CHAPTER 5:Everything She Is Leaving Behind

As Alina was packing one suitcase for six months she realised how her life was now out of her control.

She sat on the bedroom floor at midnight on Saturday and looked at the small piles she'd made — work clothes, casual clothes, the dress she'd bought for her cousin's wedding and worn once .She sat there as she  couldn't decide which version of herself she was packing for. The person who lived here knew what she needed. She knew which drawer was stuck and needed lifting, knew that the hot water in the shower took ninety seconds to arrive, and knew which floorboard creaked outside her mother's old room.

She did not know the person who was about to live in a penthouse forty-eight floors above the city.

She was still sitting there at seven in the morning when Ethan knocked. She hadn't slept, she had been up all night.

He came in, looked at the half-packed suitcase and the piles on the floor and  then looked at her sitting in the middle of them.Ethan sat down beside her without being asked. He had two coffees. He handed her one.

They sat in silence for a while.

"You could still—" he started.

"Ethan."

"I know. I know. I'm just—" He wrapped both hands around his cup. "I'm going to miss you."

She looked at him. He was staring at the carpet, jaw tight, indicating that he was feeling things he thought he wasn't supposed to say out loud. She put her shoulder with his.

"I'm not dying," she said.

"I know that."

"It's just  six months."

"I know."

"You can call me every day if you want."

"I will." He finally looked at her. "What if he's—what if he's not what he seems? What if something happens and you can't—"

"I have the termination clause. I have the right to leave if I feel unsafe."

"Rights in contracts don't always work in real life, how sure are you that you will be safe?"

"Ethan." She held his gaze. "I have to do this. You know I have to do this. And I need you to help me get through this morning without falling apart, once I'm gone you can fall apart as much as you want ."

He was quiet. Then he nodded, and stood up. "Right. What still needs packing?"

They worked in complete silence. He folded things better than she did — she'd always been a roller, he was a folder — and they'd had the folder-versus-roller argument enough times that they'd developed a silent system: he folded, she packed. It was a domestic rhythm so familiar she almost couldn't stand it.

"Take that blazer," he said, when she hesitated over it.

"It's the only one I have."

"Exactly. Take it."

At nine-fifteen she put on her coat and picked up her bags and stood in the middle of her empty-looking apartment. The suitcase sat by the door. Everything necessary was in it. Everything that wasn't necessary was left behind.

"I'll check on the place," Ethan said.

"You don't have to."

"I want to." He looked at the room. “Everything will be intact when you come back.”

She went to see her mother before the car came.

Diana Carter was sitting up when Alina arrived, which stopped her in the doorway for a second. Sitting up was new. The specialist had adjusted something, changed one of the medications, and it was working — there was color in her face this morning, actual color, and she looked at Alina with clear eyes that noticed everything.

"You look like you haven't slept," her mother said.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't ask if you were fine. I said you look like you haven't slept." She patted the bed beside her. "Come sit."

Alina sat. She'd prepared the half-truth on the drive over: new accommodations, a temporary arrangement, a work opportunity. She started to deliver it.

Her mother let her finish. Then she said: "What aren't you telling me?"

"Mum—"

"Alina." Quietly. Not angry. Just calm in the way her mother had always been about the things that mattered. "I'm ill,not stupid. You've been hiding something for weeks. What is it?"

She couldn't. She sat there and looked at her mother's clear eyes which made it hard for her to keep up with the lie ,the secret she'd been hiding for weeks pushed up against the inside of her chest like a tide.

"I made an arrangement," she said. "A man is — he's going to help with everything. The bills, the flat, everything. In return I have to do some things that are — it's complicated. But  don't worry it's safe. I have a contract that will protect me."

Her mother was quiet for a moment. "What kind of man?"

"A powerful one."

"Does he know who you are?"

She thought about the photograph. About the three years. "Yes," she said. "He does."

"And do you know who he is?"

"I'm still learning."

Her mother looked at her for a long time. Then she reached across and took Alina's hand and pressed something into it — it was a piece of folded paper,  slightly yellowed and stiff.

"I've been keeping this," she said quietly. "I found it months ago, in your father's old papers. I didn't know if it mattered. I didn't know if you'd ever need it." She folded Alina's fingers around it. "Now I think you should have it."

"What is it?"

"Read it in the car."

Alina hugged her mother — very tight, for a long time as though she was never going to see her again, she finally let go and walked out through the glass doors into the morning with a lot of doubts and uncertainty of what was ahead.

The car was already in the parking lot.

She got in. She waited until they were moving before she opened the folded paper.

It was a newspaper clipping. Old. A headline in small, serious type:

VOSS INDUSTRIES DEAL COLLAPSE COSTS MILLIONS — WHISTLEBLOWER STILL UNIDENTIFIED.

She read it once. Twice. Three times. Then she looked up at the back of the driver's head, at the city moving past the windows, at the tower rising in the distance — forty-eight floors of glass and the man at the top of them who had known her face for three years.

 The whistleblower had never been identified.

 He was never meant to find out who it was.

 Except he did. 

He  found out, and he waited, and now she was in his car, and she had a newspaper article that meant she was not walking into this blind — but she was still walking into it. The car arrived at their destination. The door opened. She got out. She put the  piece of paper in her pocket, along with the index card where she had written her four conditions, and she looked up at the building, and  said, under her breath, very quietly:

 "Okay there is no going back now. Let's go."