Jane put her hand to her throat. The sickness threatened to return. She looked out the window and watched the houses blur by. She thought about Nick because that was the only thing that kept her from breaking down. Jane had to stop questioning him, even if only in her mind. The one thing Nick could not abide was disloyalty. That was the reason for his tests while she was in Berlin—sending Jane to a biker bar near the Bornholmer checkpoint, airmailing her a dime-bag of cocaine to sell to a university student, sending her into the police station to report a stolen bike that had never existed.
Nick had told her at the time that he was helping Jane practice, honing her ability to adapt to dangerous situations. That she could’ve been raped in the bar, arrested for the coke or charged with making a false police report had never occurred to him.
Or maybe it had.
Jane took a deep breath as Andrew steered into another curve. She held onto the strap. She watched him weave in and out of traffic with barely a glance over his shoulder.
Evasive maneuvers.
They had driven repeatedly to San Luis Obispo and back, three or four cars at a time, working on their driving skills. Nick, predictably, had been the best of all of them, but Andrew was a close second. They were both naturally competitive. They both shared a dangerous disregard for life that allowed them to speed and swerve with moral impunity.
Andrew coughed into the crook of his elbow so he wouldn’t have to take his hands off the wheel. They were going deeper into the city. His eyes were trained on the road. In the sunlight, she could see the faint line of a scar along his neck where he’d tried to hang himself. This was three years ago, after he’d taken too many pills but before he’d shot up enough heroin to stop his heart. Jasper had found him hanging in the basement. The rope was thin, a clothesline, really, with a metal wire that had gouged out a slice of Andrew’s skin.
Jane was overwhelmed with a mixture of grief and regret every time she saw the scar. The truth was that, at the time of the attempt, she had hated her brother. Not because Andrew was older or because he teased her about her knobby knees and social awkwardness, but because, for most of his life, Andrew had been a drug addict, and there was nothing he would not do in service of his addiction. Robbing Annette. Fighting with Jasper. Stealing from Martin. Relentlessly dismissing Jane.
Cocaine. Benzodiazepine. Heroin. Speed.
She was twelve years old when it became clear that Andrew was an addict, and like most twelve-year-olds, she only saw his misery through her own lens of deprivation. As she got older, Jane had been forced to accept that the shape of her life would always bend around her brother. To understand that the entire family would forever be held hostage to what Martin called Andrew’s weakness. The arrests, the treatment facilities, the court appearances, the favors called in, the money handed under the table, the political donations—continually sucked away all of her parents’ attention. Jane had never had a normal life, but Andrew took away any hope of a peaceful, sometimes ordinary existence.
By the time she’d turned sixteen, Jane had lost track of the family meetings about Andrew’s problem, the screaming and blame-laying and accusations and beatings and haranguing and hope—that was the worst part of it all—the hope. Maybe this time he’ll quit. Maybe this birthday or Thanksgiving or Christmas he’ll show up sober.
And maybe, just maybe, this concert or performance that was so important to Jane; the first one where she had been allowed to choose her own music, the special one to which she had devoted thousands of hours of practice, would not be overshadowed by another overdose, another suicide attempt, another hospitalization, another family meeting where Martin railed and Jasper glowered and Jane sobbed while Andrew pleaded for more chances and Annette drank herself into a blameless stupor.
Then, suddenly, Nick had gotten Andrew clean.
The arrest on the cocaine possession two years ago had been an eye-opener for both of them, but not in the expected, relentlessly hoped for, way. They had been arrested by an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy, otherwise Martin would have as usual made the charge go away. The Alameda deputy had dealt with too many spoiled rich kids before. He was determined to see the case through the court system. He’d threatened to go to the newspapers if some kind of justice was not meted out.
Which was how Andrew and Nick had ended up living at the Queller Bayside Home, the last group home that Robert Juneau had been kicked out of.
That was where Laura had found Nick. Nick had introduced her to Andrew. Then Nick had formulated a plan, and that plan had finally given Andrew a cause that urgently demanded his sobriety.
The Porsche screeched to a halt. They were outside Nick’s apartment complex, a squat, low building with a wobbly metal railing around the upper-floor balcony. He didn’t live in the best area, but it wasn’t the worst the city had to offer, either. The place was clean. The homeless people were kept at bay. Still, Jane hated that Nick couldn’t live at the Presidio Heights house with the rest of them.
Except that now he could.
Right?
“I’ll go check,” Andrew said. “You stay here.”
Jane opened the car door before Andrew could stop her. A sense of urgency overwhelmed her. All of the doubts she’d had for the last half hour would be wrapped up in Nick’s arms and explained away. The sooner she was with him, the better she would feel.
“Jinx,” Andrew called, trailing behind her. “Jinx, wait up.”
She started to run, tripping over the sidewalk, heading up the rusty metal stairs. Her boots were stiff and hurt her feet but Jane did not care. She could feel that Nick was inside his apartment. That he was waiting. That he might be wondering what had taken them so long, that maybe they no longer cared about him, had lost their faith in him.
She had lost faith. She had doubted him.
She wasn’t a fool. She was a monster.
Jane ran harder. Every step felt like it was taking her farther away. Andrew jogged behind her, calling her name, telling her to slow down, to stop, but Jane could not.
She had let Agent Danberry get into her head. Nick was not a con man or a cultist. He was a survivor. His first memory was of watching his mother screw a police officer, still in uniform, who paid her in heroin. He’d never known his father. A series of pimps had beaten and abused him. He’d attended dozens of schools by the time he hitchhiked across the country to find his grandmother. She’d hated him on sight, woke him up in the middle of the night kicking and screaming at him. He’d been forced into the streets, then lived in a homeless shelter, while he finished school. That Nick had managed to get into Stanford despite all of these hardships proved that he was smarter, more clever, than anybody had ever given him credit for.
Especially Agent Danberry with his missing tooth and cheap suit.
“Jinx,” Andrew called from the other end of the balcony. He was walking slowly because he couldn’t run anymore. She could hear his coughing from thirty feet away.
Jane reached into her purse for the key—not the one she kept on the chain, but the one for emergencies that she kept in the zippered pocket. Her hands were shaking so hard that she dropped the key. She bent down to get it. Sweat covered her palms.