She met Steve in the parking lot of the nursing home. The lights in the lot glinted on a pond set in a depression below the circular driveway, the "bay" of Serenity Bay. If she wanted to share in the illusion that the nursing home's name and pond struggled to suggest, Myka could pretend that the empty snack bag floating on the pond's surface and shining silver in the light was a toy boat. It wouldn't be long before her father ended up in a place like this, prevented from wandering off by a locked door whose simple passcode he, like the other residents in the memory care unit, would never be able to remember. Steve, similar to Pete if only in his ability to detect the passing changes in her mood, walked with her to the fringe of laxly trimmed grass at the pond's edge.
"These places, they're not as grim as they used to be. Paul's 95-year-old grandma takes a van every week to the mall, and she gets her hair done every Saturday at the salon on site. The last time we were going to go see her, she asked us if we could come the next weekend instead because she was in a canasta tournament."
"My dad always said we were to kill him before we put him in a nursing home." Myka laughed softly, sadly. "Now he'd forget soon enough that he ever lived anywhere else." She bent down and reached out to pluck the snack bag from the water. She gingerly held it between her fingers until, spying a trash container, she stuffed the bag in the overflow, noticing the crushed cigarette butts half-heartedly toed under the container.
A hallway led from the foyer, bending left and opening into a large space divided on one side into a dining area and lounge and, on the other, bordered by a long, waist-high counter. Behind it sat staff in scrubs, staring intently at computer monitors or chatting quietly. The lounge was empty, and the dining room was deserted except for a man in a wheelchair finishing a bowl of ice cream. Myka knew it was too good to be true that he could be Henry Gryzbowski. For one thing, her luck didn't run like that; for another, she concluded, without any logical basis for doing so, that while he appeared to be the right age, he didn't seem alert enough to be an old friend of Gentleman Jim. If you ran with wolves, you had to have fangs.
Of course, it could also turn out that Henry Gryzbowski wasn't Grizzle, that her linking of an odd nickname with a man who had happened to work at the Church of St. Mary and who happened to have a last name that might lend itself to such a nickname betrayed more wishful thinking than actual reasoning. She and Steve could be intruding on an old man with a story of conmen, thieves, and art heists that sounded like the plot of a Rat Pack movie, that is if he didn't suffer a fatal heart attack from having an unannounced visit from the FBI. Playing her intuition hadn't always served her well – Helena being Exhibit 1 – but she had nothing else to go on.
An attendant, the one closest to the counter, rolled away from her computer and asked, "Can I help you?"
"We're here to see Hank Gryzbowski." At the last minute, Myka remembered that the church secretary had referred to him as Hank, not Henry. No need to announce that they were strangers, although Myka doubted that she and Steve were fooling anyone. Staff would know which patients got visitors and how often those visitors came.
The attendant theatrically flung out her arm and pointed them through the dining room and to the opposite end of the building. "Last door on the right." Something about how the woman closed her mouth, as though she were suppressing a smile, had Myka fearing that she would open it again to inform them that Hank had another visitor. A woman with an English accent. Don't get many of them. But the attendant rolled her chair back to her computer, and Myka counted it as another test passed. Helena hadn't called the church or dropped by Serenity Bay. They hadn't gotten much beyond the counter when the attendant said, "Just so you know –"
Myka froze - Helena, she's here after all—and Steve glanced at her quizzically.
"—Hank's an early-to-bed-early-to-rise guy. He's usually in bed by nine."
"Thanks. We'll try not to keep him up long." Myka was surprised at how calm she sounded.
The odors of floor polish and the evening's dinner faded as they walked down the hall, replaced by an odor that was sharper, almost like rubbing alcohol. Disinfectant . . . with a floral overlay. The door to the last room on the right was open. Attached to the wall was a metal holder with two narrow rows for labels with the occupants' names. Only one row was filled, H. Gryzbowski. Myka stepped into the room and called to the man sitting in front of a small flat-screen TV. "Mr. Gryzbowski?" He didn't turn his head, although she had raised her voice above the noise of the TV. Louder, she repeated, "Mr. Gryzbowski?"
His chair, a plumply upholstered mustard-colored armchair that could have come straight from her grandparents' house, swiveled toward her. He stared at her a long time before speaking, so long that Myka wondered whether the church secretary, not to mention the attendant who had waved them on to his room, had been completely honest about his condition. "I didn't think you were going to turn out to be Ted's niece. So why don't you and the fellow you're with tell me who you really are and why you're here?" His words came haltingly and the softer letters were slurred, but his voice was surprisingly strong.
Places to sit were limited. The room reminded Myka of the bedroom she had shared with Tracy, enough space to sleep and to get dressed in the morning but not enough space for real privacy, not enough space for friends. Maybe teenaged girls and nursing home residents had more in common than she thought, and maybe that was why it felt oddly familiar to take a seat on the bed across from his. She could have been in her old room, except for the tubes of arthritis cream and assortment of prescription medications on top of the dresser. She remembered the New Kids on the Block poster that a relative had mistakenly given her as a birthday present one year. (Her mother taped it to the wall after Myka had tried to hide it under her bed.) Hank's room didn't have that. The only thing tacked to the wall was a calendar of nature shots, courtesy of Premier Insurance.
Ted's niece. That was how she had introduced herself to the church secretary over the phone, a tissue-paper-thin explanation of why she was inquiring about a retired janitor. She hadn't once assumed or even hoped that the secretary, in turn, would mention "Ted's niece" to Hank. The name Ted Bonaventura had meant nothing to the secretary, who was simply pleased that someone was inquiring about Hank, but it had meant something to him. Maybe all the guesswork that had seemed so faulty minutes ago would be proof of her brilliantly analytical mind. Mrs. Frederic would think so. Myka didn't know what to make of the woman's faith in her abilities except that it was damn unnerving.
Telling Hank Gryzbowski that they were from the FBI didn't have him clutching at his chest. He spluttered a disbelieving chuckle. Telling him that they were following new leads about the stolen art from the Bowdoin Museum turned the chuckle into a snort of laughter and the dry comment, "Following them took you to an old man in a nursing home?"
"Following them took us to an old friend of Jim Wells," she countered.
"Am I a suspect now?" The thought seemed to amuse him. "You're welcome to search the room, but you'll not find much." He pointed at the calendar. "That's the closest thing to art in here." Myka patiently let him enjoy his joke, but he stopped chuckling and lifted a shoulder. "You remind me of my daughter with that look, the one that says 'I don't have all day, Dad.'" He shifted, searching for a more comfortable position in his chair, and Myka noticed how he favored his left arm and leg, using his right arm, elbow dug deeply into the chair arm, to move his body. "Why don't you ask me what you're burning to ask me, and I'll answer as best I can. I have nothing to hide."
Myka had heard those words countless times, usually from people who did have something to hide. Sometimes from men older and in worse shape than Hank Gryzbowski. "We're heard that some of the suspects in the Bowdoin heist had a much longer history than previously thought. They called themselves the 'boys of St. Mary,' a reference to the Church of St. Mary, your former employer, Mr. Gryzbowski. We think Jim Wells was one of those boys. Were you one of them, too?"
"That? That was what some of us used to call ourselves when we were kids. We were altar boys at St. Mary a hundred years ago, but it wasn't important, the name."
"I'm surprised," Myka said mildly, "because when I was talking with a prison guard about Ted Bonaventura, he said that Ted was hoping one of the 'boys' could transfer him to a safer prison. The 'boys of St. Mary' meant something to Ted." She paused, making sure that Hank didn't drop eye contact. "When was the last time you saw Jim Wells, Mr. Gryzbowski?"
"I told you, I have nothing to hide. I saw Jim a couple of times after the break-in and then once or twice a few years later. That's it. We were close as boys growing up, but we took different paths in life." Slowly he shifted again, this time to try to pull from behind the chair a lightweight cart topped by a tray. It held an insulated mug with a straw and an opened package of graham crackers. He could move it no more than a few inches, and Steve leapt to assist him, steadying the cart and rolling it to a spot within easy reach. Hank fumbled for a cracker and held out the rest of them, waggling them in invitation. "These were a dessert when I was a kid. Crumble them into some canned fruit and you had a poor man's cobbler. Now I eat 'em for my digestion. Have some if you want."
If this was supposed to be a distraction, Hank needed to find something better. She didn't like graham crackers. "Why did Jim come to see you after the Bowdoin heist?"
"Because the church was the one place he could go to get away from the cops. He said they were on him all time, following him, taking him downtown to interrogate him. I'd find him a quiet place where he could nap or just enjoy the peace and solitude." He noisily sucked on the straw, glaring at Myka. "What did you think, that we were divvying up the loot?"
"That was all?" Myka raised an eyebrow in skeptical emphasis.
"That was it. He wasn't always running a con, you know. Not to say that he wasn't a selfish bastard because he was. If he needed you, he was the best friend you ever had. It's why he got the nickname 'Gentleman Jim,' well, that, and he always was something of a sharp dresser. But if he didn't need you, he wouldn't know your name. And before you ask me why I let him hide out in the church, I'll tell you that you don't spend more than 40 years of your life in a church, even if it's only to change the light bulbs and mop the floors, without believing that even of the worst of us deserves a chance for forgiveness. Jim wasn't a good man, but he wasn't the worst man I knew, either. Maybe all those times I saw Jim napping in a pew, he was really praying."
"Did you ever ask him about Bowdoin, about whether he did it?" Steve interjected.
"You learned early not to ask Jim about what was going on in his life. He didn't lie all the time, but if he didn't lie, he was thinking about lying the next time you asked him something."
"A difficult friend to have," Myka said.
"But entertaining," Hank parried. He hesitated, clearly reluctant to say more. He took another graham cracker from the package and broke it in half. As though snapping the cracker in two had committed him to an action, he said, "Jim was different when he was a kid, full of the devil but not out to harm anyone. Even though I was older, he took care of me, let me stay at his house when things got too rough at mine. His dad, Archie, was shiftless and drunk most of the time, but at least he wasn't a mean drunk." He put the halves of the cracker back in the package and brushed his hands together to get rid of the crumbs. Myka wasn't wrong in her guess that he was about to rid himself of her and Steve as well. "Told you all that I know. Jim and I didn't talk about those paintings and, for that matter, Ted and I didn't either. To this day I don't know if Jim and Ted were involved in the break-in, and if you haven't figured it out yet, I wasn't the 'boy' who got Ted into a better prison. Might want to look at Al Hammond for that. He hung around with us as kids and then went to work in Corrections like his daddy and granddad. Heard he got pretty high up. Maybe Ted had something on him, or maybe Al felt sorry for him. I'd say go talk to Al, but he's been dead for a while." Hank gave a Myka a faint smile. "I'm the last of 'em, I think. You're welcome to come back, but I've got nothing more for you."
He could be holding back, probably was, but Myka doubted that whatever Hank Gryzbowski had decided not to tell them would solve the mystery of the stolen Bowdoin art. Likely it was an embarrassing detail that he was reluctant to confess. She had spent hours, sometimes days, ferreting out the secrets of people peripheral to a crime only to discover that they had been hiding nothing more explosive than an extramarital affair of the loss of a job. That the story of the "boys of St. Mary" ended here, with an old man in a nursing home rather than in a vault with art worth hundreds of millions of dollars was fitting considering that Jim Wells, who promised everything but delivered on nothing, was at the heart of it.
Before she knew Grizzle existed, she knew that Gentleman Jim wouldn't easily give up his most valuable secret. He certainly wouldn't tell it to a childhood friend who could offer, at best, only a temporary refuge from the police and their questions. Hank, moreover, wouldn't have been eager to involve himself in Jim's troubles. He had a job, a family, responsibilities, everything Jim had disdained. Myka knew she shouldn't feel disappointed, but she hadn't been able to resist living in the fantasy, if only for a moment, that she would be the one to find the missing Bowdoin art. Once again she had let herself be seduced by what a Wells had seemed to promise.
She and Steve thanked Hank for his time, and Myka dutifully infused her thanks with a sincerity that, if they need to talk to him again, might possibly make a second interview less foreboding to him. A little bit of added warmth, even earnestness, could make the difference between being greeted at the door with a friendly hello and being prevented from entering by a defense attorney. She hadn't quite left the room when Hank asked, "These new leads you're following, Jim's daughter didn't give them to you, did she?"
Steve, who was ahead, turned his head and gave Myka a puzzled look. Myka reversed direction and stepped back. "Why do you ask, Mr. Gryzbowski?"
"Just curious. Like I said, a lot of us are dead or," he twirled a finger at this temple, "cuckoo. Not too many folks around who knew that, once upon a time, Jim Wells was an altar boy. I recognized her name in the news a while back. She was being sent to prison. Caught running cons like her old man, only unluckier. I thought maybe she was telling the FBI the things she knew to get out early."
"And one of the things she knows is where the Bowdoin works are?" Myka was afraid she would sound too sharp, too anxious, but even she couldn't quibble with her tone, cool and professional.
"I don't know what she knows," Hank said impatiently, "but she's Jim's daughter. Stands to reason she'd know something no one else does."
Helena would beg to differ, Myka thought. She was slightly reassured by his answer, but it did little to slow the spurt of fear that ran through her. Pete could tell her that he had had a second DNA test run to confirm, beyond the shadow of his doubt, that Ben Winslow, and not Nate Burdette, was Christina's father and she would casually select another bite-sized candy bar from his stash. Sam could show her the disappearance of Burdette's assets and theorize that they were being stockpiled for the life that Burdette and Helena would lead outside the reach of U.S. law, and she would calmly spin his suspicions into a years-long con that the two had devised. Tori LaGrange could tell her that Ben Winslow had been arrested at a party held in a building owned by Burdette, and she would, with little more than a resigned shrug at being screwed over again, walk into a medicinal-smelling room in a nursing home prepared to interrogate a stroke victim. But let that old man, who had graham cracker crumbs dotting his shirt and white tube socks sagging at his ankles, ask her about Helena, and she was ready to run all the way back to her bedroom in Bering & Sons, never to emerge again.
"We can't tell you who it was at this point in our investigation," Steve said smoothly, "but we can tell you that it wasn't Helena." He was standing behind her. Myka knew it more by the steadiness, the solidity he radiated than by the tang of his cologne. Eau de Steve. If it could be bottled, she would buy it and douse herself with it.
Instead she took a long, slow breath, with any luck audible only to her, and asked, "Has Helena tried to contact you, Mr. Gryzbowski?"
"No, why would she?" He gruffly responded. The accompanying look confirmed that she was crazy for asking. "She's got better people than me to use those phone cards on, or whatever they have in prison these days."
"Like you said, you're one of the last to remember Gentleman Jim from way back when. Helena's always said she doesn't know where the art is. Maybe she thinks you do, and information like that is as good as money. Even in prison."
"Why don't I put your mind at ease? If you've got the time, I can show you around the church. You can see for yourself that there's no buried treasure."
Myka and Steve didn't talk until they were outside the nursing home and she had walked down to the pond. She resisted the temptation to stretch her arms. She didn't usually get claustrophobic, but Hank's room had been small and warm and her fear that Helena was, in fact, a step if not two ahead of her had made the room feel no bigger than a shoebox. She heard Steve sniff. "Don't you think it smells like water that's been standing in a washer?"
"You're ruining my zen moment."
"Just how scared were you that he was going to say that Helena contacted him?"
Myka let Steve's question hang between them. She had felt it then in a way she hadn't for a long time, the weight of all those years when a near-sighted nerdy Colorado girl had had no idea that the woman she would eventually fall in love with lived half a world away committing the occasional petty theft and playing the truant. In addition to the weight of all that unknowableness, what the woman's favorite food was, what book she had last read, there was the unknowableness of all that Helena had done when they were together. The secret meetings with Hilary and David, the planning of the gallery theft, the swapping of the elder Marstons' post-Impressionist collection for her literally too-good-to-be-true copies. Helena had since filled in some of the gaps, but there was still so much that Myka would never know, not only what Helena was too afraid or ashamed to tell her but what she had simply forgotten. Hank's question had laid bare for her Helena's irreducible . . . Wellsness. He had known that Helena, known her father, known Gentleman Jim when he was a boy. Hank wouldn't have known Helena's favorite food or the name of the book she had just finished reading, but he had met that sullen young woman with her punk haircut and her punk attitude, he had seen how she looked at her father, how much, in spite of herself, she yearned for his respect. To what extent that Helena still existed in the Helena she knew, Myka didn't know. Couldn't know, and it was that realization that had had her almost grabbing at the wall in Hank's room for support, her knees two bony knobs suddenly detached from her legs. The blind spot she had where Helena was concerned, it wasn't figurative, it was real.
"Want to hear some good news?" Just as he had sensed when she wanted his support, needed to have him next to her, he seemed to sense now that she needed the space between them, remaining where he was, at the top of the incline. "Paul and I may have found our surrogate. She's a sister of a friend of ours, and she had been planning to carry a child for him when she settled down, but Alex isn't the settling-down type, and when he told her about us . . . ." His voice trailed away. "When he told her about us," he resumed with the overemphatic firmness of someone used to controlling his emotions, "she said she wanted to meet with us. She and her husband had their kids early, and before it got too risky for her, she wanted to give Alex a chance to be a dad. We're not Alex, but she said she thought we would be good parents."
Myka turned around. "I'm so happy for you, Steve."
"It's not a done deal. We're working through attorneys because we want to get this right for everyone, but she's read through a draft agreement, and she's said she's fine with it. Paul and I need to get tested to which figure out which one of us would be a better genetic match with Debbie. He's got Parkinson's on his side, and I have cancer on mine, so it may be a toss up."
She walked up the incline and hugged him. She was freer with hugs these days, probably Christina's doing. Steve held her tight for a second before releasing her. "Paul's genes, your genes, it doesn't matter. The kid can't help but be terrific because you're going to be a great dad."
"I haven't spent a whole lot of time with Christina, but I've learned a few things. One, there can't be enough stuffed animals. Two, Nutella is the gift of the gods. Three, parents need naps even if their kids don't."
"Christina teaches me something new every time I see her," Myka wryly agreed. Her voice growing softer, she said, "You'll discover that, too. Thanks for telling me, Steve."
"I had an ulterior motive in mind. Paul and I had waited so long and every opportunity was coming up short. It just goes to show you, Mykes, that even so-called hopeless situations have a way of turning themselves around."
She could feel the intensity of his gaze. "You're telling me to keep the faith about Helena?"
"I wouldn't put it like that," he qualified, "but I'm reminding you that we come to conclusions based on evidence. If you don't have evidence that she's been betraying us, don't be so quick to fear the worst."
Myka shifted her shoulders under her jacket, half-stretch, half rolling off the suggestion that deciding whether Helena could be trusted was so easy. Nothing about Helena was easy, and, at the moment, loving her and wanting to believe in her because she loved her was especially painful. "Do you want to check out the Church of St. Mary with me tomorrow?"
Steve shook his head. "He's looking for a chance to get away from the nursing home, and you've got the wheels. Can't blame him, but you're tough enough to take him on if he tries to escape."
"The walker makes him a formidable opponent, but thanks for the vote of confidence."
"Always. If you do find something interesting, let me know. Pete's been talking about seconding me to Jonah's team. Missing art is a lot more interesting than run-of-the-mill corporate malfeasance."
She watched him cross the parking lot to his car. He had Paul waiting for him, and they would talk about the family they would finally be starting. She had Helena waiting for her, and they would, no, she would talk very carefully around the subject of the Winslows and their ceasefire regarding the lawsuit. Jemma would have spun a strategically edited tale from what their attorney had told her, but any hint that the Winslows were pulling back would be enough to fuel Helena's hopes and anxieties. Myka took her phone from her suit pocket. There was probably a stream of texts from Helena alternately rejoicing over the reprieve and worrying about what could have prompted it. Her advice for Helena would be the same as Steve had given her – keep steady, don't rush to judgment, look for the evidence. Unfortunately that advice assumed a world in which there were rules and people played fair, but in a world in which if you weren't the predator you were the prey, being cautious and analytical could get you killed.
They had completed the criminal investigation of her, or so Bates had told her with a grimace. Myka wasn't sure whether the grimace was for the necessity of the investigation in the first place or its end, but the fact that charges weren't being brought against her – if nothing else, her stupidity in believing in Helena Wells had been criminal – wasn't a relief to him. It wasn't a relief to her, either. Then he told her "they" wanted to interview her again. "They" changed; sometimes they were two agents, sometimes more, sometimes they said they were from the OIG's office, sometimes they didn't say what office or division they were from.
"Do you know what it's about?"
"They didn't say." Par for the course. Bates could look at her but not for very long. She could see the shift in his expression when he stopped thinking of her as Bering and remembered to think of her as her, the one who had fucked it all up for everyone. Still, he could look longer at her than she could look at herself. She could look in the mirror to do something with her hair, apply her usual minimal make-up, but that was it. "They're waiting for you in the conference room."
Myka observed the agents through the glass for a few seconds before she knocked on the conference room door. This time "they" were a man and a woman, older than the other agents who had interviewed her. Maybe the bigwigs were going with a softer touch, Mom and Pop, although the agents weren't quite old enough for that. She pulled at the sleeves of her suit jacket and tried discreetly to retuck her shirt. At least her suit was less wrinkled than normal. She might be able to put on a better act with these two. If someone had told her a few months ago that she would aspire, yearn to be the old Myka, she would have laughed in derision, but she was sentimental about the old Myka now. The old Myka had been tentative, too eager to please her superiors, but she knew she was smart, knew she worked hard, and she believed, with the faith of the untested and the untried, that only if she gave more, tried harder she would ultimately be rewarded. Life couldn't be so unfair as to take on the form of Warren Bering forever. She wasn't always destined not to measure up.
The smiles the agents greeted her with seemed sincere, more sincere than the other agents' smiles, more relaxed, more open. Myka allowed herself to feel a flicker of hope at those smiles. Maybe this was a mop-up interview, two agents on the long slope toward retirement sent from headquarters or wherever to tie up the loose ends from the other interviews, to ask one more time, "You suspected nothing at all, not until you first heard about the Marston heist?" For the hundredth time, she would say, "Nothing at all." In retrospect, Myka realized that it was going to be a different kind of interview when the first question they asked wasn't about the theft or Helena or even why she decided to join the FBI but about her father. Instead of the thick case file from the Marston heist or Jim Wells's old case file, there was a thin manila file folder on the table. She had thought there wasn't much about the investigation anymore that could surprise her, but when one of the agents opened the folder and started reading from the notes of the special agents who had evaluated her in the later stages of the hiring process, Myka recognized she wasn't numb to the sting of humiliation. She discovered shortly afterward she was wrong about the humiliation, too, when after a few complimentary comments, the agents read the comments that questioned whether she had the make-up to be a successful special agent. She wasn't being humiliated; she was being flayed alive.
As they probed her about her relationship with her father and how it had affected her other relationships, Myka understood that they wanted her to see a parallel between her desire to prove herself to her father and her desire to become a special agent. "It's a high bar we set. Not everyone can join the FBI. The pressure you felt must have been unrelenting because you wouldn't have been satisfied with being a good special agent. You wanted to be one of the best."
She shook her head, aware of the trap they were setting for her, but unable to avoid it. "Of course. Who doesn't want to be the best of the best?"
The male agent only nodded. It was the woman who set the barb. "But if perfection itself becomes the goal rather than being a better agent, then it can be a problem, don't you think? If an agent becomes too rigid, too afraid to make a mistake, she becomes less effective, wouldn't you say?" The woman's voice grew both softer and, paradoxically, harder to shut out. "The more worried she becomes that she's not measuring up, the more she's focused on her performance rather than the case, the more she threatens to become a liability, doesn't she?" Myka wanted to resist the picture of Special Agent Bering that they were drawing, so tightly wound, so brittle, so obsessed with controlling every aspect of an investigation that she loses sight of the larger mission. Not without an appreciation of the irony of it, she thought that Pete, in spite of or maybe because of his jumbling of the facts and his disregard for order, for process, was the better agent of the two of them. She suspected the agents interviewing her would think so. He had never been taken in by Helena, not once.
Helena. In the agents' view, she or someone like her would have inevitably precipitated Myka's downfall. Someone so blindly focused, so consumed with proving herself was also the lonely, needy victim a con artist would select. As Myka stared at the file, she began remembering the interview, how eager she was to present herself as the perfect candidate. The declarations she had made came back to her with the painful clarity awarded only to the humbled. She hadn't known what the hell she was talking about back then. "I've always been driven." "I was in my last year of law school, and I decided I didn't want to be a prosecutor. I didn't want to stand on the sidelines. I wanted to give more of myself." "I'm not into flashing a badge and throwing my weight around. I want to keep people safe." "I not only learn from my mistakes, I become a stronger person because of them." "I don't give up. Ever."
The male agent broke into Myka's thoughts. "You had aced everything until then, the first test, the written assessment. The interview almost flunked you."
"And here I'd been assuming that it was the physical fitness requirement that almost brought me down." She was being flippant, which wasn't helping her cause, but she was almost past caring about how the FBI felt about her. If anything, she wished she had flunked the interview. She would have been crushed, but, in a strange way, it might have been freeing, too, as joining the FBI and proving her father wrong (or thinking she had) never was. Pushing back her chair and trying to resist realigning her suit jacket again, she stood as straight as she could and looked first at the woman and then at the man. "If you ever get your hands on Helena, you should have her help you design better tests – to weed the likes of me out."
Years later when Myka told her about the meeting with the two agents, Leena speculated that they were behavioral specialists trying to create a profile. Myka quirked an eyebrow at Leena's sudden silence. "Profile? Do you want to explain, or should I guess?"
Leena uneasily rolled her shoulders. "I don't know who I should be with you right now, Myka. Your friend, your therapist, or the colleague who can pull rank on you."
"Just be honest."
"Then my thought is that they were trying to create a profile that would tell us which agents would be most vulnerable to manipulation." Her gaze skittered away from Myka's. "It's only a theory. I don't know all the secrets."
Myka felt she could bear to hear the truth. For the first time in years, she was happy. Her marriage to Sam, only two months old, seemed full of promise, and if she couldn't rid herself of the nagging suspicion that it would take no more than a simple mistake for the agency to put her out on the curb, she could repress it long enough to give her full attention and energy to her assignments. She couldn't stop seeking perfection, but she accepted with better grace how far she was from achieving it. "Were they right? Was it a mistake that I made it through the screening process?"
"Everybody has a weakness that can be exploited, it's just that Marston was –"
"A huge embarrassment," Myka cut in without rancor.
"Yes," Leena admitted, after an exasperated click of her tongue, "but, as I was going to say, it was more a failure of process than a person, which is what we really hate. Helena didn't con just you, she conned Bates, she conned every agent she worked with."
"Not Pete."
"Even Pete. He was suspicious, but apparently he wasn't suspicious enough to talk to Bates or go over his head. My point is that as trained agents, as a law enforcement agency that takes its procedures and policies seriously, we, and I mean we, let a con artist pull a job under our noses. But rather than doing some serious soul-searching, we pointed fingers at you and, to an extent, Bates. The problem couldn't be with how we do things, it has to be with the people we select." She pinched the skin between her eyebrows, as if she were feeling the pressure of an incipient headache. "Profiles . . . they can be useful tools but they're just that, tools. You're not going to prevent another embarrassment by trying to isolate a certain personality type." Under her breath, she muttered, "You're only going to ensure that it happens again."
Myka pressed again. "You haven't really answered my question. Did the FBI make a mistake by hiring me?"
With a rare flash of impatience, Leena said, "Have you ever thought about why you're still asking this question? Maybe it's not that the FBI made a mistake by choosing you. Maybe it's that you made a mistake by choosing the FBI."
When Myka left Serenity Bay, she knew she wouldn't change direction. She would go where she had been going most every night since she had become involved with Helena again. She could tell herself it had been ineluctable, unavoidable, fated, destined, and while there was some truth to her belief that she had lived the past eight years in a kind of suspension, the moment that she realized Helena had betrayed her hanging over years of bitterness and unsuccessful attempts to find new, better Helenas until it could interlock, almost seamlessly, with the moment she had seen her again, she knew that she had made a choice – to trust that Helena was working with them rather than against them, that Helena loved her, that this time would be different, if only because it had to be. Pete said she made the right choices, if not always the wise ones. Myka wasn't sure she understood the distinction. When was a wise decision not the right one? The ability to logically, objectively evaluate actions and their potential outcomes and then to choose the one that promised to do the most good and the least harm, wisdom and rightness working hand in hand. It was decision-making completely opposite to the process that had put her back in Helena's bed, which had happened with her standing in front of a door and seeing Helena on the other side of it and deciding, with a near-total indifference to the possible outcomes, that she was tired of being apart from her. Yet for all the likelihood that it was the worst decision she could have made, Myka wouldn't unmake it, no matter what Sam or Pete or Tori or Hank tried to tell her.
She had expected Helena to be euphoric, or at least as euphoric as someone with such a jaundiced view of the world could be, but Helena's happiness at the news about the Winslows was muted, and Myka wondered if Jemma had downplayed the import of the Winslows' retreat on the suit a little too much. Even if Helena knew more than any of them did about what had prompted the Winslows to change their minds about pressing forward with revoking her rights to Christina, she was capable of giving a better performance than a relieved "Finally" accompanied by a smile too small for the occasion.
Myka couldn't help but prod her a little. "It might be only temporary, but it's worth celebrating." They were on the sofa, Helena's head on her lap.
"I can hear your stomach gurgling. You're still hungry." Helena raised herself up and headed toward the kitchen. "I can make you another grilled cheese."
"The smoke in the kitchen hasn't dissipated from the first one." Myka caught at Helena's hand. "Seriously, I'm not hungry. I thought you'd be bouncing off the wall with joy."
"Like you said, it may be temporary, and I don't want to get my hopes up." She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "You didn't have anything to do with this, did you? It's been eating at me, thinking that you and Irene might launched this attack you've been planning against Ben and his father. A momentary reprieve isn't worth it. He'll cost you your job, and he'll find a way of getting back at Irene."
"It's none of my doing or hers. Besides, I can always find another job, and I wouldn't bet on anyone getting the upper hand going up against Irene Frederic."
"I'm forced to agree with you about Irene, but being an agent isn't just a job for you, Myka." Myka looked at their joined hands but didn't respond. After a moment or two, Helena said, "I'll take your word for it – for now – that you didn't poke at the Winslows with a stick." A longer silence ensued broken only by Helena's long, shaky inhale. Her hand, which had remained limp in Myka's grasp, returned the pressure, her fingers lacing themselves between Myka's. "You'll never guess who I talked to today," she said with false brightness.
Myka regarded her steadily. One of the hardest emotions to fake convincingly was fear. People tended to overwork their expressions, so she ignored the trembling lips and the tears in favor of less theatrical demonstrations. Fear was like water, it was always seeking a way out, so people stiffened their faces, stilled their movements trying to dam it back. Helena's tone, the squeeze of her fingers, they could be calibrated, even the sarcastic quirking of her mouth and the flexing of her eyebrows might be touches she added, but these last movements were about a half-second too slow, as if her features were freezing in place, one by one. Myka didn't doubt that her fear was real.
"Lee received a tip last night about a wholesaler who might be switching out real jewels for imitations. He didn't tell me or Jennifer until this morning, when we were on our way to Jersey City for a surprise visit. We hadn't been there more than a half-hour before one of the assistants said there was a call for me on the main line." Instead of rising, Helena's voice dropped in volume. "It was Nate. He apologized for not getting in contact with me sooner, but he had been 'busy.'" She let go of Myka's hand and slumped down beside her on the sofa. "He told me that he wants to talk soon. He said he needs to take care of a few things, but after that, he's all mine." She paused, then added in a tone that combined admiration and bitterness, "I've never doubted that he has someone on the FBI's payroll, but how he found me today of all days . . . ." She jumped up from the sofa and began to pace the living room. "He actually said it, 'I'll be all yours.' He knows how to mess with me, Myka. How can I relax about Ben and his father when Nate's decided to make a grand entrance onto the scene? He was letting me know that he can't be played. That's why he called me when and where he did. How the hell someone found out about Lee's call, I can't fathom . . . unless it was Lee himself."
Or you. Myka couldn't stop herself from thinking it. It seemed just as natural a conclusion as her conclusion that Helena was truly afraid. She could think both and believe both about the woman pacing in front of her. Helena stopped. "You don't look as surprised as you should be."
Myka shrugged. She had been unpleasantly reminded earlier in the evening of just how surprised she could still be, but there was no need to tell Helena that. Not yet, not until they came out safe on the other side, as Helena had put it, and maybe not even then. "I don't want to give him that power. He can't know everything." With more bravado than she felt, she added. "For instance, he doesn't know me. He could have a mole in the office reading him my entire personnel file, but that doesn't mean he knows me."
"Look at Myka Bering bragging," Helena murmured, her lips easing into a teasing smile. "I'm hoping that means you have a plan."
Of course she didn't. Myka said blandly, "I'm working on one."