The Girls I've Been(55)

That was one of Mom’s tricks, to keep me from messing up. She’d snap it against my skin. I’ll forever associate some things with the sting and the faint smell of rubber.

“I wanted to take you right then. But I knew she’d never stop searching for you. She doesn’t know how to run a con without a daughter. She needs a partner.”

“She gets lonely.” It’s automatic, the defense of her, even now.

“It’s not our job to fill that in her,” Amelia says.

“You sound like a shrink.”

“Probably because I go to one,” she says. “And so will you, when we’re safe and home.”

All three of those things are unfathomable: safety, therapy, and home. I want to argue, but she says, “Do you want me to finish?”

I do, so I nod.

“When I left that first time, I knew I had to find a way to make it so that once I had you with me, Mom couldn’t get to you ever again. I either had to kill her or put her in prison. And since I didn’t want to add matricide to my list of crimes, I chose the latter. Which meant I needed two things: I needed you to actually want to leave, and I needed an FBI agent in my pocket for the moment that happened.”

“Agent North.”

Amelia nods. “I knew it was going to be a long con. That it would take time to get you on my side. But I started working on North right away. She had a big case, and one of the witnesses was in the wind. So I tracked him down and brought him in. We became friends.”

“Friends or friends?”

“Friends,” she says, but I don’t think I believe her. “I’d pass her tips sometimes.”

“You put Abby on her radar,” I say.

“The FBI already knew about Abby, but North is ambitious. And a con woman who’s tangled up with all sorts of other criminal power because of the men she targets is a big get. If they managed to bring in Abby, think of all the marks she’s had through the years. Think of all the dirt she’s dug up. If she turned snitch, she’d be a gold mine.”

“Did she know that you were Abby’s kid?”

“Not until Washington.”

“You played her for four whole years?”

She nods. “It blew up after that. She found out everything. And by then . . .”

“You were together,” I fill in when it’s clear she won’t. I understand why she can’t. She broke the number one rule.

She fell for the mark. I want to reach out and stroke her arm, but I’m afraid that it’ll be clumsy. That it might be unwelcome.

“I couldn’t find you after you and Abby left Washington. When you finally popped up, I was just going to go to Florida and take you. Fuck the plan; I’d worry about her chasing us later. But then I saw the marriage license.”

“Agent North couldn’t ignore you if you gave her Raymond Keane,” I say, understanding now.

“So the plan was back on. And now we’re here.”

“I fucked it up.”

“You managed,” she says. “That’s what matters. And in a few hours, we’ll be gone.”

“He’ll look for me.”

“We have a head start. He has to be on good behavior through the trial. Once he’s put away, it’ll take him a while to gather power. They’ll assume you’re in witness protection. Whoever he hires to come after you will focus on that angle first. We have time.”

“To do what? Hide better?”

“To make backup plans. To prepare. And to live. That’s what this is all about.”

“You want me to live like a normal person.” I shake my head. “Agent North is right. I’m not normal.”

“There is no normal,” Amelia says. “There’s just a bunch of people pretending there is. There’s just different levels of pain. Different stages of safe. The biggest con of all is that there’s a normal. What I want for you is happiness and safety. That’s what I want for myself, too.”

“Were you happy with Agent North?”

When she doesn’t answer, I press further.

“Did you love her?”

Still no answer.

“Because she was kind of mean,” I add.

“What I did to her was more than mean,” Amelia says.

“So you did love her.” I pause. “Do love her?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, all the answer I need. I really am just a tidal wave, destroying everything in my wake.

“I’m sorry.”

She reaches out again to squeeze my hand. This is something she does, I realize. Touch people genuinely. Can I tell her that I’m not used to it? That it makes me jump inside my skin almost as much as it comforts me?

“Everything that I’ve done is worth it to have you here safe with me,” she says. “And now you get to have a brand-new life.”

“Where?”

“California,” she says. “Way up north.” She squeezes my hand again. “It’s a little town called Clear Creek.”

“And you?” I ask. She looks quizzically at me. “What are you called?”

It’s like the air sharpens around us, and her entire body tenses and then releases just as quickly. An ingrained response that we both have. Amelia was her touchstone, the real girl no one but the Deveraux women know. She conned Mom into thinking she was still Amelia, but she’s become someone else, truly and fully.