Chapter 3

 Aya’s POV

“Miss Aya,” said a voice behind me. “Don’t turn around.”

I stopped at the gate of the Sterling estate with a duffel bag in one hand and my shoes in the other. It was eleven fifty in the morning. Rain dripped off the cedar trees on Medina Road. Behind me, the big white house sat on its lawn like a wedding cake, every curtain drawn.

Somebody had put my bag by the mailbox. One bag. Twelve years of my life, and a security guard had zipped it for me.

“Keep walking,” said the voice. “Slowly. I’m going to put a hand on your arm.”

A thin, spotted hand closed around my elbow. It smelled of pipe tobacco and Brasso and old leather.

Abel Finch had driven the Sterling car for forty years. He was seventy-three now, retired, stooped like a question mark, and he still came up to the gate every morning to check the post. When I was twelve years old, he’d taught me how to drive a stick shift in the back lot, singing hymns off-key.

“Abel,” I whispered. “I didn’t do it.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“Everyone thinks...”

“Child, I’ve watched that girl steal since she was six.” His eyes, watery and blue, flickered toward the house. “I don’t have long. They watch the cameras. Give me your hand.”

I held it out. He pressed a small, hard thing into my palm and folded my fingers over it.

A key.

A little brass one, with a worn head and a number stamped on the shaft. 214.

“Your mother gave me this,” he said. “The night before she passed. She said, Abel, if anything happens to me, keep it until Aya’s grown. Then give it to her, and tell her to look.”

My whole body went cold.

“Look at what?”

“I don’t know. It’s a box at the Second Avenue bank. The old Puget building.” His mouth worked. “I should have given it to you at eighteen. I was afraid. Mrs. Sterling found out I had it, once. She asked me. I said I’d thrown it in the lake.” He swallowed. “I’m a coward, Aya. I’ve been a coward for fourteen years. But I couldn’t watch them throw you out with nothing. Not you.”

“Abel.”

“Go. Go, before they see.”

He squeezed my hand. Then he turned, shuffled back through the gate, and closed it behind him with a click.

I stood there in the rain with the key burning in my fist.

~

The van was waiting at the bottom of the hill.

It was a battered white delivery van with PIKE AND PEARL SEAFOOD painted down the side, and a woman in a stained chef’s jacket hung out of the driver’s window, waving both arms.

“Get in!” shouted Liron Park. “Get in, get in, I’ve been circling for forty minutes, a man honked at me!”

I got in.

She didn’t say a word. She just leaned across the gearshift and hugged me so hard my ribs creaked. Liron is twenty-seven and five foot one, fierce and round-faced, with tattoos on both forearms and a temper that once made a health inspector cry. We met at a night class in perfumery, where she was learning to pair scent with flavor. We’ve been best friends ever since.

“I saw it,” she said into my hair. “It’s everywhere. It’s on three different accounts. Somebody put your name in a hashtag.”

“Liron.”

“I don’t believe a word of it. Not one.” She pulled back. Her eyes were wet. “You’d sooner steal a bank than step on Ilana’s foot. You’re the most boring, honest, nose-in-a-bottle person I’ve ever met. Who did it? Tell me who and I’ll put them in a stew.”

I laughed. It cracked.

“I don’t know who,” I said. “I know how. There was a drug in the champagne.”

“Then we’re going to the police.”

“They won’t listen.”

“Then we’re going to a lawyer.”

“With what money?”

“I have eleven hundred dollars and a freezer of prawns.”

I put my head against her shoulder and cried, quietly, into a jacket that smelled of garlic and lemon and fryer oil, while she drove me across the city in the rain.

~

Her flat in Capitol Hill was two rooms above a laundromat, with a window over the street and a sofa that had been slept on by half the line cooks in Seattle. She made me eat toast. She made me drink water. She took my phone from my hand, scrolled through it, swore, and put it face down on the counter.

“Don’t look at it,” she said. “Please.”

“I have to.”

“You don’t.”

I looked.

Forty-three messages. Twenty-one from people I’d worked with for years.

Fired. She got fired, right? That’s what I heard.

Sorry, Aya. It’s just, you understand. HR asked us not to contact you.

Did you really do it in the ENGAGEMENT SUITE lol.

There was one email, from Sterling Fragrance House HR. The subject line read Termination of Employment. Immediate effect. No severance. Company property to be returned. Legal action reserved.

At the bottom, a link to a news site. I didn’t click it. I didn’t have to. The photograph was the thumbnail.

Me, on a white bed. Eitan beside me. My hair spilling. The strap of my green dress hanging off my shoulder.

I put my hand on my mouth.

“Look at me,” said Liron. “Aya. Look at me.”

I looked.

“They wanted you out. That’s what it is. That’s the only reason anyone does this.” She caught my chin. “You must have been getting close to the truth. What were you asking about? Before?”

“My mother.”

Liron went still.

“I wanted to know why the file was sealed. I wrote to the county clerk. Three weeks ago. I asked for the coroner’s report.” My voice shook. “Ilana said, You should have stopped asking about Mama Hannah.”

“Oh my God.”

“And Abel gave me this.”

I opened my hand. The brass key lay across my palm, dull in the window light. Liron stared at it.

“That’s a safe deposit box.”

“I know.”

“Aya. What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then we’re going to find out.”

She grabbed my shoulders. Her eyes were fierce. “Tomorrow. First thing. I’ll get the day off. We go together. Tonight, you sleep.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“You can pretend.”

She tucked a blanket over my knees, kissed the top of my head, and went to the kitchen to bang pans, because that’s how Liron says I love you.

I sat with my knees drawn up and the key in my fist, and the room went quiet, and I closed my eyes.

I was so tired.

And under the tiredness, low and dull and persistent, was the thing I’d been ignoring for a week. A queasy roll in my stomach, every morning. A smell of coffee that had started to make me gag. The fact that I had stopped being able to stand the scent of my own bergamot.

I’m a perfumer. I notice smell. And every smell had turned on me in the last seven days.

I sat up.

I did the math.

Five weeks. I was six days late.

“Liron,” I said. My voice sounded very far away.

She poked her head out of the kitchen. “What?”

“Do you have a test?”

“A what?”

“A pregnancy test.”

Her face went blank. Then it filled, very slowly, with a kind of tender, dawning horror. She disappeared. I heard her rummaging through the bathroom cabinet, muttering, and then she came back and put a small pink box in my hands.

“Bought them for my cousin,” she said, in a very small voice. “She never used them.”

I went into the bathroom. I closed the door. I did what the instructions said, and I set the little white stick on the edge of the sink, and I stared at the wall for three minutes.

I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I counted the tiles. Twenty-six across. Twelve down. The pipes gurgled. A truck passed in the street below.

The timer on my phone rang.

I looked down.

Two lines.

Bright, dark, unmistakable.

I gripped the edge of the sink. The room rocked. I thought of a rain-soaked bar and a stranger who smelled of cedar and snow, who had sat beside me in the dark and listened to every word I said, who had left before I woke.

Ezra. Just Ezra.

I put both hands over my stomach.

Outside the door, softly, Liron said, “Aya?”

I couldn’t answer.

Because someone had just told the whole city I’d slept with my sister’s fiancé.

And the only man I’d slept with was a stranger with no last name.