Chapters (61)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Imagine a girl
- Prologue
- The Foreigner
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- The Skeptic
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- The Spectator
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- The Assassin
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- The Hunter
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Imagine a girl
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Ben McPherson
- About the Publisher
“I know. But if she’s alive, Elsa . . .” I was struggling to contain my elation. “If she’s alive, then we don’t need Licia to be a hero. We just need to find her and bring her home. And we need to tell Vee.”
“Please don’t.”
“She has a right to know.”
“Know what? That her sister is not a hero? That we have no idea where she is?”
“Elsa,” I said, “can’t we please find the good in what Tvist just told us? Because what he’s telling us is that she could be alive.”
“Cal,” she said, “the police have had a year to find her. And they’re nowhere. We’re nowhere. We’re all starting from scratch.”
Vee was awake when we got home. She accepted the news about Licia, asked us very few questions. I made martinis. Vee sat with us on the dirty gray planter at the back of the apartment as Elsa scrolled through Twitter and I looked out over the hills in silence.
“Are we ever going to go home, Dad?” Vee said at last. I turned. The set of her jaw was heartbreakingly adult. “Or did this place just kind of become our home?”
“I don’t know, Vee.”
“Rhetorical question.” She got to her feet, stood looking at me.
“What, love?”
“I was so sure it was her in the helicopter footage.”
“Everyone was.”
“People need to see it, though, right?”
“They do.”
“Okay. Night, Dad. Mum.” She leaned across and kissed me, nodded a good night to Elsa. “Don’t stay up late, Mum,” she said as she headed for bed.
Elsa watched Vee go. When we heard the tap running in the bathroom, Elsa said, “I keep trying to find reasons not to go back to the courtroom tomorrow. For Vee’s sake, I know we have to. But the truth is we’ve spent a year fighting the wrong battles. Making enemies of the wrong people. Did you see what you get when you drop Tvist’s name into Google these days?”
She reached for her phone, unlocked it with her thumb, handed it to me.
That image of Licia with the gun. Someone had Photoshopped Tvist’s head on the left side of the card, as if Licia had him in her sights. Underneath were the words:
THIS IS WHAT THE #ARYAN #RESISTANCE LOOKS LIKE
I said, “So weird, the way this thing mutates and mutates.”
She nodded. “It’s the opposite of what it was when it started. The opposite of who Licia is. But it’s an exact encapsulation of what those men believe. Pretty white girl taking out the country’s first black police chief. Fuck, Cal. Our daughter became a white supremacist meme.”
She picked up her glass, drained it.
“My love,” I said.