The Last Flight(3)
It didn’t take long for Petra to also see what I was hiding. “You need to leave him, you know,” she’d said one afternoon, several months after we’d first met. She was looking at a bruise on my upper left arm, the remnant of an argument Rory and I’d had two nights earlier. Despite my efforts to hide the evidence—a towel pulled higher around my chest, hung around my neck, or draped across my shoulders—Petra had silently watched the progression of Rory’s rage across my skin. “That’s not the first one of those I’ve seen on you.”
I covered the bruise with my towel, not wanting her pity. “I tried to, once. About five years ago.” I’d believed it was possible to leave my marriage. I’d prepared myself for a fight, knowing it would be messy and expensive, but I’d use his abuse as leverage. Give me what I want and I’ll stay silent about the kind of man you are.
But it hadn’t happened that way at all. “Turns out, the woman I’d confided in, who’d tried to help me, was married to an old fraternity brother of Rory’s. And when Rory showed up, her husband opened the door and let him in, old boy-ing himself right alongside Rory, secret handshake and all. Rory told them I was struggling with depression, working with a psychiatrist, and that maybe it was time for something inpatient.”
“He was going to have you committed?”
“He was letting me know that things could get a lot worse.” I didn’t tell Petra the rest. Like how, when we’d gotten home, he’d shoved me so hard into the marble counter in our kitchen, I’d cracked two ribs. Your selfishness astonishes me. That you’d be willing to destroy all I’ve worked to build—my mother’s legacy—because we argue. All couples argue, Claire. He’d gestured around the room, to the high-end appliances, the expensive countertops, and said, Look around you. What more could you possibly want? No one is going to feel sorry for you. No one will even believe you.
Which was true. People wanted Rory to be who they thought he was—the charismatic son of the progressive and beloved Senator Marjorie Cook. I could never tell anyone what he did to me, because no matter what I’d say or how loudly I’d say it, my words would be buried beneath the love everyone felt for Marjorie Cook’s only child.
“People will never see what I see,” I finally said.
“You really believe that?”
“Do you think if Carolyn Bessette came forward accusing JFK Junior of hitting her, the country would have rushed to support her?”
Petra’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? This is the #MeToo era. I think people would be falling all over themselves to believe her. They’d probably create new Fox and CNN shows just to talk about it.”
I gave a hollow laugh. “In a perfect world, I’d hold Rory accountable. But I don’t have it in me to take on a fight like that. One that would go on for years, that would seep into every corner of my life and tarnish anything good that might come afterward. I just want to be free of it. Of him.”
To speak out against Rory would be like stepping into an abyss and trusting that I’d be caught by the generosity and kindness of others. And I’d lived too many years with people happily watching me free fall if it meant they could be close to Rory. In this world, money and power were equivalent to immunity.
I took a long breath and felt the steam reach down into my deepest corners. “If I left him, I’d have to do it in a way where he could never find me. Look what happened to Maggie Moretti.”
The edges of Petra’s face were blurry through the steam that billowed between us, but I could see her gaze sharpen. “Do you think he had something to do with that?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I answered.
*
Over the next year, Petra and I assembled a plan, choreographing my disappearance more carefully than a ballet. A sequence of events so perfectly timed, there could be no room for error, and now I sit, hours away from executing it. The hiss of steam clouds the air around us, Petra just a faint shadow on the cedar bench next to me. “Did you mail everything this morning?” I ask her.
“FedEx, addressed to you, labeled ‘Personal.’ It should arrive at the hotel first thing tomorrow.”
I couldn’t risk hiding all I’d gathered at my house, where anyone—the maids, or worse, Danielle—might find it. So Petra kept everything—forty thousand dollars of Rory’s money and a brand new identity, thanks to Nico.
“The new government technology is making it harder to make these,” he’d said, the afternoon I’d driven out to see him. We were sitting at his dining room table in his large home on Long Island. He’d grown into a handsome man, with a wife and three kids. And bodyguards—two posted at his gated driveway and another two at his front door. It occurred to me that Rory and Nico were not so different. Each of them the chosen son, pushed to carry the family into the twenty-first century, with new rules and regulations. Both expected to do more than the last generation—or at the very least, not lose everything.
Nico slid a fat envelope toward me, and I opened it, pulling out a pristine Michigan driver’s license and a passport with my face and the name Amanda Burns. I flipped through the rest—a social security card, a birth certificate, and a credit card.
“You’ll be able to do anything with these,” Nico said, picking up the driver’s license and tilting it under the light so I could see the hologram embossed on the surface. “Vote. Pay taxes. Fill out a W-2 form. This is high-level stuff, and my guy is the best. There’s only one other person who can make a full package this good, and he lives in Miami.” Nico handed me the credit card—a Citibank account with my new name on it. “Petra opened this last week, and the statements will be sent to her address. When you get settled, you can change it. Or toss this card and open a new one. Just be careful. You don’t want someone to steal your identity.”