“I’m not the first person to use social media!” Esther said. “It’s my job, you don’t have to be so freaking judge-y about it.”
“This is supposed to be a somber occasion,” Matt pointed out. “And it could have been a good bonding experience—”
“Recording it doesn’t take away its somberness,” Esther said.
“It does when you’re recording from the ideal selfie angle,” Ines said, miming holding up a phone. She posed with her hip thrust to the side. “ ‘Here’s the names of the dead and also my hot ass.’ ”
Sloane couldn’t suppress a giggle. It came out so high-pitched, she clapped a hand over her mouth, embarrassed.
“Sloanie Sloanie Macaroni just made a girlie noise,” Albie said, eyebrows raised.
“Don’t you dare call me that,” she said.
“Don’t pretend we haven’t all seen you in those home videos Cameron made,” Esther said. “You may be into this tough-girl-don’t-give-a-fuck thing now, but deep inside you will always be the kid who did a dance to ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in a tutu made of tinfoil.”
Sloane cursed her late brother’s video camera and was about to respond when Matt spoke up. “I found Bert.”
Bert’s real name wasn’t Robert Robertson, of course. He had told them his real one in confidence a few months before his death so they could find him if they lost contact with him. But none of them thought of him as Evan Kowalczyk; to them, he would always be Bert.
They all moved to stand behind Matt and followed the line of his finger to a small name: EVAN KOWALCZYK, all in capital letters. She had no idea how Matt had found it among all the names, all the panels. It was like finding a particular tree in a forest of identical trees. Matt’s hand fell away, and Robert’s name disappeared into the wall again, blurring together with all the others.
All these losses—each one for nothing. A dark lord and his insatiable hunger.
“I wonder what he’d be doing now,” Matt said.
“Probably refusing to enjoy his retirement,” Ines replied.
Sloane turned toward the door before her expression gave her away. She didn’t want to tell them what she had read in the files she had gotten from the FOIA request, hints of a Bert she had never known.
“Let’s go,” Sloane said. “They’re going to start to wonder where we are.”
4
THE INVITATION to the gala was taped to their refrigerator: CELEBRATE TEN YEARS OF PEACE. As if the defeat of the Dark One had brought harmony to the entire world. It hadn’t, of course, but for the United States, at least, it had been a reason to withdraw from everything. A new era of isolationism, the headlines had called it. The reactions had been . . . mixed. One side had celebrated withdrawing troops from other countries but protested pulling out of international peacekeeping organizations. The other side had cheered the closing of borders but resisted the decreased military presence abroad. Regardless of where on the spectrum they fell, everyone had shared the same paranoia. No one knew where the Dark One had come from, which meant he could have come from anywhere. He could have been a friend or a neighbor, a refugee or an immigrant. Even Sloane’s mother had gotten a licensed handgun and practiced at the shooting range once a month, as if that had ever helped anyone against the Dark One, who had made guns collapse from within, like imploding buildings, warping and twisting the metal without even touching it. Sloane couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take ARIS to harness the same power for themselves. If they hadn’t already.
Sloane took her dress out of the closet and hung it on the door. It was a gold-beaded gown that looked like something out of the twenties. It would be heavy on her shoulders, so she didn’t intend to put it on until the last second. On a normal day, she wouldn’t have bothered with anything so fancy, but Sloane loved formal occasions—not that she would have admitted that to anyone. Earlier, she had even hidden in the bathroom to watch one of Esther’s Insta! beauty tutorials for winged eyeliner. If Esther ever found out, Sloane would never live it down.
The unfortunate formfitting nature of the beaded dress meant she had to find the item of clothing she most dreaded in the world: shapewear. The greatest wrangler of women’s minorly imperfect torsos since the corset. The last thing she wanted was to wake up to gossip websites showing increasingly zoomed-in pictures of the bubble of fat around her middle, speculating about the state of her womb. Pregnancy rumors had haunted her as long as she and Matt had been together.
She couldn’t find the shapewear in her underwear drawer or her sock drawer, so she turned to Matt’s armoire. Sometimes it got lost amid the sea of black boxer briefs that he favored. She dug around in the spandex, and her fingers brushed something small and hard.
A box, small enough to fit in her palm. Black.
Shit.
Sloane glanced at the door—still closed, with no audible movement in the hallway beyond it. Good. She opened the box. Inside was a ring, of course, but not just any ring—it was old-fashioned, dotted with pyrite instead of diamonds. He had remembered what kind of jewelry she liked even though she never wore any.
She snapped the box closed and shoved it back in the drawer, her throat tight. She knew what it meant, of course: he was going to propose to her. Soon, probably, because he wouldn’t trust the underwear drawer as a good hiding place for long. Given his fondness for dramatic gestures, he would likely do it at the gala that evening.
Sloane felt sick with dread. She opened the door and peered down the hallway. Matt was on the phone with his assistant, Eddie. His calendar was stuffed to bursting with causes. This week alone, he was moderating a panel discussion on mass incarceration, attending a fundraising event for a school on the west side, and meeting with a senator about state-funded counseling services for Dark One survivors with PTSD. He would likely be on the phone for a while.
She shut the door again and sat on the edge of the bed, staring out at the two-flat across the street, the one with the gaudy blue fairy lights hanging from the eaves all year round.
Sloane took out her phone and dialed a number she hadn’t used in years. Her mother’s number.
“Hello?” June Hopewell said, her voice sharp as ever.
“Mom?”
“Sloane?”
Sloane frowned. “Yeah, it’s me, unless you’ve got some other kids running around I’m not aware of.”
“Saw you on the TV this morning,” June said. “You sure you don’t want to rethink that whole ‘no autographs’ policy? Looked like you were being chased by wolves.”
“Yeah, Mom. I’m sure.” Sloane didn’t think her mother actually cared whether she signed autographs or not, but ever since the defeat of the Dark One, she had weighed in on everything Sloane did, maybe in an attempt to make up for her nonexistent parental influence when Sloane was growing up. She had, after all, missed out on Sloane’s entire adolescence due to not giving a single shit when the government came to take her away.
“Listen, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” Sloane said. “I just found a ring in Matt’s underwear drawer. An engagement ring.”