Chapter 7: The Account With My Name On It

"Rebecca, if you don't answer me in the next ten seconds I'm calling campus security and telling them you've been kidnapped by a cult."

Priya's voice crackles through the phone, half joking, half not, and I realize I've been standing on the library steps for almost a full minute without dialing anyone, just staring at the message on my screen like it might rearrange itself into something that makes sense.

"I'm here," I say. "Sorry. I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine. You sound like someone who just watched a ghost walk through a wall." A pause, muffled, like she's covering the receiver to tell someone else to be quiet. "What happened up there?"

I tell her, standing in the cold with my coat pulled tight, the words tumbling out faster than I mean them to. The text about Kate. Christian's confession, the hotel bar, the lawyer, a girl transferred out of her own life because a business associate happened to be drinking at the wrong bar on the wrong night. And then the second message, the one that's still glowing accusingly in my palm.

Priya is quiet for a long moment after I finish. Too quiet.

"Priya."

"I'm thinking." Her voice has lost its teasing edge completely now, gone careful in a way that scares me more than her panic would have. "Rebecca, has anyone ever asked you for your social security number this semester? A financial aid form, a scholarship application, anything that wasn't through the registrar directly?"

My stomach does something slow and cold. "No. Why would you ask that?"

"Because if someone opened something in your name, it had to start somewhere. A form. A signature. Something." I can hear her moving, a door opening, footsteps on hardwood. "I'm coming to find you. Don't go back to your dorm yet. Meet me at the diner on Clark."

"Priya, it's almost nine."

"And somebody just told you that you might be tangled up in whatever destroyed the life of a girl named Kate. I think the diner can handle a late customer." Her voice gentles. "I'm not trying to scare you worse than you already are. I just don't think you should be alone with this right now."

She's right, and I hate that she's right, because being alone with this feels exactly like what the message wants. I agree, hang up, and start walking.

The campus at night has a particular quiet to it, streetlamps haloed in the cold, the windows of the library going dark one floor at a time behind me as some unseen custodian makes their rounds. I keep my phone gripped tight in my coat pocket the whole walk, half expecting it to buzz again, half hoping it will, because at least then I'd know whoever is doing this isn't finished yet, and unfinished means there's still time to understand what they want.

It buzzes before I reach the corner.

Not the blocked number. Christian.

Found Sloane. She says she doesn't know what I'm talking about. She's lying. I can always tell when she's lying, there's a thing she does with her ring, turning it on her finger. She did it four times in two minutes.

Then, a second later:

I'm sorry. I shouldn't be texting you updates like you're part of my surveillance team. Are you okay? That was a lot to drop on you tonight.

I stop walking, right there on the empty sidewalk, and read it twice. Six years of watching this boy from careful distance taught me to expect certain things from him: charm deployed like currency, warmth that evaporates the second someone else is watching. It did not teach me to expect this, a boy circling back in the middle of his own crisis to ask if I'm okay.

I'm okay, I type back. Going to meet Priya. Be careful with Sloane. If she's lying, she's lying for a reason, and reasons like that usually protect someone.

Protect who?

Herself, probably. Or you. People don't always lie to hurt the person they're lying to.

There's a longer pause this time before his reply comes through, long enough that I start walking again, phone held loose in my hand, watching the screen glow faintly against the dark street.

You're very forgiving for a girl a blocked number just tried to scare.

I'm not forgiving. I'm careful. There's a difference.

I'm starting to think you're always the smartest person in whatever room you're standing in, and nobody noticed until today.

Something warm moves through me despite everything, despite the fear still sitting cold in my stomach, despite the message about an account I've never opened in a bank I've never used. I don't let myself examine that warmth too closely. I've built a careful life out of not examining things too closely when it comes to Christian Ashworth, and tonight of all nights isn't the time to break that habit.

The diner's neon sign flickers into view at the end of the block, pink and tired against the dark, and I can already see Priya through the window, two mugs of coffee steaming on the table in front of her, her leg bouncing under the booth the way it does when she's worried and trying not to show it. I push the door open, the bell above it jangling too bright for the hour, and she looks up with an expression that tells me she's spent the last ten minutes rehearsing exactly what she wants to say to me.

"Sit," she says, before I've even reached the booth. "Drink the coffee. It's terrible, but it's hot, and you look like you need something hot."

I slide in across from her, wrap both hands around the mug, and feel the shaking in my fingers settle just slightly against the warmth. Priya watches me with the particular, fierce attention of someone building a case.

"I called my cousin," she says. "The one who works in fraud at the bank downtown. I didn't tell her anything specific, just asked, hypothetically, how someone would check if an account exists under their name without their knowledge."

"And?"

"She says if it's real, if there's actually something out there with your name on it, it would show up on a credit report. She says I should walk you through pulling one tonight, before you sleep, so you're not lying awake all night not knowing." Priya reaches across the table and squeezes my free hand, grounding and fierce at once. "Whatever's going on here, Rebecca, you don't have to figure it out alone. I mean that."

I nod, throat too tight to answer properly, and pull out my laptop while she talks me through the website, her voice steady and sure in a way that makes the whole terrifying night feel, for just a moment, survivable. I type in my information with careful, deliberate keystrokes, Priya leaning over my shoulder, both of us holding our breath as the page loads.

The report blinks onto the screen.

Three accounts. One is my student checking account, the one my mother helped me open freshman year with forty dollars and a promise to be careful. One is a credit card I applied for myself last spring, limit embarrassingly small, balance paid in full every month out of pure terror of debt.

The third account was opened four months ago. A savings account, at a private bank I've never heard of, with an opening deposit of twenty five thousand dollars.

And the authorized co-signer listed beside my own name is Graham Ashworth.