Page 56 of Every Step She Takes
I head into the drugstore and purchase hair dye and a cheap prepaid cell. Then I find a quiet spot, turn on my new phone and punch in…
I don’t know Marco’s number. I always just hit his contact info on my phone.
I pull out my cell, my heart pounding.
There, he’s still in my contacts. I exhale and dial. It rings. Rings. Rings again. It’s a strange number, and he’ll think it’s spam.
His voice message comes on in rapid-fire Italian, followed by English.
“Hey, it’s Marco. As you probably know, I’m terrible at checking voice mail. Text me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
There’s no beep. Marco isn’t going to warn people against leaving messages and then let them do exactly that. I knew this – I just forgot because, well, we always text.
I start a text… and then pause. A voicemail message can be erased, but if the police connect me to Marco and subpoena his phone records, they’ll get his texts. If I’m on the run, I’m sure as hell not making him an accessory.
I try calling his number again in case his curiosity is piqued and he answers. He does not.
What I’ve done is an unforgivable breach of trust. I screwed up the moment that parcel arrived and I pretended not to know who Lucy Callahan was. I could have fixed it then. Could have fixed it at any point thereafter. Now, though, it’s too late.
I send up a silent apology to Marco with the promise of a full explanation, and I pray it’s not too late for that.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Before the Colt Gordon scandal, the worst thing that ever happened to me was Dad’s death. Mom came to get me from my kindergarten class, and then I sat in my bedroom, waiting for the phone call that would tell us it was all a mistake. How could he be killed by a drunk driver in the middle of the day? The answer was three-martini lunches, but I’d been five years old, and confident in my knowledge of the world, which stated that adults drank after dark. I only had to wait for him to come home and set this whole misunderstanding straight.
Dad did not come home.
That mistake didn’t keep me from doing the exact same thing post-scandal. Mom found me with Nylah in my dorm room, holed up, waiting for the world to realize it had made a mistake.
I will not do that again. While I’m certainly hoping the police will realize they’ve made a mistake, Idoplan to hole up in a hotel room, but only so I have a quiet place to dig for answers.
I dye my hair in a single-occupant bathroom. Then I take the subway to a part of Queens that Nylah and I accidentally ended up in during our first week at Juilliard. I remember her joking about the rooming houses that rent by the hour, week or month. I find one of those places and walk in. A middle-aged woman sits at the desk, her eyes glued to Netflix.
When she asks for a credit card, I say, nervously, “My, uh, husband holds on to it. For safekeeping. I forgot to get it from him.”
Her gaze flicks to my face and then my arms. She’s looking for track marks, signs that I might be a difficult guest. Then she takes in my dark sunglasses and nods, accepting my story. Not the part about forgetting my credit card. That nod says she understands an older story, one that says I’m running away from the kind of husband who doesn’t let his wife have her own credit cards.
“Can I pay cash?” I ask. “I’ll only be here a few days. My sister’s coming from Idaho to get me.”
She quotes me a weekly rate, and I pay it. Then I retreat to my new room and take out Isabella’s phone.
In the twenty-four hours before her death, Isabella had no fewer than a dozen text conversations. Most of them are business. She’d been texting with cowriters and others involved in a production. Two more seem to be friends. The “Hey, I’m in NYC for a few days. Lunch?” type of message.
There’s one from Karla, who knows about Isabella’s plan with me. She approves, while warning that Isabella needs to remember I have a new life, and she should do nothing to jeopardize that. My heart lifts a little reading that. Karla understood, and if Isabella had lived, Karla might have proved a valuable ally in my fight for privacy.
Could she be an ally now? No. Colt is still her client, and we are right back where we were fourteen years ago. Even if Karla didn’t think I killed Isabella, her priority is the family.
Isabella’s shortest text conversation is with Jamison. It’s a simple “Call me” from her to him, sent at 8:03 last night. When I flip back in the thread, there’s a lot of “Call me” and “Just checking in!” from Isabella with a one-or-two-word response from Jamison. Not unlike my mom when I’d been away at Juilliard, a parent nudging her busy child for a call.
A quick check of her phone logs shows he did call after receiving that nudge, and they’d talked for half an hour.
By contrast, the longest text thread is from her other child. Tiana lives in New York. When she learned Isabella was coming, she offered her the spare room with a joke that she was the only twenty-four-year-old Manhattanite with a spare bedroom.
My heart aches, seeing those texts and recognizing the girl I’d known. It hurts worse, realizing she’d spit nails if she knew I was reading her private correspondence with her mother. And I wouldn’t blame her one bit.
I shouldn’t read these texts, but I cannot help it. A story unfolds here. A story I love. A different mother-daughter relationship that is as good as my own. This is mother and daughter as adult friends who flit in and out of each other’s lives, grabbing cocktails and, I’m sure, talking deep into the night as we all had in that massive bed in the penthouse suite.
The suite where Isabella died last night.
