“Two more,” she said.
I wanted to be calm and confident, but already I felt fear’s insidious creep. It was the preshow jitters I hadn’t felt in years, only magnified. Ellen placed her hand on my arm and said, “I’m gonna stack the cards, Victor’s gonna cut the deck, and you’re gonna reverse the cut and deal the cards. That’s all there is to it. Easy peasy.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Definitely.”
“Not definitely.”
“Natalie, it’s gonna work. We planned it right, and we practiced it. We’re ready. Remember, cheating at cards is what I do.”
“Not like this. Not for this kind of money.”
“It’s just another performance,” she said, though I detected a slight hitch in her voice. “It’s going to be fine,” she said. “We’re going to win all the money.”
I tried to visualize the money, what it would be like to have it. “When this is over,” I said, “I’m going to buy one expensive bottle of wine. We’ll drink it together.”
She smiled. “I love the thought. But when this is over, you and I will part ways and never cross paths again.”
Maybe this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Still, I found myself resisting a twinge of betrayal.
“In twenty years,” she said, “maybe we’ll trade brief, nostalgic emails. I like you. I really do. This has all been … I don’t know.” She paused, finding the right word. “Nice.” She shook her head. “You know what I mean. We can’t be seen together after this.”
I knew she was right. She and I were, in the end, partners in a risky endeavor, and while our business was about to conclude, the risk would last. No, we could not be seen together after this.
“The money’s too big for it to be any other way,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “I totally get it.”
“Just focus on the cards and we’ve got this. Natalie?”
I was no longer in the passenger seat of Ellen’s car. I was at my father’s graveside on a hot August afternoon. The casket was being lowered into a hole. Winning tonight wouldn’t get my father out of that hole. Everything could go exactly as planned, and my father would never know I’d gotten the better of Victor Flowers.
Victor would never know, either. I would have to live with that.
“Nat?”
“What?”
“Have faith in us.”
She shut off the engine, and together we stepped out into the sleet. Sharing a single umbrella, we rounded the hedges and walked past several snow-ready vehicles parked in the driveway—two Mercedes SUVs, a Ford Bronco, a Jeep Wrangler—up to the path that led to Victor Flowers’s front door.
The last time I had come here was a warm May afternoon with everybody in spring clothes, with music and sunshine. It took me a moment to square that image with the cold stone structure before me now, dim under the outdoor lights, the sleet striking the slate roof and the saturated, brown grass and the naked, skeletal trees. I shivered.
“Are you ready?” Ellen asked softly.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
She gave my arm a gentle squeeze. “You’re gonna do this, Natalie. You’re a pro. You’re the greatest card handler I ever saw. I’m lucky to be working with you.”
I’ll admit to loving Ellen in that moment in the dreary dark. She was a cheat through and through, everything Jack Clarion detested, yet she had made me work harder than anyone else ever had, including Jack. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d believed I was one of the best, but now I knew I hadn’t been. I had needed Ellen. I had needed her fiercely honest assessment of who I was and what I was capable of becoming. Ellen was many things, but a flatterer wasn’t one of them, and a compliment from her—here, now—meant more to me than if it had come from Cardini himself.
“Thanks, Emily,” I said.
“You’re welcome, Nora.”
We walked up the path to the front door. With the eaves keeping us dry, Ellen closed the umbrella, took a deep breath, let it out, and rang the bell.
PART THREE
A
The man who opened the door must have been close to seventy. He looked not so different, though, from the person who’d been time-capsuled in my mind all these years—same razor-fine part of his now gray hair, same crystal blue eyes, same smile that said, Relax—I’ve got it from here. My memory failed to take note of his stature. Victor Flowers stood no more than five and a half feet tall. Towering over him, however, I didn’t feel like a tower. I didn’t feel powerful.
I felt like Big Bird.
But I had Ellen by my side, the arm of her coat grazing the arm of mine. She was stunning—unrecognizable as the frumpy and frenzied woman I’d met and quickly dismissed in Ethan Garret’s bakery.
“I was starting to worry,” Victor said.
Ellen’s smile under the porch light was nothing I’d seen from her before, a dazzling blend of mild flirtation and major confidence. “Well, if it isn’t the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey.” Her voice, too, was alien to me—melodic, a few pitches deeper, a speck of gravel. She stepped into the house and pecked Victor on the cheek. “I would have thought a man like you could at least order up a drier evening.”
I followed her into the house, into the heat.
Victor took Ellen’s umbrella and placed it into an umbrella stand by the door. “I would have felt terrible if anything had happened.” He turned to me. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting. I’m Victor.”
I held out my hand. “I’m Nora Thompson,” I said. We had met only that one time, at his Memorial Day party nearly two decades earlier. Now I was a grown woman. I had cut and colored my hair and doused my face with foundation, blush, cover-up, mascara. Even I didn’t recognize me. Still, for a moment I felt certain he’d see through all that and know it was Dan Webb’s daughter returning after all these years to steal his money.
“Emily speaks highly of you,” he said,
