Chapter 8: Find Me

I ran until the alley opened onto a street of tyre shops and auto-body garages. Then I kept running until my lungs burned and my legs trembled and I couldn’t tell if the sound behind me was footsteps or my own heartbeat.

A rideshare was sliding past with its hazards blinking. I waved both arms like a drowning woman. The driver, a young guy with earbuds on, took one look at my face and unlocked the doors without a word.

“Koreatown,” I managed, and gave him Natalie’s address.

I pressed my forehead against the cold window. The driver’s playlist murmured something soft and sad about home, and I wanted to ask him to turn it off. We passed the Coliseum, the Convention Center, a thousand lit windows with a thousand ordinary families behind them eating dinner and arguing about the dishes. Some of those families, I thought, were built on lies as well. Mine had simply been the one that cracked.

In my fist were a USB drive and an envelope with ten thousand dollars I hadn’t asked for. In my chest was a feeling I had no name for, as though someone had reached inside and rearranged all the furniture.

My mother had said she loved me. She had also said she’d never forgive herself for taking me. Both things were true at once, and I didn’t know where to put either of them. I opened the envelope an inch and looked at the bundled hundreds, crisp and banded, and shut it again quickly, the way you slam a door on a draught. I had never held so much money. It felt like a bribe, a farewell and an apology at the same time, and I couldn’t tell which one my mother meant.

Natalie opened her door before I knocked. She pulled me inside and slid the bolt behind us. Her apartment was small and warm and smelled of jollof rice, and for one wild moment I wanted to lie down on her kitchen floor and sleep for a week.

“I told you not to go alone,” she said, and then burst into tears.

We sat on her sofa under a window that looked out on a parking structure. I told her everything, the ledger page, the newspaper, the cheque stub, the way the door had come down like a guillotine. When I got to Mum, Natalie put her hand over her mouth.

“She really said she loved you?”

“She said a lot of things.”

“And she gave you ten thousand dollars to leave town?”

“She called it paying for my life.” I laughed, though it hurt. “How did they find the storage unit so fast, Natalie? Dad only gave me the key this afternoon. Nobody knew where I was going.”

She frowned. She took my phone out of my bag, turned it over in her hand, and went very quiet.

“Amelia, did you ever turn off Find My?”

“What?”

“Location sharing. Your family plan. You and Vanessa have shared locations for like, three years.” She held up the screen toward me. A small blue dot pulsed on a map of Koreatown, exactly where we were sitting. “Your phone has been on this entire time.”

My stomach dropped.

“Anybody on your plan could see you,” Natalie said. “The guesthouse. Crenshaw. The bank. San Pedro. She didn’t need me to tell her anything.”

I switched the phone off and held the button until the screen went black. My fingers felt like someone else’s.

“Vanessa has been watching me,” I whispered. “The whole day.”

“Or somebody who has Vanessa’s phone.”

“Or my mother,” I said. “I don’t know who to trust any more.”

Natalie reached for the USB drive in my hand. “Then let’s find out what he wanted you to see.”

She made tea first, because Natalie believed no terrible thing should ever be faced without it, and she wrapped me in a blanket that smelled of her fabric softener. For a few minutes we simply sat. A neighbour’s television murmured through the wall, and a car alarm chirped twice and fell silent. It was so ordinary that I nearly cried again.

“Whatever’s on that drive,” Natalie said finally, “you don’t have to watch it tonight.”

“Yes, I do.” I turned the little silver stick over in my fingers. “He wrote if something happens to me. Something already has.”

She nodded slowly and set down her mug.

She plugged it into her laptop. A single folder opened, and inside it sat one video file, dated three weeks ago. The thumbnail was my father’s face in close-up, lit by the lamp on his desk in the study.

I took a breath and pressed play.

Dad looked older than I remembered. His collar sat crooked, and there were grey shadows under his eyes. He looked straight into the camera for a long moment before he spoke.

“Amelia. If you are watching this, then I’ve lost either my nerve or my life, and I am sorry for both.”

My eyes filled. I pressed my knuckles to my mouth.

“You are not a Coker by blood. I will say that first, because I have been a coward about it for twenty-two years. But you have been my daughter in every way that matters, and I need you to remember that in the next few hours, because you are about to hear things about me that will make you hate me. I will have earned it.”

He paused and swallowed. The camera caught the movement of his throat.

“I did something terrible the night you were born, and it didn’t end that night. The doctor who helped me, Peterson Watson, was not acting alone. Someone paid him, and I was too ashamed to ask who. For two decades I pretended not to know. Recently someone began asking me about it again. They wanted money. I gave it. Then they wanted more.”

His voice cracked, and he looked away from the lens. “I can’t keep paying, Amelia. I have to send you away before this comes out. If you stay in my house, they will hurt you to hurt me.”

So the money, I thought, dazed. Did he…

“There is something else you need to know. Your real mother’s name is—”

The image froze. A grey bar swallowed the screen, and a small box opened over it.

FILE CORRUPTED.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”

Natalie hammered the keyboard, then clicked through folders, searching for a backup. “Maybe he saved another copy somewhere. Maybe it’s on the cloud.”

“Try it!”

She was still typing when her phone buzzed against the coffee table. We both flinched. She looked down at it, and her face went slack.

It was a text from an unknown number. She turned the screen toward me.

Tell Amelia I’m outside.

Then the doorbell rang.