The detective had me wait while he wrote up my statement. The last time I’d given the police a statement was just before I’d moved to Arlington. I’d spoken to the police in DC—haltingly, awkwardly, pushing my words past a swollen lip. Blinking back tears from a blackened eye. Trying to ease the pain from a rib that I assumed was broken.
As that memory surfaced, I tried my best to block it.
I took out my phone instead. Replied to the students who had texted me back.
Then I clicked through to the latest edition of a financial news digest I subscribed to.
As I read the latest headlines, I felt an eyebrow rise in surprise. A bill that I had worked on when I’d interned on the Hill, a bill that had finally made it out of committee several months before, had died on the House floor. I clicked through to the article to read the names of the dissenters. Four of the representatives who had voted for the bill in committee, including the congressman I had interned with, had ultimately decided to vote against it.
How could that be?
The bill would have strengthened some of the most important financial oversight measures that had been put in place after the Great Recession of 2008. And those four representatives had been the loudest voices supporting those measures.
I was still puzzling over the failure of the bill when Detective Baroni approached. He offered me the statement. “Read it over. If it’s accurate, go ahead and sign.”
I read it.
“Any corrections?”
“Here.” I pointed to a box on the form.
He picked it up. Read the box. “Age?”
“Twenty-eight, not twenty.”
“I thought that’s what you’d said, but it didn’t sound right.”
There seemed to be an assumed correlation between height and age with some people.
“Sorry.” He corrected it and handed it back to me along with his pen. “Sign it for me?”
I signed.
“You’re good on my end. Any questions on yours?”
“Just one.” And it was really starting to worry me. “The killer saw my face. He knows who I am. I don’t have any idea who he is. That scares me.”
“He’s probably miles from Arlington by now.”
“But what if you’re wrong? What if he hasn’t disappeared? What if he tries to find me?”
He sat down across from me. “Crime seems irrational, but people who commit them have their own logic. That shooter knows you saw him. He won’t want to have anything to do with you, won’t want to be anywhere near you, because he won’t want to be identified. We know you have face blindness, but he doesn’t. In his mind, he gets away with this by making sure he can never be identified. You don’t have to be afraid, don’t have to go into hiding, because chances are, he already has.”
I followed his argument; it was logical; it made sense.
I wanted to believe him. I really did. But I couldn’t convince myself to do it.
Chapter 5
After the detective left, I stayed at the Blue Dog. I canceled the rest of my students because I was afraid to go back outside.
I shifted to the table farthest from the windows, sat in a chair with my back to the wall. Then I spent some time calling parents to reschedule all the coaching sessions I’d missed. When I was done, I pulled my study guide from my backpack and did some review for the bar exam. But eventually, I didn’t have any excuses left to stay. And I needed a study guide that was at my apartment.
If Corrine had still been working, I might have convinced her to walk outside with me to the scooters. Instead, I told myself that there was nothing to worry about, that the street out front was busy enough, that there were plenty of people walking to and from the metro, that nothing bad was going to happen. Still, after scanning the sidewalk, I jogged over to the scooters, quickly unlocked one with the app on my phone, and wasted no time as I started toward home.
* * *
My new basement apartment was located in a part of Arlington I couldn’t have afforded even to visit. As I headed away from Virginia Square, the modern high-rise apartment buildings gave way to older retail buildings and restaurants, which tapered off to several-story duplexes and townhomes and then into a century-old residential neighborhood. As the buildings shrank, the trees got older and taller. The sidewalks became more uneven, the streets more serpentine.
The cars changed from Priuses and Subarus to Teslas and Audis.
The gusty winds had mellowed into a stiff breeze. It carried with it the cloying scent of some kind of flower. Fallen crepe myrtle petals had drifted across the streets, accumulating in piles, clogging the sewer drains.
I was still getting used to not having to look over my shoulder for my ex all the time. After I’d gathered my courage and finally broken up with him, he’d shown up everywhere, trying to apologize, begging me to give him another chance.
At school.
At work.
At my tiny studio apartment across the river in the warrens of DC.
I’d tried to ignore him at first. It wasn’t easy. He called, he texted, he sent flowers. But I wasn’t open to persuasion. I had proof that he had cheated on me; he couldn’t gaslight me anymore. I had a picture from his other Instagram account—the one someone had finally shown me—of him with another woman.
Of course, he insisted that it hadn’t meant anything. He told me he deserved a second chance. So I tried to reason with him. He’d cheated on me, so clearly he wasn’t happy with me. At that point, I didn’t mind labeling myself as the villain. I just wanted out. It was an awful, heart-shattering end to what I had once thought was a beautiful beginning. The best day of my life and the worst were both thanks to him.
I’d never met anyone like him. He was smart, charming, charismatic. And I’d felt so lucky that the person he wanted to be with was me. I actually tried to reason him out of a relationship at first. I’d made every argument I could think of: the difference in our ages, the fact that I was still a student, and the reality that we came from two different worlds. But he never took no for an answer. That was how he’d come up with his innovative made-in-America secure-server solution to cybersecurity. By not taking no for an answer, he’d done what most people had considered impossible. He’d sourced all of his components and materials in-country. It wasn’t that difficult for him to argue me around to seeing myself from his point of view.
It was his appeal to reason that had seduced me. He’d done it by laying down actual answers to all of my questions.
Why do you like me? Why do you want to be with me?
He said I was brilliant. I was passionate. I was committed to making the world a better place. Why wouldn’t he want to be with me? If anyone was lucky in our relationship, it was him.
Eventually, I didn’t have any arguments; I gave in to what my heart had wanted all along.
Growing up, I heard people say all the time what a beautiful girl I was. Though I could never see myself the way they did, I understood that to them, beauty was important. To my ex’s credit, he never, not once, used my beauty as one of the arguments for why we should be together. He’d already figured out it wouldn’t have worked with me.
One of the joys of our relationship, early on, was that we could debate anything. To the lawyer in me it was stimulating. Exhilarating.