Shame swooped through me and I unlocked my phone to reply.
And then I paused. A commercial on the TV was blaring, an annoying jingle about the best wireless network.
Get away. It had been echoing in my head all evening. And yet I was about to engage, knee-jerk, and start the cycle all over again.
I set my phone back on the table. Picked up the remote next to it, cranked up the volume, and settled into the soft sofa behind me.
* * *
—
Aaron texted as soon as I stopped thinking about him: “Wen can cover for me. LET’S DO IT.” Several celebratory emojis, confetti and champagne. I closed my eyes and grinned, pulled the phone against my heart. Thank God.
But as I opened the booking site, doubts crept in. I’d have to pretend to be normal—not just normal, excited—twenty-four hours a day, as Aaron and I wandered the reddish streets and watched the sun dip over distant mountains and ate meals together, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He texted me his birthday so that I could book our flights: God, I don’t even know his birthday yet. Would we travel well together—would he find me gross? What if I got hangry or sick or snappish or stressed? What if we got into a huge fight?
A fight. With Aaron. In our own oasis, a jumble of glass and steel in the middle of the sunbaked desert.
And then a new thought padded in, as sly and unassuming as a cat.
Is Aaron safe with me?
* * *
—
I woke to a string of texts from Kristen （“Can we talk?” “I really think we need to talk.” “Are you ignoring me?”） and muted the conversation before I even got out of bed. As I neared my desk after a meeting, I saw that my phone was ringing. I was about to snatch up the handset when I realized it was Kristen, one of the few numbers I knew by heart. I jabbed around in the phone’s settings until I found the Do Not Disturb function.
“It’s been ringing off the hook for the last hour,” the designer kitty-corner from me announced.
“Sorry about that.” My stomach tightened like a fist.
I was vacant-eyed in meetings, quietly replaying Sebastian’s final moments: Was that Kristen’s foot bashing into his ribs, or mine? If it was the former, why could I see it so clearly, feel the heavy thump of my toes meeting his flesh? Toward the end of the day, as I passed the floor-to-ceiling windows, an eerie feeling washed over me. I swiveled my gaze to Rogers Street below. Kristen would be out there, I knew it—facing the window, hands in her pockets, solemn and staring and still. The shot in a horror movie stamped with a sudden, dissonant chord.
I scanned the sidewalk through the budded boughs of trees, over the fruit-tree petals stippling the cement. There was a teenager, an old man with a cane, a frazzled-looking woman with a baby strapped to her bosom.
I turned and hurried on. Kristen wasn’t there.
* * *
—
On the drive home from work, my heart pounded at every red light. She’d stopped calling and texting around two, and this was worse, the sudden silence so loud it sizzled against my eardrums. I held my breath as I turned the last corner onto my street, braced to see Kristen out front.
But there was stillness, empty space. Even the birds closed their beaks as I let myself in, locking the door behind me. I was partway through yanking down the blinds when I started to laugh. Here I was, cowering in my own home like Kevin freaking McCallister in fear of my supposed best friend. The friend with whom I’d just spent four days in a remote cabin in the woods. Look what’s become of you.
Then I got a text from Kristen, the first in almost four hours.
My rib cage locked up and my fist flew to my mouth. Bad. This was very, very bad.
It was a screenshot of the tip line for the South African Police Service. Her caption: “Don’t think I won’t turn over that photo.”
CHAPTER 32
I called Kristen immediately, head pounding, jaw juddering like a jackhammer. The first ring cut out after a moment, and then we were both on the line, breathing at each other.
“So that got your attention,” she said.
The lies dripped out of me before I even had time to think—excuses, placations, supplications to please please please not be so mad at me. Natural as slipping out of a foreign language and into my mother tongue. “I’m sorry I missed your calls, it was so busy at work today, and I wanted some time to really think about what I wanted to say—”
“Just stop.” Her voice cracked. “Do you have any idea how awful I’ve felt for the past twenty-four hours? How deeply you hurt me?”
A javelin of guilt went through me, followed by a groundswell of indignation. My Achilles’ heel, the chink in my armor, the soft belly that made me curl up like a pill bug: You hurt me. Over and over, Kristen found it, exploited it, wielded it like a weapon. Like a bottle of Carménère wine, held aloft.
“Kristen, look,” I said softly. “I’m sorry I hurt you. But the photo of me and Sebastian—”
“We really need to talk.” Her voice was a machete, slicing off my words. “Can you come over?”
“What?” My chest tightened. “We’re talking now.”
“You know what I mean. In person.”
“We’re talking right now,” I said again. “I have a lot to do tonight. I’m going out of town tomorrow and I need to pack. I don’t see why either of us should drive twenty miles—”
“Because I don’t think this is a conversation we should have on the phone.” She didn’t quite clear her throat, but the ahem was implied.
I slammed my hand onto the couch cushion. Had Kristen always been this paranoid? Her insistence on squeaky-clean search histories and turned-off phones had always seemed sage—and in stark contrast to her cheerful chatter about our travels. The Instagrams she showed Priya, the easy patter with Aaron. She was the one acting brazen, like she wanted to get caught.
Now she sounded like a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, quivering under a space blanket and tinfoil hat.
“No one is listening, Kristen. No one is freaking tapping the phones of a couple of thirty-year-old white girls in southeastern Wisconsin.”
She scoffed. “What, you think I’m crazy? Do you think your phone just happens to only be listening when you say ‘Hey, Siri’？ That it couldn’t hear every single word that came before?” Her voice had a quivering intensity, like a hunting bow pulled taut. “Or, or do you think it’s a coincidence that after someone mentions, like, a museum during a phone call, you start seeing ads for it? Think about it, Emily. Don’t be stupid.”
She had a point, but still I rolled my eyes. “Well, you sound pretty damn sketchy right now. If they weren’t listening before, they sure as hell are now.”
“Stop. This is serious. Just stop, please.”
Stop. Stop. Stop. I wished I could set up something like a police lineup, have her read the line in a hysterical pitch. Had it been her larynx vibrating that night, or mine? The thought rammed me in the gut and I curled over it, my palm on my stomach.
“Come over,” she pleaded, “or I’ll come to you. I don’t want to send the photo, but…you’re not leaving me much choice.”
“That’s how you want to handle this?” I said. “That’s the kind of friendship you wanna have?”