Helena continued pacing, her expression a grim study, and when she turned and glimpsed Myka coming through the doors, she blanched, which made that pale complexion, the white of lab coats and latex gloves and hospital beds, stark and foreboding. Her apprehension touched Myka, who had stepped onto the terrace her mind still filled with the breezily confident Helena of the earliest days of their partnership. Just as she wasn't the same, this wasn't the same Helena, both the breeziness and the confidence diminished. If Helena's betrayal of her had reduced both the goofy joy and the frequency of her smiles, encouraged her tendency to over-exercise and skip meals, which, in eight years' time, had hardened her natural leanness into a type of armor, it had aged Helena as well. Those canted eyes were more hooded, the lines around her mouth tugging down rather than up. Eight years ago, Helena wouldn't have been huddled in on herself, as if she were waiting for the guards' permission to return to her cell.
And yet . . . Helena's despair, complete with dramatically flying hair and an anguished look, made her such the picture of Christina during a time-out that Myka couldn't entirely smother a laugh. Not the most appropriate response as the tense set of Helena's jaw became more pronounced and her agitation solidified into anger, yet Myka still wanted to offer her some apple or banana slices dipped in Nutella, much like Jemma would do when Christina was released from her time-out. "What?" Helena demanded roughly. "I handed the Jeffrieses to you on a silver platter. Don't tell me that the trained monkey and his crew managed to screw it up?" Her outrage quickly subsided and, turning her face her face away, she said in a tone that was as bleak as it was penitent, "You, you handed them on a silver platter to your so-called superiors. If you hadn't said what you did to Laura, they'd already be halfway home, and DeWitt halfway to one of the countries that doesn't have an extradition agreement with us." Her voice dropping lower, she said, "I heard it, and I saw it, what I had done to you. More than that, I felt it. Remorse is a con artist's kryptonite, Myka."
Myka let another bubble of inappropriate laughter break through her words. "Don't grow a conscience on me now. We can't afford it."
"Bates, he didn't say what time tomorrow, did he?" Helena gathered together the sandwich wrappers, crushing them, and stuffing them with more force than necessary into the wastebasket. "I have to give Joshua as much time as possible. In the meantime . . . ." She pursed her lips in concentration, then gave Myka a sideways look that was sly and conspiratorial, even devilish if Myka were inclined to think that way, which she shouldn't be because she had a boyfriend, of sorts, and more to the point, their case was collapsing. "Let's go rattle some cages, shall we?"
They drove back to the university, with Helena at the wheel. She took the corners a little too fast and she bulldozed through intersections that had no traffic signs of any kind, apparently expecting all who crossed her path to yield. Unsurprising, Myka thought, trying not to dig her fingers into the door handle. They parked in the same visitors' lot, but instead of heading in the direction of the administration building, Helena veered off on a narrow, crumbling sidewalk that wound down a slope to yet another charmingly ivy-covered brick building. Students were exiting through the main doors, some carrying sketch pads and others displaying daubs of paint and charcoal on their clothes.
"We're going to rattle Hobart's cage?" Myka tugged Helena into the grass bordering the sidewalk, still a vibrant green this deep into the fall.
Helena spread her arms in frustration. "I'd prefer to rattle Katie Vanderwaal's, but Hobart's the one who's here. Since I have no idea when Joshua will call or what he'll have, we'll need to stir things up on our own. Care to run a minor con with me?" She stared steadily into Myka's eyes.
"There are rules, Helena," she said warningly, although the longer those eyes stared into hers, the more Myka could feel herself weakening. She wasn't sure how much of it stemmed from her reluctance to give up on an investigation - Helena was probably right about the Merrick being turned over to the family once they returned to New York - and how much from an apparently unsatisfied adolescent yearning to do something reckless, something that might get her into trouble. Her friends, her boyfriends, Rachel, they had all been versions of her, the only outsized thing about them being their ambition.
"Which you'll let me bend but not break. You'll pull me back." For a moment, Myka thought Helena leaned into the space between them, not to kiss her but to cup her face or tuck that sleek, dark head under a chin that Myka thought might be trembling. Because it would be so much more intimate than a kiss to have Helena show that she trusted her. That was really the allure of being reckless. You couldn't trust that you were going to come out all right, but you could trust that she would be right in it with you. Myka closed her eyes against the sudden dizziness, and when she opened them, Helena was disappearing into the building.
Definitely not the same Helena. Myka took Helena's hand and led her to a bench molded from the same concrete that preserved a small square of scrubby grass and a tree laboring to grow in the middle of it. Helena didn't let go of her hand, but she didn't look at her either as they sat down, looking instead at the office tower opposite them. "We have Nate Burdette to deal with yet, and he's far more dangerous than Chris Jeffries." Helena didn't respond, and Myka reflected that the problem with relying on symbolic gestures like opening doors was what to do once you went through them. While she hadn't thought she would rush out onto the terrace and whirl around for joy like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, she had had some confidence that she knew what she was going to say when Helena saw her. She had rejected Helena's guilt because it didn't belong in this new . . . New. Neither did her own numbness. But what did?
Haltingly, she said, "If you're expecting me to tell you that I still hate you after all these years, I can't do that. Hate and love, I don't even know what they mean when it comes to you. Not anymore." She sucked in a breath. "I'm trying, I want -"
But Helena interrupted her, words spilling from her, announcing the resolutions she must have made as she paced the terrace from end to end. "I'm going to have Lattimer take you off this case, Myka. Steve or Lee or Jennifer can be my 'handler,' or he can send me back to prison." Her laugh was hard-edged and wild. "I'm sure Ben is meeting with his father's battery of attorneys as we speak. He'll get custody of Christina, and Jemma'll be lucky if she gets an afternoon a month with her. The silver lining is that Nate won't dare touch her if she's in the bosom of the Winslow family." Calming herself, she squeezed Myka's hand so hard that Myka bit her lip but didn't protest. "Things do have a way of working out. This partnership was never going to succeed. There's just too much between us. Once you're out of it, you won't have to think about Nate or me or anything having to do with a Wells. It's over." She kept squeezing Myka's hand, but when she turned her eyes to Myka's, they were dry. "It's over."
Myka wondered if Helena was hoping she would concede that here was a Wells trying to do the right thing, perhaps even characterize it as a noble gesture, believing that Helena loved her enough to set her free. It wasn't as hard as it once might have been for her to believe something like that, but she could just as easily believe that Helena had learned nothing in eight years, still treating her as a minor character in the greater drama of her own life. The old suspiciousness hadn't completely died either. It wasn't much of a stretch for her, Myka admitted, to believe that Helena's willingness to let her go was a ploy only to reel her all the more surely in, a necessary step in the con Helena had been planning since Justice and the FBI had opened her prison doors. Myka knew she could wholeheartedly believe any one of those possibilities because Helena was equally capable of all of them. But looking into the dark eyes that at times seemed to swallow her whole, she didn't see the felon or the lover who had betrayed her, she saw the child promising that she would do whatever it took, be whoever it was necessary to become to win back her father's love. All those Helenas springing from one simple promise: never to disappoint him again. If a doesn't work, try b and c and d and e and f . . . . Never run out of options and don't please him for the moment. Anticipate what he wants next and deliver it. Helena had fallen back on her default mode - identify the mark's dearest wish and make her believe it can come true.
"Is that what you think I want?" Myka didn't look away.
"You should." Helena glanced down at their joined hands and tried to loosen the hold. Myka only squeezed their fingers tighter together. Helena smiled slightly, sadly at the white-knuckled grip. "If we succeed in giving them Nate, do you think your bosses are going to reward you? They'll save their accolades for your buffoonish ex-partner. He'll advance while you'll get their begrudging acknowledgment that you didn't make a bloody mess of it this time. And as for your Neanderthal - "
"Ex-Neanderthal," Myka interrupted.
Helena's smile was a little less sad. "That's one step in the right direction. But if you're seeking in me the Helena you fell in love with -"
"She wasn't a fabrication," Myka interrupted again. "She just wasn't the only Helena there was." She held her breath for a second, steadied herself, then let it out. "Every time I'm with you and Christina, I see what could have been. But it's not only what could have been, it's also what could be. It's both. It's been so long since I imagined what my life could be like, really imagined it, let myself dream and hope, that I didn't realize I'd begun to stop mourning the past. Yes, you're a constant reminder, Helena, of the worst moments of my life, but you and Christina also make me want to put all that behind me. You want a world in which dolphins can exist? I'm your fucking dolphin, Helena. I'm still out there." She ended raggedly, aware of how damp their interlocked hands had become. She worked her fingers from Helena's, but Helena's hand moved to rest on Myka's thigh, so lightly that Myka could barely feel it through the summer-weight weave of her pants and close enough to her knee that she wouldn't jump to the wrong conclusion about what it meant.
"I suppose you'll say what we have is a work-in-progress. If I ask you whether you'll ever fully trust me, you'll tell me that you're learning how to trust all over again. If I ask you whether you can love me like you used to, you'll tell me you'll love me as much as you can. You'll be 'One day at a time" and "Let's see where we're at.'" Helena's tone was sardonic but not reproachful. If anything, it carried a note of sympathy, as if she were in perfect agreement about the burden of loving Helena Wells. "My bold words to the contrary, I'll take however much of you I can get." Her hand began kneading Myka's muscle, abstractedly, ruminatively, claws retracted. "But Christina deserves more. I'll have to answer someday for how poorly I've mothered her, but I'm not going to let another person into her life who's going to fail her. There are no maybe's, no possibly's with her. You're 100 percent in the present with her, no regrets, or there is no putting the past behind you. Not with us."
Alex Hobart hadn't been happy to see them when they entered the studio on the main floor. He had been standing with one of his students in front of an easel, pointing out the errors in her drawing of a skyline that vaguely resembled New York's. The student hadn't seemed to mind the criticism, her gaze wholly, dreamily fixed on the disordered mane of his hair that the hand that wasn't gesturing at the clumsiness of the perspective was restlessly finger-combing. She was blond and pretty, and when he reluctantly agreed to Myka's request for a private conversation to "clear up a few matters," she had reclaimed her sketch pad with a suggestive smile and an invitation to join her and some of the other students at Bedell's for happy hour. Divining the direction of Myka's thoughts or, more likely, unable to miss the smirk on Helena's face, he had said irritably, "I can spare you 15 minutes, and then I have an appointment I have to make - and it doesn't involve undergrads and 2-for-1 drinks."
The irritability didn't diminish when they followed him upstairs to his office and Helena, rather than taking the chair he offered her, wandered the narrow confines of the room, commenting on the framed artwork on the walls ("Some of it's mine, others are the work of friends and my more talented students," he said curtly) and picking up the objects on his desk - stress-relieving squeeze balls, worry beads, a Rubik's cube, scratch pads filled with doodles. "If you're ready," he said impatiently as Helena languidly sat down.
"I used to wear rubber bands on my wrists," she volunteered. He stared at her with a mix of confusion and exasperation. "You used to smoke, right? So did I, and I snapped a rubber band against my wrist every time I thought about a cigarette."
He shrugged. "I'm fidgety by nature. I stopped smoking a long time ago."
Myka struggled not to show her surprise. Helena had never once indicated that she used to smoke, and Myka had a hard time believing that she would resort to anything remotely painful in order to break a bad habit. This was headed not just in a direction Myka hadn't anticipated but in a direction that she was certain Helena hadn't intended - until they had entered this room. Helena seemed to accept his response as a suitable answer, nodding in agreement. "I was wondering how you met Katie Vanderwaal." She vaguely pointed toward the corners of the room. "This tells me what I need to know."
Hobart stiffened, his impatience giving way to wariness. "You find a Vanderwaal everywhere you look on this campus or in this town. I've met all of Larry Vanderwaal's children at one event or another. That's the extent of my relationship with Katie Vanderwaal." He drew up his leg, resting the ankle on the opposite knee. The crossed leg started to bounce up and down. "Why are you talking about Katie? How is she important?"
"She's important because you know her much better and for far longer than you're willing to admit," Helena said calmly. "I'd been thinking she was one of the students you'd slept with." She shook her head as Hobart lunged forward in his chair to object. "Of course you were unfairly dismissed by your former employer. How were you to know they were students?" The mockery died away and she was silent, pretending to think over the claims she was making. "It didn't feel right to me, that Katie was a student of yours. She's too old to be a recent undergraduate conquest, and I couldn't see you concocting a scheme to defraud a university with a girl you had screwed in the parking lot of a campus bar." Hobart's leg stopped bouncing. He had grown very still, his eyes not moving from Helena. Myka was certain that he was no longer aware that she was in the room. Helena leaned across the space between her chair and the desk to pick up one of the balls. They could have touched noses, but Hobart, though trembling with the effort not to retreat even so much as an inch, wasn't ready to surrender. She rhythmically squeezed the ball, smiling cockily at him. "You met her in rehab. Maybe you were a fellow addict, maybe you were a recovering addict providing art therapy for the patients, but you met her there," she twisted in her chair, pointing to a painting of a mansion so large and so festooned with turrets and towers and arches that Myka thought it had to be an architect's spoof of a castle. "It rivals the Hearst Castle but it's not nearly as well known. It's called the Harrington Clinic, and it's located outside San Diego." Helena had said the last for her benefit, Myka realized. "I've always loved architectural monstrosities, and the old Harrington estate is one of my favorites. I'd recognize it no matter how badly it's drawn."
"You're way out on a limb, Agent Wells," Hobart said evenly, "be careful."
"Worse, a tightrope," Helena said cheerfully, "but I've wonderful balance, Professor Hobart. Can you say the same for Katie? We've been watching her. She's already been spending the money she thinks she'll realize from the sale of the Merrick. Now that Daddy's no longer alive to see that she stays clean . . . . When we start to question her, how long before she gives you up?"
Hobart's posture had changed. That was the first thing Myka noticed, and she felt the telltale sign of alarm, a sudden heat between her breasts that promised to blossom into sweat. He was sitting back in his chair, and while his eyes remain fixed on Helena, they had narrowed, as if he were thinking over all that she had said and seeking its flaws. She had claimed too much, and he sensed the overreach. "Surveilling her because she's an addict? That's all you have? Doesn't seem like a good use of a government agency's resources. Are you going to get a search warrant for her house for a few grams of cocaine? What do you have to pressure Katie Vanderwaal with?"
Hobart was right, and Myka felt her shirt beginning to stick to her in places. Helena's cocky smile was still in place, but there was something immobile about it. Fearing that she might insist on the FBI's unlimited powers of surveillance and interrogation, not to mention its prescience in identifying Katie as the weak link, Myka jumped in, at first to just to draw Hobart's attention away from Helena, hoping to find the most credible method of walking back from some of her claims. Whether it was true that Hobart and Katie had met at a rehab clinic wasn't as important as the fact that they didn't have the time to prove it. There was rattling his cage and then there was sticking their heads in his mouth. "Katie's an important element, and we will talk to her, but there are other factors we have to consider as well."
He was listening to her, he was even looking at her. Sort of. Every few seconds, he was glancing at his door. He was on the verge of throwing them out. He had sniffed out their con and he was calling their bluff. She was the cautious one, she was the one who was trying to save them some remnant of their dignity. Helena relied on her to pull them back to safety. But she really hated being dismissed. It was her father deciding from practically the day she was born that she was never going to measure up, the popular kids in high school always pronouncing her name "Meeka" or "Mikka" because she - and her name - weren't worth the effort of getting it right. It was Hobart deciding that she didn't need to be reckoned with.
"One of those factors is the problematic appraisal by Bellamy Consulting," she said coolly, her suit jacket betraying no sign of the sweat glands warring beneath her skin. "Some of its so-called hard data appears to have been falsified. We've reached out to Marilyn Dixon, a Merrick expert, to review the appraisal. Tomorrow morning we're convening with President Nolan and members of the Vanderwaal family to discuss the status of the investigation." Sometimes never forgetting a name she had heard came in handy. She unclipped her phone and searched for the number of Nolan's office in the call log. "I don't bluff, Professor Hobart."
Of course that was exactly what she was doing. She was going farther out on the limb than Helena had dared, but she hated losing almost as much as she hated being dismissed. What was one more humiliating overreach at this point? They didn't have the time to pursue leads or to collect and evaluate evidence. They had only suppositions and guesswork. If they were going to fail, they might as well fail big, and there was still the chance. . . . She set her phone on Hobart's desk, turned the speaker on, and pressed redial.
"I've been thinking about the case in Dorchester," Myka said. "Do you remember it?" Helena had issued an ultimatum and she was talking about an old case. It was worse than a non sequitur, she could see foresee Helena responding to it as if it were proof that, however much she had been professing to the contrary, she remained stuck in the past.
But Helena was slowly nodding. She lifted her hand from Myka's knee to scrape away from her face the hair a persistent breeze kept tugging across her nose and mouth. Hooking the strands behind her ear, she said reflectively, admiringly, "Of course I do. I witnessed one of the best cons I've ever seen anyone pull off, and one of the ballsiest." Her sideways look at Myka was still disbelieving. "How you knew she would back you up . . . . What was her name, Marjorie?"
"Rosemary, another old-fashioned name."
"You saved the day then just as you did today. It's not a surprise that you'd be thinking about it." Helena's expression had lightened, her brows regaining their natural ironic arch, her smile with its secret at its center hovering on her lips. "You saved things today with the truth, but back then? Pure flim-flam."
Myka recalled how startled Rosemary Hastings had sounded answering the phone and how close she had come to choking out the request for confirmation of the meeting. But she had managed to keep her voice steady, even casual, and Rosemary, after a half-second pause, had adeptly filled out the rest of her lie. A breakfast meeting at 8:30, President Nolan's schedule cleared, and Christopher Vanderwaal sitting in for the Vanderwaal family. Myka hadn't known which Vanderwaal served as the family's representative; she had referred to them in the collective, and Rosemary had smoothly clued her in by saying, "Only Christopher's coming, I'm afraid, but since he's the Vanderwaal on the board of trustees, he's the one who should be there." The meeting had, in fact, taken place, a breakfast meeting at 8:30, although it had served mainly to put an official end to the FBI's involvement. The case itself had likely been resolved within 15 minutes of when she and Helena had left Hobart's office.
"It wasn't flim-flam, it wasn't a con." Myka half-turned and pushed the hair away from Helena's face before she could, her fingers lingering on Helena's cheek. It felt both strange and entirely natural to touch her so intimately. "It was throwing a Hail Mary, it was playing the lottery. All I had was hope."
"You think cons don't depend on luck There's a reason they're called con games," Helena challenged but so softly and affectionately as she nuzzled her cheek against Myka's hand that it seemed less an objection than a plea to be convinced.
"It's not the same," Myka said, leaning away and letting her hand drop to Helena's shoulder and then trail lazily down her arm. "I didn't research Rosemary, didn't test her first with something small, didn't file away every little thing that annoyed her or made her happy. I didn't know, we didn't know until the next day just how much she didn't trust Hobart."
"She liked you. You must have sensed it on some level."
As she drew her fingers across Helena's palm, Helena closed her hand over them. There had been something predatory in how quickly and firmly Helena had trapped her fingers, her hand snapping over them like one of those strange lifeforms on the bottom of the ocean, no eyes and all mouth, barely sentient yet capable of seizing its prey in a flash. She might have learned to curb those impulses, but she would never be able to root them out. Was it possible to live with someone like that? A snake could shed its skin a thousand times over, but it remained a snake. What Myka knew with greater certainty was that living without her had been no safer or better for her.
"I knew that I liked you, maybe even more than liked you, and that we had agreed to give the case our best shot in the time we had left. If you were going to go down in flames trying to shake something out of Hobart, you weren't going to go down alone. Being someone's partner means knowing that sometimes you pull them back and sometimes you jump into the fire with them." It had been difficult not to look away from Helena as she said it, not because she found it hard to remember a time when she had trusted her - she had punished herself for it so often over the past eight years that the scar tissue was thick - but because she knew how hard it would be for Helena to hear it. It would be another confirmation of the damage she had done . . . and Myka was tired of being damaged.
Helena didn't let go of Myka's fingers but her head was bowed and her voice unsteady. "I'm not sure I can survive a lifetime of your forbearance. I think I could better suffer your hatred." Her thumb tentatively rubbed across Myka's knuckles. "For what it's worth, that day I wasn't thinking of the Marstons or what I needed to do next to hoodwink the agency. I was thinking only about proving that that awful painting wasn't a fake. We were in it together, Myka. And to watch you risk it all," she sighed girlishly, "I didn't realize it then, but I was gone, completely, irrevocably gone. Oh, I knew something had changed for me that afternoon, but I framed it in the only terms I knew, that I had to have you, that I would have you, and that, afterward, I would move on. It was how I operated and I didn't believe people could relate to each other differently. Get yours and then get out. I was wrong. You had vanquished me and I didn't recognize it until it was much too late." She paused before saying so quietly that she seemed to be whispering to herself, "I was going to end up ruining the both of us. That's when I knew - whether I pulled off the Marston heist or confessed it to you, I wouldn't wriggle away this time. I was caught. Halfway across the world and millions of dollars richer, I still wouldn't be free of you." She laughed, and it surprised her enough to look up and send Myka a startled glance. "Of course I didn't have millions to comfort me. The money that bought the house on the Island, that paid for the defense that couldn't save me from prison, it came from all those 'lost' Jim Wells originals." She let go of Myka's hand and ran her thumbnail down her thigh, creating a seam in the material of her pants. "I knew what I was. Although Edgar Merrick may not have been the most talented artist, his work was his, and I wanted to give him that."
"I haven't been thinking about Dorchester because I played the hero, and I'm not talking about it to punish you, Helena. I've been thinking about it because, by rights, that painting shouldn't have been hanging on a wall to inspire a fraud. It should have had a hole put through it or sold at a rummage sale. It never should have survived. It's not Edgar who's on my mind, it's Amelia."
"I said he was a wanker. You said she must have seen in him more than that." Helena laughed again, although it carried a sour note. "I thought you were wrapped up in some romantic fantasy about that worthless boyfriend of yours. I didn't like him, and that was years before he thought to make my daughter a bargaining chip."
"It was easy then to say that Amelia loved him despite his abandoning of her. But I became her. She should have destroyed that painting a million times over, but she not only kept it, she kept it safe. There were no scratches in the frame, no damage to the canvas. She protected it, Helena. She knew what he was and everything that he wasn't, and she still held onto the painting. Not for their child, he never knew who his biological father was. Not for posterity, she was long dead before a Merrick was worth anything. She kept it because he was important to her. He had left her decades ago, but she held on." Myka could hear her voice rising and she could see that Helena's face was growing paler, but she had eight years' worth of emotion to let out. "You're afraid that I'm going to abandon Christina. A month from now, a year from now, I'll decide it won't work, and I'll leave the two of you without a second thought. But I've been here all along, Helena. I've held on."
"I can't pull free, and you won't let go. We're quite a pair." Helena tipped her head back and stared wide-eyed at the sky. She blinked rapidly. "If I start crying now, I won't stop for another eight years." She lowered her head until her eyes, red-rimmed and wet, met Myka's. "I want to spend the rest of this day with you and my daughter. I want to start there. Can we do that?"
They did that. While Helena perched on the desktop in Myka's cubicle and called Jemma, Myka returned to Pete's office. The agency's attorneys, the Jeffrieses, and their attorney were huddled around one end of the conference table working out the last details of the deal while Pete, Leena, and Steve were awkwardly congregating at Pete's desk. Myka didn't phrase it as a request, she said, with a casualness that was belied by the directness of her look at Pete, that she and Helena were going to spend the rest of the day with Christina. She saw Steve and Leena sidling away, clearly expecting Pete to object, not to the time off she was taking but how she was planning to spend it. But after a significant pause, Pete shrugged and said, "Just remember that she never plays nice."
Myka knew she would have a longer conversation with Pete tomorrow, but today he wanted to savor his victory. His glance flicked from her to the Jeffrieses, and she recognized that he wanted to join the attorneys to make sure that they were hewing to the agreement that management had approved, not the one Ted Roget was hoping to change for the benefit of his clients. No one needed her here, not Pete, not the attorneys, and not the Jeffrieses. Laura hadn't seemed to notice her reappearance, but she didn't miss Myka's attempt to noiselessly slip out of the office. Her eyes didn't blaze the resentment that Myka expected; in fact, they looked at her almost blankly, as if she no longer existed. But Myka understood that look too. Laura wasn't trying to peer into a vastly different future, she couldn't see any future. She had opened a door and nothing recognizable was on the other side of it. There's no other way but through it, Myka silently advised her, but someday, if you're lucky, you'll find the door that leads you out.
There were no wary glances from Christina, nor from Jemma for that matter, when she and Helena entered through the house's side door. While Christina showed some caution climbing down from the stool at the breakfast bar, she didn't wait for her grandmother to assist her, remembering to slow her slide from seat to floor by flinging her good arm behind her. Her hair was tousled and she had the half-sleepy, half-bewildered expression of a child not long from a nap, but she squirmed between them in greeting rather than giving a one-armed hug to her mother's legs. It had only been hours since they had left her and not many at that; it was just past one, yet Myka couldn't shake the ridiculous impression that Christina's hair was longer and that she had grown a couple of inches. Yet she wasn't the only one to have felt it because she heard Helena murmur beside her, "It's different now, isn't it? Her, us."
Jemma said somewhat caustically, "Things must have gone well because you're here," but her expression was pleased, especially when she happened to look at Myka. Helena swung her daughter back onto her stool, burying her face in Christina's hair and kissing her head. Jemma had been making lunch, chicken salad sandwiches, and she put out two more plates. "Would she have come back if things hadn't gone well?" She nodded in Helena's direction.
"I wouldn't have. I would've been given the bum's rush from the agency," Myka said, holding the first of four glasses under the refrigerator's filtered water dispenser.
"You still could've come back, fired or not. It makes no difference to me or Christina where you work. And that one," she nodded again at Helena as she cut a sandwich into triangles for Christina and put it on her plate, "it would be a Christmas gift to her if the agency let you go." Her face turned from them as she went back to the counter where she had set the Tupperware container of chicken salad, Jemma asked with an assumed casualness that wasn't casual at all, "How long are the two of you planning to stay today? I imagine Helena will have to go back to her halfway house."
Myka noted that Helena was needlessly trying to help Christina eat her sandwich, which Christina was managing just fine with her left hand. Chunks of chicken and apple were falling to her plate but that would have happened had she been holding it with both hands. Myka realized she wouldn't be bailed out from having to answer. She had decided to take the risk, she might as well fully own up to it. "We'll be here through tomorrow morning. Helena will have to go back to Mrs. Frederic's tomorrow night." Bringing two glasses of water back to the breakfast bar, Myka couldn't miss the smile Helena shone down at Christina's plate, not secretive but smug. Definitely smug.
Jemma's sole comment was "Good thing I washed the clothes you wore yesterday. You'll have a clean pair of knickers."
They colored in coloring books with Christina, played board games with her, and Myka even wore a tiara for an impromptu playlet that Christina called "I'm a Princess." She and Helena had both changed out of their pantsuits, and this time as Myka moved around Helena's bedroom, carefully folding and packing her jacket and trousers in her overnight bag, she didn't feel quite so out of place. She avoided looking at the bed too much or for too long; she hadn't yet decided what she wanted or when she wanted it. Maybe it was enough that the bed didn't seem ten times too large for the room.
With Christina propped up against her chest as they both lay on the sofa, Myka flicked through channels, looking for something kid-appropriate while Helena and Jemma shared cups of tea at the breakfast bar. She hadn't realized that she had fallen asleep until she felt a touch on her shoulder and the sharp of dig of elbows in her ribs as Christina resisted being disturbed. "Love, let's get you to bed where we can set you up proper," Jemma entreated her granddaughter, crouching in front of them. Christina shook her head, which rubbed painfully against Myka's collarbone. "Leave her be," Helena lazily suggested from the breakfast bar, "Myka's not such a bad pillow."
"When she wakes up in the middle of the night crying, and all because she didn't have a decent rest in the afternoon, you'll be the one who'll attend to her," Jemma grumbled good-naturedly. "And as long as Myka doesn't mind being used as a pillow." She pushed herself up with a hand on the sofa's arm, giving Myka a long look. "You give an inch to that one," she glanced at Christina and then back at Myka, but Myka knew it wasn't only Christina Jemma meant, "she'll not only take a mile, she'll give none of it up."
Myka smiled down at Christina, who had already fallen asleep again, her lashes long and black against her skin. "It's okay," she said, tilting her head until it lightly touched Christina's, "I'm prepared."
She wasn't, not really. She hadn't any better idea now of what was going through Helena's mind, what plans, what schemes, than she did all those years ago. There were two things, however, as opposed to the one thing she had been fairly certain of after she and Sam had met with Helena in the prison's interview room. Helena wouldn't jeopardize her daughter's safety. That was as close to a guarantee as one could get from a Wells. The other, much less than a guarantee but more than Myka would have let herself believe the day Helena was released into her custody, was that Helena wouldn't want to hurt her again. She would, of course, if she thought she had to, but it would come at a cost, just as hurting her the first time had come at a cost. It wasn't the kind of heroic, ennobling love portrayed in movies or written about in novels; it was messy and imperfect and all that Helena knew how to offer. Myka carefully twirled a strand of Christina's hair around her finger. Yet Helena's imperfections had eventually resulted in Christina, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, Myka smiled at her old fantasy of being surrounded by Helena and a number of mini-me's. It wasn't something that could have been, it was something real - and sleeping on her shoulder - and maybe, someday, if everything worked out, it could be part of her future as well . . . .
Helena cooked dinner as Jemma relaxed with a paperback romance in one hand and the TV remote in the other. Myka wasn't sure how much this represented the resumption of an old pattern and how much of it was Helena living out a fantasy of her own. She must have spent the long nights in her cell imagining what Jemma and Christina were doing, what they had for dinner, whether Jemma made Christina take a bath before bed. Jemma had been planning to make sweet-and-sour chicken, which was one of Christina's favorites because it had "pink sauce" and Christina loved all things pink. The ingredients had been bought, but the vegetables and chicken still needed to be cut up, and as Helena inexpertly diced chicken breasts and tossed them in a breading mixture, Myka cut peppers and drained cans of water chestnuts. Christina lined up several of her toy animals on the breakfast bar and played a game of "zoo," its rules known only to her.
They ate at the table in the dining room, and as Christina burbled and drip-painted her face with sweet-and-sour sauce in her game attempts to feed herself with her left hand and Helena and Jemma bickered about whether Christina should be allowed to play outside the next day, Myka listened to their voices and the clinking of silverware on plates and juxtaposed the scene with her memories of Bering family dinners. When she was a child, dinners had usually been silent except for her father's requests, demands in reality, that she and Tracy report the grades they had received on their schoolwork. Tracy's occasional B in a string of As would merit no more than a disapproving grunt from him. Myka's one B for the entire school year, on a chemistry test she had slighted in favor of studying more for a trigonometry test, hadn't resulted in any sound from Warren Bering. Instead, he pretended that she wasn't at the table, in the house, for the next three days.
She grinned at the thought of his having to endure Christina's giggles as she used her fingers rather than her spoon to transfer bites of chicken from her plate to her mouth, her impromptu songs extolling the virtues of "pink sauce," her random bellowing of "My-ka" or "Myka, Myka" followed by the clapping of her sticky hands. The old Warren Bering, not the new one defanged by Alzheimer's who would smile somewhat glassily at his grandson's playing with Matchbox cars at the table, would have refused to eat surrounded by noise and distraction. There were no Bering family dinners, Myka concluded, only an uncomfortable 20 minutes when she would consume her meal as quickly as she could while making herself as small a target as possible.
Her meals didn't have to be like that anymore. They also didn't have to be the daily chores that she had made of them for the past several years. They could be like this, with Christina softly singing nonsense words and Helena and Jemma casually sparring with each other when they weren't urging Christina, in alternation, to play less and eat more. They could be anything. Strange to feel so freed over a simple meal, to see a wealth of possibilities in a pool of sweet-and-sour sauce, but she did.
"What did I get wrong?" Helena anxiously asked. "I'm used to Christina finger-painting with her food rather than eating it, but I've also seen her nibbling on Crayons, so she's no guide."
"It's fine," Myka said. As Helena gave her a skeptical look, Myka repeated, laughing, "It's fine. Everything, absolutely everything, is fine."
The closer the end of the evening approached, the less infinite the possibilities seemed but Myka felt no more constrained or nervous because of it. The old Myka and Helena would have combusted long before this; with no child, no live-in Jemma, no betrayals or, more accurately, no evidence of the ones Helena had already committed or hints of the ones she had yet to plan, they would have been romping in the bed for hours. But there was a child, who wanted her mother to illustrate the next installment of The Bald Princess as Myka developed it on the fly, and there was Jemma, although she used the stagecraft involved in getting this particular bedtime story told to Christina's perfection, as an opportunity to escape into her own bedroom. And there was their history, eight years of it apart.
Closing Christina's door behind them, her complaints at being left alone and having the lights turned out becoming fainter, Helena was suddenly unsure, ill at ease, her hands seeking her jeans' pockets. The confidence, insolence really, with which Helena had carried herself when they first met had been eroded by mistakes and regrets, but Myka had never seen her so intensely uncomfortable, as if she wished she could shrug off her skin like she might dirty clothes. "Are you going back to your apartment now?" Helena abruptly asked her.
"I don't know," Myka said, "I didn't, I mean, I don't have any expectations." Seeing that her response made Helena no happier, she added, "Would it be easier if I left?"
"I think it comes down to what you want, Myka," Helena said just as curtly, tiptoeing down the hall toward the stairs. Watching herself take exaggeratedly careful steps, she said, "This reminds me of when I was a teenager and I used to sneak my conquest of the day into the flat." Laughing softly, ruefully, she glanced at Myka. "You were the only one of my amours my mother liked."
"Because I was the only one she met?"
"Ha." Then Helena reconsidered. "There is some truth to that." At the bottom of the stairs, she turned to face Myka. "You're the one who's seeing this all so clearly. What do you see happening next?" With a derisive puff of air, she asked, "Am I supposed to sweep you off your feet? It's a little late for that. You'd keep one foot on the floor for fear I'd drop you."
The discomfort, the defensiveness, Helena was petrified. Myka realized that Helena was trying to trust her, but next to honesty, trust was about the hardest thing for a con artist to manage. She was used to writing the scripts that others would follow. "I wouldn't say 'clearly.' I'm seeing what could be, that's all. Nothing has to happen, Helena."
"That's what I'm afraid of. If nothing has to happen, it won't, and you'll realize that none of this is what you want." With a queerly wistful smile, she said, "I was less frightened of you when you hated me."
They lay together in her bed after each had taken her turn undressing in the privacy of the master bath. Just as they had used to combust without care, they had rarely bothered with modesty when it came to dressing or undressing. Myka kept her top and underwear on, but Helena had unearthed a set of pajamas, smelling vaguely of lavender, which attested to how long and how deeply they had been buried in a drawer. Seeing her in the pinstripe short set, Myka thought she looked like an overgrown child sent away to summer camp, but she only folded back the sheet and invited Helena to slip in next to her. Helena didn't roll to the other side of the bed, but her tension was tangible. "I haven't been with anyone since Ben," she said as abruptly as she had outside Christina's door. "There weren't that many before him either, which, given my history, is hard to believe, I know. But it's true. Sex had always been a tool, one I enjoyed using, but a tool all the same. It became something more with you, and when I left you, it became something less. I don't know what it'll be now, with you." She laughed weakly. "What if I've lost my magic touch?"
Myka turned off the lamp on the nightstand and edged closer to her. "This is enough." Hearing a disbelieving snort, she rested a hand on Helena's hip and let the other smooth the dark hair spilling across the pillow, darker even than the impenetrable black of the room. She thought she could feel the jump of Helena's pulse through her skin, the barely restrained impulse to flee in the skittery slide of her hair. They had nestled like this before, in Helena's bed after the charity run at Barrington, in Christina's hospital room, one needing comfort, the other, in her own way, offering it. Helena might not have had sex in years, but Myka knew that she hadn't held anyone she had slept with out of affection or need since before her divorce. They would both have to relearn how simply to be with one another. Given how easily and frequently they had lolled in bed when they lived together, the tangling of limbs serving as both foreplay and afterglow, the muscle memory was there. The mattress creaked and suddenly Helena's butt was pressed against her pelvis, and the hand that had been resting on Helena's hip was trapped against Helena's stomach. The muscle memory was definitely there. Myka smiled to herself and pulled Helena's shirt off her shoulder to kiss it.
They held each other for a long time without speaking, long enough for Myka to begin drifting toward sleep. But she didn't want to sleep, not yet, because she wasn't through with talking about Dorchester, because she hadn't let herself think about Dorchester in years and yet, today, it was practically all she had been able to think about. "Catching that fraud about the Merrick painting wasn't one of the bigger cases we worked. Bates forgot that we were even on it once we were back. When we were together I hardly gave it a thought. But after the heist, after I knew you were involved, I kept going over and over everything, trying to pinpoint where I had gone wrong, and I settled on Dorchester because that's where I lost focus. You had become more than a hired gun, more than a colleague, more, even, than a potential friend, and I obsessed over the thought that if the case had ended differently, then none of the rest of it would've happened. No 'us,' no Marston, or no successful Marston." The relaxed curving of Helena's back into her had stopped. "I couldn't change things, so to keep my sanity, I put it out of my mind."
She had been shaking so badly after they left Hobart's office that Helena led her to a bench in the student exhibition gallery and sat her down on it. Thanks to Rosemary Hastings's completely improbable, wholly miraculous confirmation of a meeting that hadn't existed 20 minutes ago, she and Helena might very well have a half-hour with President Nolan and one of the Vanderwaals and nothing to fill it with except suppositions and unproven claims against a member of the faculty. Maybe they could find a bakery and buy donuts, Myka giddily thought. They could fill the meeting with donuts. Helena was circling the gallery, gazing at the artwork, dismissing most of it with mutterings against overindulgent parents humoring their talentless children. She fell silent before one or two, however, and when she took a seat on the bench, she said, with an emotion that Myka couldn't quite define, "A few actually have some ability. Let's hope we've managed to foul Hobart's little nest here before he can ruin them." More warmly, she asked, "Are you feeling better? It was a bravura performance, Myka, but now we do have to give Nolan something before we leave tomorrow."
"You really think Rosemary will schedule that breakfast meeting? Maybe we can bring donuts. I'm thinking that's all we have."
Helena leaned in and tipped Myka's chin toward her, her gaze steady and reassuring. "I'm not one who believes the world treats us kindly, but after what I saw you do in there, I'm convinced that Joshua will come through for us. We have Hobart. He's probably on the phone with his confederates as we speak, trying to find a way out of this mess." Her lips twisted up in a charmingly crooked grin. "Trust me."
They bought no donuts, barely having time to grab a few granola bars on offer at the reception desk as they hustled through the hotel's lobby on their way to a meeting they were already late for. That there was a meeting and that Rosemary had been able to arrange it in such a short time was something of a miracle as well. She had sent an email to Myka a scant half-hour after their talk with Hobart confirming that Nolan, Christopher Vanderwaal, and Stoddard, the university's counsel, were looking forward to a report on their progress. As if the universe had decided to hitch a ride on her improbable good fortune, Myka had to admit that Helena's other prediction also came true; Joshua Donovan called late in the evening, but he called, providing them with the information they needed to make a persuasive, if not airtight, argument that the Merrick donated to the university was a Merrick and that the suspicion it wasn't had been engineered by a discontented Vanderwaal daughter and a couple of con artists, one of whom was in the university's employ.
Joshua hadn't been able to discover any connection between Alex Hobart and Katie Vanderwaal before Hobart was hired by the university, but he had found a number of intriguing links between Hobart and a man named Thomas Dawson, who had been enrolled in the same chemical dependency program at the same San Diego-area clinic at roughly the same time as Katie Vanderwaal. Their stays had overlapped by a month. Furthermore, after much arduous trolling through electronic files of incorporation papers, his complaint causing Helena to roll her eyes rather than offer sympathy, Joshua had uncovered the name Thomas Dawson on a list of Bellamy Consulting's founding members. Subsequent filings by the company didn't list his name, and, as of five years ago, Thomas Dawson had ceased to exist. There were no traces of him anywhere. Coincidentally Alex Hobart had no history beyond the past five years. Joshua couldn't prove that Thomas Dawson and Alex Hobart were the same man - he would need the time that Helena and Myka didn't have to prove it - but Dawson had a lengthy criminal history, including burglary and possession of stolen goods, and, Joshua thought Helena might find it interesting to know, an apparently genuine MFA.
"He could credibly pass himself off as an art teacher," Helena had mused.
"A sparkling C.V., some clever friends who would act as his professional references, it could be done," Joshua had agreed. "And the college that fired him - it was a real position. Perhaps his only real one before coming to Dorchester." His monotone wavered; it sounded like he might have been smothering a laugh, as unlikely as it seemed to Myka. "Putting a lowlife at a high-class college isn't going to elevate him. Just like a bad person hooking up with a good one doesn't become good by association."
"I get it," Helena had told him testily.
As for Bellamy Consulting, Joshua had been able to find no evidence that it had performed any of the appraisals listed on its website, although, since the clients named on the site were mainly individual collectors or private firms, there was no reason he should have found any evidence, he pointed out. However, a small museum that, according to the website, had hired Bellamy three years ago to appraise a new addition to its collection had actually closed its doors in 2000. "Makes you wonder, doesn't it?" His laughter was unmistakable this time, but Myka liked it no better for hearing it. It had the thinness and sharpness of a fillet knife.
She and Helena had stayed up well past midnight, assembling their notes and trying to create a coherent narrative from them. Or, rather, Helena had taken on that duty, as Myka remotely plumbed the FBI databases for information on Thomas Dawson. She had found little more than the arrest records Joshua had summarized. Dawson's crimes had been small and well within the purview of state law enforcement; there had been no need to bring in federal agents. Interestingly enough, among the items recovered from his burglaries had been antiques and artwork. Eventually the two of them had dropped, exhausted, onto Helena's bed for a couple of hours of sleep before the meeting. Myka had kicked off her shoes and scrunched a pillow under her head without giving a second thought to the fact that she and Helena were sharing a bed. Oddly, it seemed natural, even down to Helena's bumping her butt against her as she burrowed deeper into the bed, like they had been sharing a bed for years.
The late night, the frenzied preparation, the necessity of listening to Joshua's drone, none of it had been necessary - another one of Helena's predictions that had been absolutely on the money. Rosemary Hastings didn't bother to hide the triumphant little smile on her face as she ushered them into President Nolan's office at 8:29. Donuts also weren't necessary, a tray of pastries, which included some donuts worthy of the longing glances Myka was sending them, as well as carafes of coffee and hot water (Rosemary hadn't forgotten about Helena's preference for tea) were on the top of a credenza. Three men, Nolan, Stoddard, and a younger man who had to be Christopher Vanderwaal, greeted them casually as they entered the room and then returned to their conversation about winter vacation plans. Myka thought the mood in the room seemed closer to that of a staff meeting rather than a verdict on whether the university owned a multi-million dollar painting or a forgettable rendering of the Dorchester countryside.
President Nolan urged them to have a pastry and a cup of coffee, while, with a distinctly lighter step than he had shown when they first met, he went to his desk and searched among the papers on top of it. Finding what he wanted, he joined them at the credenza and handed Myka the document. It was a faxed letter from Bellamy Consulting, withdrawing its report as the result of "an internal review that uncovered significant errors in the analysis." Bellamy's experts, the letter said, "could no longer conclude with the same degree of confidence that the painting in question wasn't a Merrick."
There would be no further analysis of the painting. Helena suggested that the university or the Vanderwaal family contact a bona fide expert for another appraisal, but Nolan, after glancing at Stoddard and Vanderwaal and receiving an approving nod from each of them, declared that the matter was settled. As far as the university and the Vanderwaal family were concerned, the painting was a Merrick. Moreover, it was highly unlikely that the university's trustees would ever recommend selling the painting to raise funds (especially, Myka thought, if one of the trustees was a Vanderwaal). Edgar Merrick and the intertwined Merrick and Vanderwaal families were part of the area's history and, thus, part of the university's history.
"It would be like selling a birthright," Nolan proclaimed.
Even more importantly, there was no need to publicly embarrass one of the university's most important donors, but Myka didn't say that aloud. Despite entreating her and Helena to stay and enjoy more coffee and pastries before they returned to New York, Nolan was clearly anxious for them to leave. Christopher Vanderwaal was already making his excuses, apologizing for having to leave for another meeting. Helena took their cups and returned them to the credenza, saying over her shoulder, "Professor Hobart will be surprised by this development. He'd suggested Bellamy, hadn't he? I hope the company's errors won't be held against him." She almost sounded sincere.
"No, when his contract comes up for review in the spring, we'll be looking at other factors." Stoddard more successfully managed to sound neutral, but his message was clear, and he and Helena smiled at each other in mutual understanding.
Myka drove on the way back to the city while Helena slept. More accurately, Helena occasionally dozed, only to wake up and exclaim, "You really were magnificent yesterday. Have I told you that enough?" Myka would simply shake her head in answer, pretending that negotiating the increasing volume of traffic was absorbing all of her attention. They were in the office by early afternoon, and Bates almost immediately sent them to interview the Wall Street wizard, his wife, and their household staff. They no sooner returned from the wizard's palatial suite off Central Park than Bates virtually imprisoned them in a conference room with the piles of paper that had been produced just at this early stage of the investigation. Refueling with coffee and vending-machine-supplied carbohydrates, Myka didn't keep track of the time, didn't realize until she answered a call from Sam on a brief walk out to the courtyard to stretch her legs that it was already closing in on 10:00. It grew dark so early that Myka could believe it was dinnertime or past midnight; she didn't care. She didn't work by the clock, she worked until her eyes no longer focused or her knees had so locked under her desk that she would practically stumble when she got up from her chair. Whether she had dinner before midnight or at all was of little matter to her, the work came first. So far her relationship with Sam hadn't been much of a threat to the order of her priorities.
She and Helena exited the office building a few minutes after 11:00. Snowflakes were beginning to flutter down from the sky. She had only a vague idea of where Helena lived, somewhere fashionably post-industrial, too arty to give itself over to gentrification. They took different routes, different subways, but tonight they lingered, Helena finally saying, "It's hellishly late, but we really should celebrate what we did in Dorchester. There's a bar not far from here, we can get a drink and an appetizer, if nothing else." Exhaustion had dimmed the challenging light in those eyes, but the smile remained cocky.
Myka was surprised by how much regret she felt at declining. "I'm meeting Sam at his place for a really late dinner." She could feel herself blushing. She hadn't given much of a thought to Sam at all the past few days, and though she could attribute her lack of enthusiasm to her own exhaustion, she knew that if Helena gave her an especially devilish smile or disdainfully arched her eyebrow in the way only she could do it, Sam and his stir-fry would be left behind.
"I understand," Helena said, "another time." She touched Myka's arm, as if to emphasize that she did understand. Instead of turning and walking toward the subway stop, she went to the curb and tried to hail a cab.
"Hey," Myka shouted after her, "I'd like to see your work sometime . . . if you allow visitors."
A cab had just pulled up, but Helena turned, her smile even cockier. "You want to come up and see my etchings?" She laughed, and there was no tinge of mockery to it. Not much, anyway. "Anytime, Agent Bering. If you have a spare Saturday afternoon, you'll usually find me there. My studio's in what's called the Weller Building. You can look it up."
"But today, it didn't seem like I'd fall into the abyss if I remembered Dorchester. For the first time in eight years, you were on the other side of it." Helena might have minutely moved closer to her. "What would have happened if I'd gone with you instead that night?" Myka asked softly, her lips brushing the shell of Helena's ear.
"You'd have come home with me, you'd have been with me," Helena said. "We could pretend, if we wanted, that things would've turned out differently if it had happened like that."
"It's a possibility," Myka agreed.
Helena rolled away from her only to straddle her with a speed and assertiveness that Myka didn't expect. Her hips pinioned between Helena's thighs, she heard the rustle of clothing and then the whip of something being flung into the air. Helena leaned forward, positioning herself with a hand on either side of Myka's head, and instinctively, because she had done this so many times with Helena in the past, in bed, out of bed, seemingly everywhere, Myka cupped Helena's breasts, their nipples hardening against her thumbs. "Let me show you," Helena said, "all that that night could have held for us."