I know you told me to kill the article...and I have...

...But I wanted to keep following the money, just to give you peace of mind, nothing else...

I think you should know...

Then these words, which had me clutching the edge of the sink:

...Stealing seems to have started with your college tuition...then escalated... Wallis’s, too.

I put my screen to sleep and flipped my phone over. But it wasn’t enough. I picked it up again and, from the bathroom doorway, tossed it onto the bed, watched as it bounced off the comforter and landed on the floor. Then I closed the bathroom door. I couldn’t even look at it.

“You still there?” Wallis’s voice, over the running water, sounded like she was keeping back tears.

I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me. “Yes,” I said. But, no. No, I was not there. I was falling, down through the past, flailing for a hold, trying to find something to clasp, something my father hadn’t broken. I’d thought we’d be safe in Charleston, but reality had tracked me down.

“Sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’m tired and stressed.”

With the side of my hand, I wiped off the steam from the bathroom mirror. “It’s okay,” I told her. I’d been born with Cricket’s nose—a dainty one, turned up at the end. Somewhere along the way, though, it had inflated both at the bridge and the tip, a coup of my father’s genes. My father, the hijacker, clear as the nose on my face.

“They’ve got good shampoo here,” Wallis said. “It’s making me feel better. It smells really nice.”

“It does.” I took up again the makeup remover and scrubbed. Soon the mascara was gone, but I kept going. “Everything here is so, so nice.”

Twenty-Four

For our first activity of the day, Bo brought us down to Charleston’s seawall and to the former home of a man named, naturally, Beauregard. On the walk there, I let Bo and Wallis stroll ahead so I could take many deep breaths and get straight what had to be the most convincing happy face of my life. This was difficult as I kept being sucked back to the same disquieting question: How could my father have done this? After Atlas’s texts, I’d considered canceling the touristy plans we’d made for the day, but to what end? So I could panic alone in Judge Reed’s third-floor guest bedroom surrounded by jars of potpourri and monogrammed pillow shams?

By the time we’d arrived at our destination—as Bo put it, it was a well-preserved museum of atrocities—I’d found no answers, but I did land on what I hoped was a working approximation of Daisy In A Good Mood.