“So she just walked in the door one day?” Con asked.
Stephie laughed. “Pretty much. I was working the counter, and she strolled in like she’d been coming in every day for years. Said she’d married a guy in Richmond and wanted to make things right with us.”
That sounded like her old self—straightforward and direct. She missed that version of Con D’Arcy. “When was that exactly?”
Stephie thought it over. “A year, give or take.”
“And she was really over Zhi?” Con said, standing and putting the guitar back in its case.
“No,” Stephie said simply. “But I think she was starting to make her peace with knowing she’d never really get over it. Zhi had passed that New Year’s Eve, and she’d only met Levi a few days earlier. She talked about being in this moment when her grief was telling her that she had no right to be happy. How close she’d come to picking some stupid fight as an excuse to blow it up before it even got started. We talked a lot about that—whether we were allowed to move on. I know I don’t ever want to forget Hugh. He’s a part of me, part of this amazing time in my life. But he’s a part of my past. Elena is my future. I think Hugh would have liked her.”
“Do you have any idea why my original wouldn’t tell her husband she was coming here?”
“She needed to finish this music, but I think she felt guilty about it too. I’m a part of her old life. A connection to Zhi. I know she loved her husband, but everything was his, you know? His house. His stuff. His friends. They didn’t start a life together so much as she joined his life already in progress. I think that was partly why she reached out to me—to reconnect with something that was just hers.”
“Thank you for helping her,” Con said. “How did she seem to you at the end?”
“Couldn’t begin to tell you. We haven’t seen her since she stopped coming around six months ago, but she was sure as hell strange that last day.”
“Six months?” But the police had found her car in Charlottesville after her original went missing, and GPS records showed her making regular visits in the last few months. If she’d stopped visiting Stephie, then why had she kept coming? “Police think her husband killed her because she was having an affair with someone in Charlottesville.”
“Here? No way. When she was here, we worked.” Stephie thought back. “But that last day, she was anxious about something. She’d been traveling with her husband, so I was looking forward to getting back to work. Right away, I knew something was wrong.”
“Wrong how?” Con asked.
“Just wrong. She felt off to me. Remote. Said she’d gotten involved with something and couldn’t come around anymore. I tried to get her to tell me, but she said it wasn’t safe. Asked me to respect her wishes and not to contact her. It hurt; I’m not going to lie. We’d just reconciled, and then she was gone again. She was scared to death.”
“How could you tell?”
Stephie pointed to the guitar and music. “Because she left those. Asked me to keep an eye on them for her. Just in case, she said. That was when I knew that it was really bad, whatever it was.”
Con agreed. She couldn’t even imagine the circumstances in which she’d willingly part with her guitar. Her original had gone to Laleh Askari for help a few weeks before she died, but if she was already afraid for her life six months ago, that changed the timeline significantly.
“Then she left, and never came back,” Stephie said.
“Yes, she did,” Dahlia said softly.
Stephie and Con turned to see the twelve-year-old leaning in the doorway in her pajamas. They had no idea how long she’d been listening.
“You saw her?” Stephie said. “When?”
“Two weeks ago. It was really weird.”
“How so?”
“She ignored me.”
“Ignored you how?” Stephie asked.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye, so I thought it would be nice, you know? But she walked right by me like she didn’t even know me.”
“Where was this?” Con asked.
“On Water Street,” Dahlia said.
That was where her original always parked her car. Con asked the girl if she saw what direction her original was headed.
“I know more than that. I know where she went. I followed her,” Dahlia said defiantly.
“Followed her where?” Con asked, kneeling in front of the girl.
“I don’t know the address,” Dahlia said.