It was quiet in the room, as usual. I kept the heart monitor volume down when I was there, so the only sounds besides my own voice were the hiss of the ventilator and an occasional snatch of conversation from the nurses’ station down the hall.

Nana’s condition hadn’t changed, but she just seemed sicker to me. Smaller, grayer, more distant. It felt as though everything in my life was sliding in the same direction these days.

“I don’t know where to go with any of this. One way or another, it’s going to come out, and it’s going to be huge when it does. I mean like Watergate huge, old woman. There’ll be hearings and spin, and probably no one’s ever going to know the real story—but I feel like I’m the only one who even wants to open that particular door. I want to know. I need to know.”

There was one other thing about the quiet. It meant that I could hear Nana talking back.

Poor Alex. An army of one, huh? What else have you got?

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. She’d really want to know. So I gave it some thought…. I had Sampson on my side. I had Bree, of course. I had Ned Mahoney—somewhere out there.

And I had one other rainy-day idea I’d been sitting on. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could be undone once it was started, but hey, how much rainier did I expect it to get?

I reached through the bed rail and put my hands on Nana’s. Things like touch had become more important than ever to me—any way I could connect with her, for as long as I could.

The room’s ventilator hissed. Someone laughed down the hall.

“Thank you, old woman,” I said. “Wherever you are.”

You’re welcome, she communicated somehow, and we left it at that. As always, Nana had the last word.

Chapter 80

AND PEOPLE CONTINUED to die. Anyone who knew anything was at risk.

It was two thousand miles from Virginia back to the island of Trinidad and the bright blue house where Esther Walcott had grown up, just outside the capital city of Port of Spain. That’s where she’d run to after the raid on Mr. Nicholson’s club.

Mum and Bap had welcomed her home with open arms and, more important, asked no questions about the life she’d left behind so abruptly in America.

Two years of hostessing and recruiting for the club in Virginia had left her with a nice bank account, if nothing else, and she planned on putting it toward a hair and nail boutique of her own, maybe even something at Westmall, like she’d always imagined as a girl. It seemed like the perfect way to start her life over.

But when she woke up on that third night home with a man’s hand pressed tightly over her mouth, and heard the American accent in her ear, Esther knew that she hadn’t run far enough.