Chapter 48 Nina

Chapter 48

?Nina

Two years later

Nina looks out at the dark diner car park through the glass. The warm glow of humanity buzzes around her in the small-town establishment, a heated slice of cherry pie waiting untouched on the plate in front of her. The waitress has left two forks.

She needed to order something from the girl in the pale-pink uniform gliding among the busy tables, she hadn't considered that. And the pie looked nice, though right now, she can't risk pulling her eyes from the darkness outside.

She doesn't recognize the waitress; she doesn't recognize anyone here, which feels odd after two years of steering clear of strangers. They moved her to Charlotte, North Carolina—well, Belmont to be exact, a small town outside Charlotte—shortly before the first trial began.

She has been living under a new identity in sleepy Belmont for almost twenty-six months. She has friends there, a job in the local library, she volunteers with the historical society, her neighbors know her—she's made sure of it.

But no one knows her here in Davidson, the town three over. It isn't a huge misdirection, but she thought it best to meet here, just in case. Everything is always just in case these days.

She knows they aren't supposed to meet at all, even though the trials are over, even though everything is in the public domain now and she has told everything she knows many times over. They are theoretically safe by now, but they have been told they can never go back to their old lives, that they should never attempt to reconnect.

They could easily lead any leak right back to the other and after giving evidence, after being involved in bringing down a network that stretched across many continents perhaps, they were sensible to start over.

The American government has worked together with the UK's National Crime Agency to relocate and patriate her pre-trial. They moved her twice in the early days to protect her. A brief stint in Pennsylvania, followed by even less time in Delaware, but fears over her safety were raised in both locations though she herself had noticed nothing. Perhaps that's the way bad things happen to you, they just do, and then that's it.

But she needs to see him and he has to see her; they can't just live their lives waiting for the worst to happen. Besides, she needs to apologize and to thank the man who tried to save her.

They emailed a few times since the last trial connected with the house on Gorda. There were other trials after theirs, there were other houses, but they were not required in those cases.

The flash drives Lucinda created containing information pulled from the house's hard drives enabled the FBI and the British National Crime Agency to track and locate several of the servers on which clients had watched the enslavement and murder of the four previous victims at the house on Gorda. And given them leads to other houses and connected networks.

Nina learned early in the case that while her father had built Anderssen's Opening, it had been repurposed after its sale to another buyer. Her father's house was just an elaborate parlor game, limits set that meant the homeowner could attempt to beat the odds without the fear of meeting their end. But part of her game had been to make her believe her father was responsible for the house as it was. She learned about the fabricated deeds, James's involvement, and Lucinda herself.

Nina still finds it hard to know what to think about Lucinda; what to make of her.

Nina saw her body as they were led from the house, crumpled and so seemingly innocent as she lay there, a pool of blood circling her.

He told her, after the fact, how Lucinda was really the one to save them. It was she who gathered the information needed to prosecute and end the activities at the house and others like it. Still, Nina can't feel grateful to her, not after what Lucinda had so willingly done. It sickens her to think of Lucinda, in her father's house, using up what precious moments of life he had left with her tainted presence.

She made her way into Nina's life and pried it apart. And yet Nina doesn't doubt that her father knew exactly what he was doing, her father read her and paved a way for everything that happened after.

He weighed the options and saw that kindness, sympathy, understanding—and tea and biscuits—might somehow save his only daughter down the road. He offered Lucinda an out. She doesn't doubt her father changed that woman from the inside out—good people can do that, a little kindness can do that; it has that power.

No, she can't think well of Lucinda no matter how hard she tries, even though in a sense she knows she owes the woman her life.

The waitress in pink returns to her table and gestures to the untouched pie with genuine concern.

"No good?" she asks.

Nina gives her a smile. "I'm waiting for my friend. I think he deserves it more than me," she tells the waitress kindly.

"I'll get you a coffee refill, though," the waitress offers as she bustles off.

Nina checks the time. He's late.

Nerves shake her suddenly; she did not receive an email from him that morning and she wonders if something terrible might have happened, if this might all be an incredibly stupid idea. He might have been spooked; she might be a sitting duck.

Their correspondence needed to be vague over the past two years; they found they could share little of their lives with any safety, and since the trials ended the messages have dried up.

At least until he sent her the most recent one, on the day that the last of the convictions began. And they arranged to meet.

She does not know where he's traveling from, where they relocated him. She hopes it's nice. Bizarrely she feels responsible for all that has happened to him, and of course in a way she is responsible—after all he wouldn't have been there in the first place if it weren't for her.

She has to face the possibility that he isn't coming, and of course she can't blame him. If he doesn't believe it's safe, she can understand that. Even if the key players are now sentenced. Even if one of their number, the man she believed to be called James, already took his life in jail a year ago.

But rather than make her feel safe, facts like this make her wonder more than anything. They raise the possibility that "James"—or Nathan Cartwright as he turned out to be called— was allowed to take his own life in prison because of the things he knew and the danger he posed to others involved. Facts and names that could cause important people important problems.

In spite of the National Crime Agency's and FBI's protestations, she is certain that there are still houses out there, that the key players have remained invisible—as they always are, until they aren't. Somewhere out there it is not over.

The truth of how those things were allowed to happen out there on Gorda and of the numbers of people involved undoubtedly stretches much further than the six convictions made. She knows it in her bones.

She looks at her watch again. If he doesn't come, she won't hold it against him. She understands the kind of fear that makes it hard to trust again because a part of her is still down in those rooms, and always will be.

She looks out of the darkened glass, her own reflection partially obscuring her vision as she watches the headlights of cars pass on the road beyond.

The waitress returns and refills her cup with that same sympathetic smile, steam rising as Nina imagines what the waitress sees: just another woman in her late thirties stood up, abandoned.

Nina smiles to herself. God, if only she had those problems; the problems she used to have; warm, cozy problems.

Sure, she's alone, but alone doesn't mean the same thing it used to. These days loneliness is an existential threat. Since the house, loneliness means you are a target, that you are not part of a pack.

Nina is always part of a pack these days. Everyone in Belmont knows Helen Fisher; she has made sure of it. She isn't lonely in that sense, but by God does she miss her father some days. The guilt she feels for doubting him is strongest at night, or when she wakes sweating in the early hours. They successfully turned her against her own father before unsuccessfully trying to kill her.

She misses him viscerally, and Maeve, and her old job back in innocent, self-important Cambridge with its old buildings and bloated ideas of itself. She misses it all.

A car pulls up across the lot from her window table and she straightens in her seat.

The driver cuts the engine and then after a minute emerges. It's him.

A man in his late fifties, smartly dressed in chinos and a sweater. He looks at the diner window from across the lot, spots Nina, and gives an almost apologetic wave.

He hasn't stood her up, he hasn't chickened out; Joon-gi has made it here after all.