Wherever She Goes(39)

“You really need to work on your suburban-mommy librarian routine, you know that?”

“It’s not a routine. I am a librarian. I am a mother. I live in the suburbs.”

Another shake of her head. “Get down. Put your shoes on. We need to talk.”

“If you’re arresting me—”

“This isn’t how I arrest people, Aubrey. We’re going for coffee. Now come on.”





Chapter Twenty-One





We’re in the coffee shop. Jackson pulls out her chair and sits. “So, Aubrey Stapleton . . .”

I say nothing. This hammer has been poised over my head for ten years now. The laws of probability say it will fall at some point.

The statute of limitations has passed on my crimes. That no longer matters. The problem is that I have a daughter, and if I am discovered, I will lose her. That is a fate worse than jail.

It’s also a fate I’ve earned.

I can argue the whole “robbed from the rich and gave to the poor” thing, but I’m not Robin Hood. I can say I was only a kid. But I knew what I was doing.

Now my past has caught me. If I’m calm about it, that isn’t indifference. I’m dying inside, numb and exhausted. Officer Jackson sits there, smiling like the proverbial cat that caught the canary, and I feel no urge to wipe that smirk off her face. This isn’t about her.

“Aubrey Stapleton,” she repeats. “Mother died in an accident when you were two. Dad when you were eighteen. PTSD.”

She doesn’t say suicide, and I’ll grant her a point for that. PTSD is what killed my father. A life spent in service without the resources to help him deal with that. Without the resources to let him know it was okay to need to deal with that.

“You dropped out of college when he died. Dropped out of MIT, where you were in the top ten percent of your computer engineering class.”

She’s done her homework, and she’s proud of it. Fine. Let her show off and get this over with.

She continues, “You rattled around for a bit after that with part-time jobs. Then you disappeared. Took off and dropped out. Stopped using your name.”

“I used Minor. That’s my mother’s maiden name, and it’s my second middle name. As long as I paid my taxes, I wasn’t breaking any laws.”

“By paying your taxes under a false name? I think the IRS would have something to say about that.”

Yes, what I did isn’t exactly legal, but I suspect the IRS’s biggest concern is that they got their money, and I was meticulous about that.

“You married under a false—” she begins.

“No, I didn’t. On the marriage license, I’m Aubrey Rose Minor. On my birth certificate, I’m Aubrey Rose Minor Stapleton.”

She gives me a hard look, and my gut flip-flops. I’ve always told myself that what I did wouldn’t negate my marriage. But did I ever investigate that to be one hundred percent sure? No, I didn’t.

“I’m not asking for alimony or even an equal distribution of marital assets,” I say. “I didn’t deceive my husband.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

I realize then that she’s skipped something. Something vital. The part that I expected to be at the heart of her accusation.

My criminal past.

She’s saving it for last. The sucker punch. Go on, Officer Jackson. Just get it over with.

“I saw you on that fence,” she says. “You’re no suburban-mommy librarian.”

I tense but force a calm response. “Yes, I am. That’s who I’ve chosen to be, like you’ve chosen to be a police officer. I may have been faking a few things, but not my job, not my daughter. And there’d be a lot of suburbanites and mothers and librarians who wouldn’t appreciate you suggesting that they can’t climb a fence.”

“Vault onto a fence. In a dress and heels.”

“In heels? That’d be crazy. I took those off.”

She leans over the table. “You can leap that fence because your dad was a career soldier. You planned to join the army. You stay in shape as if you’re still planning to.”

“I stay in shape because I need to keep up with a three-year-old.”

I get a small smile for that, and she eases back in her seat.

“The point is that you’re in excellent shape, with skills that the average suburb—person doesn’t have. Then there’s the tech. You have a gift. One most people would take full advantage of. And you don’t.”

“That’s my choice.”

“Is it? I don’t know what happened after your dad died. I can understand you deciding not to go into the army after that. As for the tech stuff, maybe you quit out of misplaced guilt, because you were in college when he died. I’m not going to play amateur shrink here. You have physical and technological skills that you choose not to use, having reinvented yourself for whatever reason, which is none of my business. My business is how you’re using those skills now.”

My mouth opens. Then it shuts, as I realize what she’s said. That she doesn’t know why I cut ties with my old life. She suspects it’s my father’s suicide, and that’s good enough for her.

She has no idea what I did after his death.

And she doesn’t seem to care.