Page 96 of Devil

“It has been a while,” Busy says coolly. “For me, I can’t even remember, but I think probably—what do we think, Birdie? Seven years since she kicked you out of her house because your own student assaulted you?”

“It wasn’t quite like that,” I whisper, but Busy keeps talking.

“I saw you on the news last week, you know,” she says. “Lawyer for the diocese, how fancy. And you’ve got that nice new tax bracket glow. Or maybe that’s just foundation that’s color matched for once?”

To her credit, Kaitlyn doesn’t take the bait, even though the reflex to exchange bitchy insults with Busy is as old as our preschool class picture. Instead, she switches her gaze to me. “Birdie,” she says—notquietlynecessarily but with a sort of delicacy that reminds me of quietness. “Can we talk?”

Busy tilts her chin at Kaitlyn. “Not finished making her feel like shit? Would you like to kick her out a second time? She works at a gas station now, so maybe you’d like to see if you can get her fired from there too?”

Kaitlyn closes her eyes briefly and then opens them again, fully composed. Wherever her journey as a lawyer has taken her in the last seven years, it’s matured her, polished away all the outward reactions and tics. “If you want to talk here, we can. I know how close you two are, so I’m guessing you won’t object to having this conversation in front of Busy.”

“Like I’d leave her alone with you, you sadistic b?—”

“Busy!” I put my hand over hers on the table. “It’s okay. Everything is okay now.”

I turn back to Kaitlyn and force myself to take a breath. Sweat is gathering at the small of my back and on my scalp, and my heart is thumping in my chest, lurching and jolting like it’s trying to pump enough blood for an army. Again, I wish Bell were here. I also wish Kaitlyn didn’t want to talk because anything she could want to talk about will only bring up grim and ugly things.

But Bell said we’d see each other tonight, that he’d fuck me until I couldn’t walk, that he’d feed me ice cream after. Bell kissed me this morning like he was ready to wake me up from a hundred-year sleep, and Bell loves me, and everything is okay. Everything will be okay by tonight, when I’ll be safe and doted on, and I just have to make it through right now.

“It’s okay if we talk here,” I say. I keep my voice low to hide any potential quavering, and I think it works.

Kaitlyn sits down next to me, I think so she can hear me better. “Right,” she says and takes a deep breath. It’s not explicit on her face—flawlessly made up, the med-spa treatments only barely discernible—or in her posture, which signals an alert kind of competence, but I sense that she’s nervous. “I want to say I’m sorry. For what Busy said earlier—she’s right. I should have done a better job listening to you, and I definitely shouldn’t have kicked you out of my house. I’ve thought about it so often since then, and I’ve felt so guilty and ashamed, and then I saw you at the gala last month?—”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.I hope she didn’t see me literally running away from her.

“—and when I saw you were with Ryan Bell, I thoughtSurely not. Surely she’s not with the same boy who ended her art career.”

Next to me, Busy becomes motionless, her hand going rigid under mine.

“I started asking around. He’s popular, has friends everywhere, so it wasn’t hard to find out that you were dating, that you started living with him this summer. And I had to dig deeper, I’m sorry, I just had to know, because I couldn’t understand why you’d date him after what he did to you. I was worried that you’d lost the farm and had no other place to go, and that’s when I saw that you’d recorded a new deed this summer, a deed showing that the farm is held by a trust. A trust named for you.”

Something deep inside me goes very, very still.

I don’t know anything about the farm being in a trust. I definitely don’t know anything about a trust named forme. Everything Bell is giving me should be for Busy.

Right?

“You’ve only been together a few months, and I just worry—with everything you were trying to tell me that night—that you’re not okay. That he’s coercing you or financially isolating you. And you’ve always been so careful, Birdie, more careful than all of us, but you’ve also been the least…” Kaitlyn pauses, clearly searching for a word that’s not offensive. “The least suspicious. The least cynical. It’s a good thing, generally. But I worry that he’s not a good person, no matter how much this city loves him. Everyone at Evelyn loved him too, and look at what he did.”

I nod. I’m not sure what I’m nodding about, actually, what I could be agreeing with in anything she said, but it seems like the right thing to do.

She takes my free hand and sandwiches it between both of hers, concern scrawled all over her face. “If you need help, I’m here.”

“Very reassuring from the one person who could have helped her seven years ago and helped ruin her life instead,” Busy says from next to me, having come back to life. “If you felt so guilty all these years, why didn’t you ever reach out? Never stop by the farm? Never call, never write?”

Kaitlyn lets go of my hand and carefully tucks her hair behind one ear. “I should have,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I want to help now, I promise.I promise. I was wrong to have doubted you back then, Birdie, but in my work, I’ve learned so much more about assault and the effect it has on a victim, how it can affect testimony and memory. And seeing the situation you’re in now, I think you need an advocate to help navigate you to a safer situation.” She pulls a business card out of her slender leather clutch and sets it on the table next to my marked-up program. “This is the number of a lawyer friend who’s got experience disentangling property and money in abusive relationships. She’ll help you for free if money is an issue. And I’ve got my number written on the back, and please,please, call me if you need anything. I want to help and I want to make things right.”

She touches my hand and gives me a final look—worried and caring—before standing up. She gives Busy a nod and walks away, perfectly balanced on sky-high heels, hair bouncing loosely around her shoulders as she’s swallowed by the milling crowd on the far side of the room.

“Busy,” I say, turning to my twin, but she’s already shaking her head.

“Not here. In the car.”

I nod. I understand. I pocket the business card, sip automatically at my coffee, and then when Busy stands, I follow her out of the convention center ballroom without seeing anything around us. Kaitlyn is already gone, but it’s hard to feel relieved when I don’t think I feel anything at all right now.

The farm is in a trust? Why? And how could he even do that without me?

We get to the car and navigate away from the convention center to the highway. Then Busy finally speaks, her foot braced against the dash and her head thrown back against the passenger seat. She could be sixteen instead of thirty-six right now.