him.

“Everywhere,” Daniel continued. “We’ll publish all of this.” He swept his arm around the kitchen island, where stacks of files and notebooks were piled high. “What happened to you, what was done to you, what he was responsible for—and then he won’t be able to hide anymore. I’ll need to snap a picture of him at the podium and match it up to something else. I haven’t been able to find any of him online anywhere.”

“There’s that photo from McCarthy’s office,” Jamie said, whipping out his phone.

Daniel looked confused. “Let me see?”

Jamie handed him the phone.

“Wait, that’s him?” Daniel asked. “He looks familiar.”

Goose bumps rose on my arms.

“I can’t place him, but I feel like I’ve seen him before.”

Maybe you have, I almost said.

Daniel shook his head as if to clear it. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that we have to follow him, find out as much as we can about him so we can find out who he really is—his real name, his real identity, so we can connect him to all of this, so you can have a normal life,” Daniel said to me.

In fact, almost everything he had said was to me. For me. I was the one who needed Lukumi more than anyone else in that room. I was the only one of us who wasn’t innocent.

“What do you think he’s hiding from?” Jamie asked quietly, but no one answered. None of us could guess.

“We’re going to have to talk to a lawyer,” my brother said, head cocked to the side. “You know that, right?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but he was right.

“The things you’ve—” He stopped himself before continuing. “The things that have happened to you, and what happened at Horizons—we need to get them out in the open, deal with them, make sure we can establish that you were tortured, that it was self-defense—”

Not always. But I bit my tongue.

“And then, once he tells us how to fix you guys, we’ll go public anyway.”

“Stop saying that,” Jamie said.

The three of us turned to him.

“Stop saying that we have to be fixed. I like who I am. I don’t think I need to fix anything. I’m not broken.” Jamie left the room.

Daniel leaned his elbows on the table and rubbed his face. “You knew what I meant, right, Mara?”

I did. But Jamie had voiced what I hadn’t been able to put into words until then, what the slight sting of shame kept me from saying out loud.

I didn’t think I needed to be fixed either. I liked who I was becoming too.





45


TO DIFFUSE THE TENSION, DANIEL suggested we take a break before the lecture. We were tired and cranky and confused, and we’d been trapped in the house for too long. Daniel wanted to keep reading, though, so he stayed home, leaving Stella, Jamie, and me to our own devices. Which to Jamie meant buying food.

Without a car, and with our agreement not to order out, we ended up having to take the train to a Whole Foods (Jamie insisted), which meant lugging bags of groceries with us on the way back. The platform was weirdly empty, except for a couple of preppily dressed guys urinating on a heap of what looked like rags. Stella and I were debating the artistic merits of graffiti (my opinion, art; hers, vandalism), but I digressed for a moment to loudly inform the guys of their disgustingness. They didn’t say anything back. Not even when Jamie called out to them. It was only then that I noticed that the heap was actually a person.

Jamie spoke first. “What in the ever-loving f*ck do you think you’re doing?” He was already marching toward them.

I was close at his heels, and Stella brought up the rear. We could see the person, the woman, huddled against the wall, her small, pathetic collection of things strewn around her like trash. She was older and her face was dirty, and she was awake. Part of me hoped she’d be unconscious so she wouldn’t ever have to know what was being done to her, but one look at her face told me she did know. And she was ashamed.