In the meantime, I’ve slowly, very slowly, been uploading my collages to Instagram, the ones not so overtly about me, about Odilie. I’ve started a new account without my full name. But there’s been traction. As Sam anticipated, people are asking for T-shirts and mugs and tote bags with my prints on them.

But I have bigger plans.

One day, as I’m working on uploading new pieces, my laptop propped up on my stomach, Quinn rushes in without knocking. I didn’t even know he was home. His face is red and slicked with sweat, like he ran all the way here from his office.

“I found her,” he says between labored breaths, not helped by his Juul lung. “Persephone Thelma Kay Barnes, Peri for short. Now Persephone Tanner, wife of the heir of Tanner Industries.” He blinks rapidly, almost manically. “Tanner Industries, as in, munitions. They’re mentioned during every school shooting and direct action by the US Military. She’s worth billions, Vera. That photo, it’s a gold mine.” He wipes his face with his shirt.

I raise my brows. “A gold mine about to explode.”

7

TOM

1.5 years ago

He’d stayed mad at Odilie for a few days. It didn’t sound like she was actually back in touch with Peri. But even the fact that she’d tried it pulled something loose in him, a screw that had been holding his sanity together all these years. How dare she hurt him like that, break the foundation of their partnership. Make him feel, even for a moment, like the shameful little boy he’d sometimes felt like in Peri’s presence. How dare she diminish him like that. Did his feelings, his buried weaknesses, mean so little to her that she dismissed them without a second thought? How dare she defy him.

Biting his knuckles, sitting in his home office, he decided he would get back at Odilie for all this newly illuminated pain he was feeling, the stir in his gut and clench in his chest. He would find a way to make her pay.

The vitriol, the anger she had revealed in her diary entries, that didn’t matter to him if she had remained loyal to him, loyal to their pact. And Odilie hadn’t. She absolutely hadn’t.

So on another night, before she left for Michigan, he took her phone again to check her journal.

He scrolled through until he hit something that was a tad more interesting, almost fascinating. Because it didn’t start with the kind of hardness as the rest of the entries, full of complaints about him, did. This one was softer, lovelier. The woman he’d met all those years ago resurfaced, the earnest, hopeful one.