What Have We Done (26)

“You’re not gonna, like, tell Dad about me skipping and, uh, drinking at the 7-Eleven?”

Teenagers. After everything that’s happened tonight, she’s worried she’ll get grounded.

“I think it can wait, don’t you?” Jenna will tell Simon when the time is right. She won’t lie to him. He deserves to know. Not tonight, though.

Out of nowhere, a silhouette appears from the side of the house. Simon, carrying a shotgun. He leans the gun carefully against the cabin and scoops his older daughter in his arms as she races into his embrace.

He whispers something to her; she nods, hugs him again, and goes inside. Jenna feels her heart shatter a fragment when Willow doesn’t say goodbye.

Jenna approaches. The sky out here is so clear, the stars brighter. In the half-light, Simon looks tired, like he’s aged ten years in a single day. She swears there’s more gray hair.

“I’m so sorry,” Jenna says.

Simon doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Finally: “I thought you said you were done? That they said you were out. Free.”

She doesn’t like the accusation in his tone. “I told you everything.”

He thinks about this. It was never real before, she understands now. Sure, Simon believed what Jenna had told him about her past. He understood that she’d worked for a shadow outfit that did contract work for the government. But it was an abstraction. A construct that seemed more out of a spy

movie or thriller novel, too farfetched to ever happen.

But that was before he saw the fear in his daughter’s eyes. Before he’d had to slink away and hide like a fugitive. Before he truly understood that Jenna has done awful things that could come back to haunt her.

“What now?” Simon asks.

Jenna almost smiles. The taxman always wants a plan.

“I go figure out who’s behind this.”

“And when you do?”

Then I kill them. Each and every one of them.

“Then I try to get our lives back.”

He looks at her skeptically but doesn’t say that he knows that will never happen.

“If anyone comes, you go to the safe room.” They built a hidden panic room on the main floor.

The entrance is a secret panel in the back of the kitchen pantry that leads to a room armored with Kevlar panels.

Simon nods.

“I’ll call when it’s safe.” The cabin has no internet, but the burner phone is untraceable. As long as no one used it to call any line connected in any way to Jenna.

Simon nods again.

“And if I don’t hear from you?”

“You will.”

“But if I don’t?”

Jenna tilts her head to the side. “Then go to the FBI and give them this.” She puts the manila envelope in his hand. The insurance policy she created when she got out of The Corporation, long buried in that lockbox. “And make clear that you had no idea until today when I told you.”

She goes inside, finds Lulu sleeping in her room, decides not to wake her. She leans over and kisses her on the head. She stops by Willow’s room to say goodbye, but the door is shut. She puts her hand on the door but turns and leaves.

Downstairs, Simon hands her a travel cup of coffee for the road. He gestures to the Glock on the kitchen table.

“You keep it,” Jenna says. She has the gun from the lockbox. It’s all she needs.

At the doorway, she looks at him and says, “I love you.”

For the first time in their marriage, Simon breaks Jenna in two when he says nothing in response.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE TWINS

“He’s pissed,” Casey says into the phone. She’s ditched the Camaro and is driving a stolen Nissan on I-95.

“Expected,” Haley says. “And, I mean, he’s got a point.”

Casey laughs. Mocking their client’s voice, she says, “He was like, Dumping a guy in the ocean? Blowing up a coal mine? I know I said make it look like accidents, but haven’t you ever heard of a car accident or drug overdose? ”

Haley laughs too. “Wait till he finds out about you using that cattle killer on those douchebags at the 7-Eleven.”

They have always been on the same page, Casey and Haley. They met in college. On Casey’s first day on campus, people kept waving at her, saying hey, like they knew her. This is the fucking friendliest place on earth, she concluded.

Then, a girl in a sorority shirt came up and hugged her, referring to her as Haley, not Casey.

Casey had shoved the girl away. “My name isn’t Haley.”

After a few minutes of convincing, the sorority girl pulled out her phone, took a picture of Casey, sent a text. Pings came back and she shook her head. “Are you adopted?” she asked. Casey didn’t answer but didn’t need to. “You need to come with me.”

That’s how she met Haley, who’d come to campus and rushed a sorority before the other freshmen. Looking at Haley was like looking into a mirror. Except that Haley hadn’t been adopted by a poor couple on a farm in Adair, Nebraska, but instead by a hedge-fund manager in Greenwich, Connecticut. They were identical twins except Haley’s lowlights were expensive, her clothes designer, her teeth straighter.

Turns out they both love horror movies, both eat too much candy (both favoring Mike and Ikes), both scored 1545 on the SAT, and both applied to a small liberal-arts college in Vermont, mostly for the skiing. And they learned that the similarities didn’t stop there. After a night of drinking—both being partial to gin—Haley confessed that she had an empty hole inside her that made her care about no one but herself, that she’d been disciplined in school for hurting other kids, that she liked doing it.