“If you tell me, I’ll know what I owe,” I interrupt.
That makes her straighten. “I’m going to say this once: You owe me nothing. I chose to seek you out when you were little. I chose to get you free of her. I chose to be your sister. That was all me. There is nothing owed. You and I are on even ground. Always.”
“I don’t know how to be on even ground.” My confession, when it comes, is just as quiet as hers, but it’s so shameful. I am so ashamed. Tears well in my eyes, and am I a monster, that this is where I cry? Not before?
The bathroom light outlines her profile, stark bones against the golden glow. We are both so tired, and there is so much still to do. There is so far to flee. But I have to know.
If she wants us on even ground, I need to know what she did for me. What my existence did to her.
So I’m honest for once and tell her that. And in turn, she is honest with me.
“I didn’t find out about you until you were three,” she says. “When I ran from Mom, I was determined to never come back. I ended up in LA. Disappeared into the sprawl. I worried that if I started running cons, it might get back to her somehow. So I went legit. Worked for a PI. Got my own license. I resisted looking for her for a long time, but when I finally did . . . that’s how I found out about you.”
“But you didn’t come to see me until I was six.”
“I didn’t want to come at all,” she says, and she can’t look at me while she says it. Honesty at its most brutal. This is what I asked for. “For years, I told myself that you weren’t my business. I knew if I went back, she’d just use you to pull me in.”
“What changed your mind?”
“You were turning six,” she says. “I was six when—” Her fingers shake as they press against her lips, like she’s trying to keep the words inside. “I couldn’t leave you. I had to try to get you away from her. So I made a plan.”
“You came to see me.”
Her fingers are still pressed against her mouth, but her lips spread, an almost-smile for the tips of her to remember. “You were so funny and smart already. But you were wary. And the second I saw that rubber band on your wrist . . .” She shakes her head.
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 . . .”