The Last Flight(8)

It’s a complicated grief, not just the loss of my name and identity, but also the life I once hoped I’d have. The death of any dream deserves to be mourned, all its intricate facets touched one last time.

I pass through the living room with its large windows that look down onto Fifth Avenue, glancing at the door that leads to Danielle’s office, and wonder what she’ll think when I go. If she’ll be blamed somehow, for failing to keep track of me. Or if she’ll feel bad that she didn’t do more to help me when she had the chance.

I head down the narrow hall that leads to my office, a small room dominated by a heavy mahogany desk and a Turkish rug that probably costs more than what my mother’s Pennsylvania house was worth. I look forward to creating a home with furniture that isn’t worth six figures. I want color on the walls and plants I have to remember to water. I want mismatched plates, and glasses that don’t require a complicated reordering process to replace if they break.

I glance over my shoulder, as if I expect someone to catch me in my own office in the middle of the night, reading my thoughts, knowing what I’m about to do. I listen hard, the silence a loud rush in my ears, straining to hear the hint of footsteps two floors above me. But the doorway remains empty, and the only sound is the pounding of my heart.

From my top desk drawer, I pull out the small thumb drive I used before Rory insisted everyone work in shared docs. My gaze catches on a photograph of my mother and my sister, Violet, hanging on the wall. It was taken before I left for college, before I met Rory and changed the trajectory of my life.

“We’re going on a picnic,” my mother had announced from the doorway of the kitchen one Saturday afternoon. Violet and I had been on the couch, watching TV. Neither of us wanted to go. We were in the middle of a Twilight Zone marathon. But my mother had insisted. “We don’t have too many weekends left before Claire leaves,” she’d said. Violet had glared at me, still angry that I’d chosen to go to Vassar instead of the local state school. “I want to spend the day outside with my girls.”

Three years later, they were gone.

I’d been on the phone with my mother less than an hour before it had happened. We’d only chatted briefly, but I can still hear her voice across the line, telling me she couldn’t talk, that she and Violet were headed out the door for pizza and she’d call me when they got home. In the years since it happened, I’ve often wondered if they’d still be alive if I had kept her on the phone longer. Or perhaps, if I hadn’t called at all, they might have been through the intersection and gone by the time that drunk driver flew through it.

In my dreams, I find myself there with them, the thump-thump of the windshield wipers, the two of them laughing together in the car, my mother singing along with the radio and Violet begging her to stop. And then a sudden screech of tires, the sound of breaking glass, the crush of metal on metal, the hiss of steam. Then silence.

*

My eyes linger now on the image of Violet, caught mid-laugh, my mother just a blurred figure in the background, and I ache to take it off the wall, to slip it between the layers of clothes in my suitcase and bring it with me, like a talisman. But I can’t. And it nearly destroys my resolve to have to leave it behind.

I tear my gaze from my sister’s smiling face, forever frozen at age eight, with only a few more years ahead of her, and make my way to Rory’s spacious office. Lined with wood paneling topped with bookshelves, his enormous desk dominates the room. His computer sits on top of it, dark and silent, and I walk past it to a section of the bookshelves behind. I pull the red book from its spot and set it down, reaching my hand into the empty space, feeling around for the small button hidden there and pressing it. The paneling that lines the wall below the shelves pops open with a tiny click.

Danielle isn’t the only one who’s been taking notes.

I pull it open and slip Rory’s second laptop from its hiding place. Rory doesn’t keep hard copies of anything. Not receipts. Not personal notes. Not even photographs. Hard copies are too easy to lose track of. Too hard to control, he’d once explained to me. This machine is where everything hides. I don’t know exactly what’s on it, but I don’t need to. No one keeps a secret laptop unless he’s hiding something big. Perhaps there are financial records that outline undoctored foundation accounts or money he’s siphoned off and redirected offshore. If I can get a copy of the hard drive, I’ll be able to leverage it if Rory ever gets too close.

Because despite what I’ve directed him to do in my letter, I have no doubt Rory will go to great lengths to find me. Petra and I discussed the possibility of faking my death. An accident where the body couldn’t be recovered. But Nico had warned us off that plan. “It would be all over the national news, which would make your job harder. Better to make it look like you’ve left him. You’ll get a little bit of attention in the tabloids, but it’ll fade fast.”

As expected, when I open the laptop, I’m asked for a password. And while Rory has all of mine, I don’t know any of his. What I do know, however, is that Rory cannot be troubled by details such as maintaining passwords. That’s a job for Bruce, who keeps them in a small notebook in his desk.

I’ve been watching Bruce for weeks now, my eyes tracking the green notebook as he’d riffle through it, punching in passwords whenever Rory needed them. I arranged flowers on the table just outside Rory’s office or searched through my purse in the doorway, tracking where Bruce kept the notebook during the workday and where it went at night.