“What?”
I gestured at the poster near the ballroom door. “She’s the speaker at the event tonight.”
“Don’t you know her?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s strange,” Tai replied.
“Why?”
“She told me she picked the hotel on your recommendation.”
“On my recommendation? She said she knew me?”
“Definitely.”
I took another look at the photograph of Dr. Eve Brier and felt the same sensation that her eyes were sending me an invitation. Come closer. Get to know me. Yes, she looked familiar, but I had no recollection of meeting her.
“Maybe I ran into her somewhere and gave her my sales pitch,” I speculated, although I didn’t think that was true. “Who is she?”
“She’s some kind of new age self-help guru,” Tai explained. “She left me a copy of her book, but I haven’t looked at it. Whoever she is, she’s very popular. We’re planning on a big crowd for her talk.”
“‘Many Worlds, Many Minds,’” I said. “What does that mean?”
“Apparently, she applies a theory from quantum mechanics in physics to her psychotherapy practice. It’s about how we’re all part of an infinite number of parallel worlds. Every time we make a choice, a carbon copy of ourselves makes the opposite choice in a different universe.”
“Parallel worlds?” I said skeptically.
I couldn’t wrap my brain around the concept. Maybe that’s because I was focused on the other two words she’d used.
Carbon copy. Like a double. A twin. A man in a storm.
“That’s what she says,” Tai replied. “When Eve was signing the contract for the ballroom space, she told me that an entirely separate universe had already been created in which she didn’t sign it.”
“What did you say to that?”
Tai winked. “I said to make sure that she lived in the universe where she paid the bill.”
CHAPTER 3
On my way to meet Edgar at the Art Institute, I stopped in the museum’s south garden, near the Fountain of the Great Lakes, where the water flowed from clamshells over the bodies of five beautiful bronze women.
This place was flush with memories for me.
I’d sat with Karly here once on a spring afternoon, holding hands among the honey locust trees and listening to the bubble of water. We were still in our early days then, when we knew we were in love but before we’d shared all our stories. Karly wore a long-sleeve green sweater and a plaid skirt that made her look, to me, like some kind of Irish rebel. A woman for all seasons. Her skin was ivory pale, with a few freckles. Her eyes had a way of changing color with the light, and that day, in the cool April shadows, they were a sad country-song kind of blue. A single brass stud adorned the top of her left ear. Her blond hair, jaggedly chopped off at the shoulders as if she’d done it herself to show the world she could, smelled like a fresh sprig of rosemary.
I remembered that particular day well, because that was when I’d told her what my father had done to my mother. She knew what had happened, of course, but not the details, not what I’d actually seen from the corner of the bedroom. Other than Roscoe, I’d kept that secret to myself. I’d told Karly I had something important that I needed to share with her, and although I didn’t say what, I was sure she’d already guessed. That moment from my childhood was a gaping hole in what she knew about me. Even so, as we sat together by the fountain, I found myself struggling to talk. Somehow, I couldn’t switch on the clickety-clack of my mental projector and go back to when I was thirteen years old, my eyes wide, smelling the smoke and seeing the blood on the floor. There are simply places in your past you don’t want to visit again.
Karly gave me space. She didn’t push me, hoping I’d tell her without prompting. When that didn’t work, she told me one of her own stories to get me started. Most of Karly’s stories had to do with her mother.
“Did I tell you that Susannah’s first business failed?” she said. She always called her mother Susannah, not Mother or Mom. “Before she started Chance Properties, she went bankrupt. Not many people know that.”
“Oh, yes?”
I didn’t know why Karly had chosen that story for that moment, but she always had her reasons.
“Yeah, this was years ago. She and her best friend split from one of the big commercial houses and went off on their own. Small time, just the two of them, but you know Susannah, she had big plans. They were pretty overextended. Her partner—Bren was her name. I liked her a lot. We had a little apartment on Devon back then, and Bren would always bring me takeout from Superdawg when she came over to meet with Susannah.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Eleven, twelve, something like that. Like I said, I really liked Bren. The two of them were the same age, and their relationship went back for years, but Susannah was definitely the boss. I guess Bren just kept trying to please her, but even as a kid, I already knew that was a no-win game. Anyway, the business was only a year old when Bren screwed up. I mean, it was a big screw-up, but Susannah signed off on it, too, so it’s not like it was all Bren’s fault. They closed on a series of commercial properties south of Milwaukee, because Bren had inside information about a big corporate headquarters relocating out of Chicago. This came right from the CEO. It was solid. But as it turned out, the tip was just a ploy to get the city to shell out more tax breaks. Susannah and Bren wound up holding the bag. They’d been played. They lost everything.”
Karly stopped. She studied the women in the sculpture pouring water, which was meant to symbolize the flow of the water from Great Lake to Great Lake. A cardinal landed on the very top of one of the women’s heads and trilled about what an amazing spring day it was.
“Bren came over that day, and Susannah laid into her,” Karly finally went on. “Blamed the whole debacle on her. She said they were ruined, that Bren was a failure, that she should never have trusted her to do anything right. It was one of Susannah’s most impressive performances. And Bren just sat there and took it. I mean, she walked into our apartment knowing what she was going to get, but she came over anyway. She even remembered Superdawg for me, too.”
I watched Karly steel herself. I didn’t understand the emotion I saw in her face, but I knew there was a twist to this story. Bren was important to her, and that was why she’d picked this moment to tell me about her. While I was struggling with my own past.
“Karly?” I asked softly. “What happened?”
“That night, Bren killed herself. She cut her wrists in the bathtub.”
A little strangled gasp of air escaped my throat. “I’m so sorry.”
“She actually left a note apologizing to Susannah. Can you believe that?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again.
“I love my mother, Dylan, but you have to understand that there are times when I hate her, too. She can be so thoughtlessly cruel. To be honest, I’m always afraid that I’ll turn out like her. That she’s in my genes and I can’t escape my destiny.”
“I understand.”
Because I did. I knew exactly how she felt. I’d spent my life afraid of turning into my father.