Chapter 5: What Celeste Knew
The call came at 7:14 in the morning.
Evelyn was awake.
She had not slept.
She was sitting at the window with her second cup of coffee watching the city go gray and then pink and then the hard flat white of a November morning when Lorenzo's phone buzzed on the table and he answered it without moving from the chair where he had apparently also not slept.
"Talk," he said.
A pause.
His jaw tightened once.
"How many?"
Another pause.
He stood up.
"Don't touch anything.
I'm coming." He ended the call and looked at Evelyn.
"Celeste sent someone to your building last night."
Evelyn put the cup down.
"Your neighbor — Mrs.
Pacek, second floor — she called the building super when she heard someone in the hallway at three in the morning.
The super called the police.
Whoever it was left before they arrived." He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair.
"They went through your door."
"My apartment."
"Yes."
Evelyn stood up.
"I need to go there."
"You can't."
"Everything I own is in that apartment."
"I know." His voice was not unkind.
"But if you walk in there right now, you're telling Celeste exactly where to find you.
She'll have someone watching."
Evelyn pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose.
She thought about the apartment — the jammed deadbolt, the clanking pipes, the stack of bills on the kitchen counter, the photograph of her mother tucked into the frame of the bathroom mirror because she had never gotten around to buying a proper frame for it.
Nine months of her life folded into four hundred square feet.
"What did they take?" she said.
"We don't know yet."
"What were they looking for?"
Lorenzo was quiet for a beat too long.
"Lorenzo."
"Celeste doesn't know what you saw," he said.
"She knows someone warned me.
She's narrowed it to staff.
She may have your name by now, but she doesn't know what you know about her — the message on her phone, the signal to her men.
If she did, she wouldn't have sent someone to search.
She'd have sent someone to finish it."
The word finish sat in the room between them.
"So she's still guessing," Evelyn said.
"For now."
"Then we use that."
He looked at her.
"What do you mean?"
Evelyn turned away from the window.
Nine months of invisibility.
Nine months of keeping her eyes down and her mouth shut and her head below the line of fire.
She thought about Celeste's face in the curved silver of the pitcher — the breathtaking smile, the completely wild eyes.
She thought about two cold taps on a brass clutch frame.
"She's looking for the person who warned you," Evelyn said.
"She doesn't know what that person saw.
So give her what she's looking for."
Lorenzo was very still.
"You want to use yourself as bait," he said.
"I want to use what I know," she said.
"There's a difference."
"Not to Celeste there isn't."
"Then we make sure I'm not alone when she finds me."
A long silence.
Lorenzo looked at her with that same direct, undecorated attention.
Then he crossed to the table and picked up his phone.
"I need to make a call," he said.
"There's someone you should meet."
He stepped into the other room.
The door didn't fully close.
Evelyn heard his voice, low and deliberate, and one name she didn't recognize.
Then a second name she did.
Raymond Marsh.
Her father's name.
May you like
Spoken into a phone at 7:20 in the morning in a River North apartment while the city came fully awake outside the glass.
She stood very still and listened to the silence after it.
