“It’s hard to imagine what would keep you there,” said one anchorwoman. She wrinkled her brow as if in concern—or tried. “Surely most people in your position would try to get home as quickly as possible.”
“I don’t know that many people in my position,” Anya replied. She reminded herself to smile, because if she didn’t, people asked why she wasso mad. “Captured, held, then released into a royal palace. Maybe I think that having spent so much time in the kingdom, it might be nice to explore it a little.”
And then, on the heels of a morning filled with interviews from all over the world, she marched herself back to her rooms, dug her phone out of her bag, and forced herself to deal with all of her messages and voice mails.
It took hours. But when she was done, she felt both more emotional than she’d anticipated, and less panicky. A good number of the voice mail messages were from an array of journalists, some of whom she’d already spoken to. A few friends had called over the past eight months, claiming they only wanted to hear her voice and letting her know they’d been thinking of her during her ordeal. She took a surprising amount of pleasure in discovering that a bulk of her email was, as always, online catalogs she couldn’t remember shopping from in the first place.
It made her feel as if, no matter what, life went on.
Better still, Anya felt somewhat better about the fact she still hadn’t called her father, because he had neither written nor called her. Not once in all the time she’d been held in the dungeon. And, of course, not before that either, because he hadn’t approved of her wasting her time in an aid organization when she could do something of much greater status and import.
Maybe it told her something about herself—or him—that she felt a bit triumphant when she finally dialed the number of the house she’d grown up in. She knew the number by heart, still, even though the house and the number attached to it hadn’t been hers in a long while. Since long before she’d left it, in fact.
She stood in her elegant suite, looking out the window as yet another desert sky stretched out before her. Impossibly blue to the horizon and beyond. Looking out at so much sky, so much sand, made her feel as if she was just as expansive. As if, should she gather up enough courage, she might run through these windows, out to her terrace, and launch herself straight into the wind. Then fly.
It made her heart ache in a good way.
Anya had never felt that way in the excruciatingly tidy Victorian house on a Seattle hill where her father still lived. More care had been put into the gardens than her feelings. She had grown up guilty. Because she barely recalled her own mother. Because she was forever disturbing her father. Because she didn’t usually like the women he married and presented to her as so much furniture. Because they mostly didn’t care for her, either—and as the window between her age and the current stepmother’s age narrowed, she felt even guiltier at how relieved she was to stop pretending.
She had left for college and had never returned for more than a brief visit over the holidays. She would have said that she barely remembered the place that her father’s cleaners kept so pristine that it was sometimes hard to believe people actually lived there. Even when she’d been one of them.
But she could see it all too clearly, now.
As if all this time away forced her to look at it face on, at last. Not the house itself, but the fact it had never been a home.
The dungeon beneath this palace, hewn of cold, hard stone, had been cozier. Happier, even. She had catapulted herself out of her father’s house as quickly as she could. The urgency to get it behind her—the kind of urgency the anchorwoman thought Anya should feel about Alzalam—had guided her every move after she’d graduated high school. But it wasn’t as if she’d ever made herself a home elsewhere.
She’d been moving from place to place ever since, concentrating on school, then her job, then how much she hated her job. She’d never settled anywhere, she’d only endured wherever she’d found herself.
Until the dungeon had settled on her.
First she’d despaired, as anyone would. Then she’d tried to make someone tell her how long she could expect to be left there. But after the despair and the bargaining, there was only time.
When she’d told Tarek that prison had been a kind of holiday, she’d meant it. Now she had the unsettling realization that it had also felt a whole lot more like a home than any other place she’d ever lived. No expectations. No demands.
Just time.
What was Anya supposed to do with that?
“Oh,” came the breathy voice of her latest stepmother when she picked up the phone. For a moment, Anya couldn’t remember her name. Or more precisely, she remembered a name, but wasn’t sure it was the right one. It had been eight months, after all. “Anya. My goodness. You’ve been all over the news.”
Charisma,Anya thought then, recognizing her voice. That was this stepmother’s name. It was, of course, a deeply ironic name for a creature with all the natural charisma of a signpost. But Charisma was young. Anya’s exact age, if she was remembering right, which said all kinds of things about Dr. Preston Turner that Anya preferred not to think about too closely.
Charisma was not smart, according to Anya’s father. He liked to say this in Charisma’s hearing, and she always proved his hypothesis to his satisfaction by giggling as if that was an endearment. Charisma was blonde in that silky way that seemed to require endless flipping of the straw-colored mass of it over one shoulder, then the other. Her hobbies involved numerous appointments at beauty salons and sitting by the pool in a microscopic bikini.
Charisma also managed to make it sound as if Anya had gone on the news in a deliberate attempt to provoke her father. As if she was indulging in attention-seeking behavior by telling her story.
Anya didn’t have the heart to tell this woman that she’d given up on attempting to get Preston Turner’s attention a long time ago. Or that she should do the same.
“I would prefer not to be on the news,” Anya said, proud of how steady she kept her voice. With a hint of self-deprecation, even. “But apparently you become a person of interest when you’re snatched up in a foreign country, thrown into prison, and then disappear for eight months. I don’t see the appeal myself.”
Charisma made a breathy, sighing sort of sound. “Your father’s at the hospital,” she said. “Do you want me to tell him that you called? He’s very upset.”
“He’s been worried about me?” Anya asked, in complete disbelief.
“There have been a lot of questions,” Charisma hedged. “And you know how your father is. When he’s at the country club he really doesn’t like to be approached or recognized. So.”
“So,” Anya echoed. She did not point out that the entire purpose of her father’s snooty country club was to be recognized. What would be the point? “What I think you’re telling me, Charisma, is that my imprisonment was an inconvenience.”