“Mom?”
Holly whirled. Ava was in the doorway.
“Just a minute,” Holly told Jessica.
“Who’s there?” Jessica asked.
Ava’s eyes took in the battered and broken safe, the splintered desk, the papers scattered on the floor, the hammer, and the crowbar. “What the hell are you doing, Mom?”
“I know this looks bad,” Holly said, hearing her own ragged breath.
“Bad? It’s totally insane!”
“I needed some information, and your father wasn’t getting back to me,” said Holly.
“Oh shit,” Jessica whispered in her ear.
“You couldn’t, like, wait for him to just call you back? You’re breaking into his stuff?”
Holly took a step forward as Ava retreated into the hall. “It’s our stuff, Ava.”
“So you’re obviously getting a divorce. Like, it’s happening.”
Holly reached out, realized the futility of hoping for an embrace, and let her hands drop to her sides. “I don’t want to talk about it without your brother and your sister present.”
Ava stared, fury masking her confusion. Holly ached to hold her but knew one more step would cause her daughter to turn and flee like a wild animal. It turned out not to matter, because Ava left of her own accord, her final retort a strangled, “Whatever.”
“I’m sorry, Holly,” said Jessica after Holly returned to the call. “Do you need to go after her?”
“When she cools down.”
Her heart breaking, Holly pulled the chair back to the desk, sat down, and started emptying drawers. Everything looked exactly the same as before.
“I’m going through the desk now,” she told Jessica. “It’s all just old work stuff. Outdated contracts. Cancura swag with the original logo.”
“It was probably too much to hope for.”
Frustrated, Holly started digging through the notepads and stress balls, tossing them aside. Underneath everything was a hard drive that must have at one time fit into a computer tower.
That was strange. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. On the bottom, Jack had written with a Sharpie:
DON’T USE.
“What if I find something that could be important?” she asked, suddenly hesitant to admit what she was holding. “To Cancura.”
“Send it to me. We can decide together how to proceed.”
Holly had a random thought and made a sound that was almost a laugh.
“What is it?” Jessica asked.
“You’re so serious—somehow I just don’t picture you with funny-colored hair.”
“I don’t get it.”
“During Christmas break, Ava’s friend Sienna was downtown and saw you with Jack in front of the windows at Macy’s. She said you had blue hair at the time.”
“That’s weird,” Jessica said. “We were definitely there, but I’ve never dyed my hair in my life. Not even a streak.”
They were both silent for a moment.
“If he wasn’t with you, then who was he with?” Holly asked.
“I have no idea. Do you think . . . there could be . . . someone else?”
“Once we start digging, who knows what we’re going to find?” Holly said grimly before hanging up.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
LARK
Social media can make or break you.
—“How I Lied about My Name and Discovered My Truth,” a TED Talk by Jon M. Wright
Lark woke to an empty bed in an empty apartment. After staying one more day in LA, Trip had booked a dawn flight back to Chicago after discovering all the reasonable departures were sold out and had left so quietly she hadn’t even stirred. Callie had been asleep when they arrived and, as Lark discovered as she dragged herself to the kitchen for a bowl of fruit and yogurt, had already left for work. She needed to get there, too—bad form for the boss to be rolling in late. After showering, dressing, and running a brush through her hair, she took her ring from the nightstand and slipped it on her finger, laughing at herself for the pleasant shiver she felt.
Thirty minutes of stop-and-start traffic later, she walked through the door of Larkspur Games, carrying a chai latte and unable to stop the stupid smile that spread across her face as she greeted Sandro and stuck her head inside the office of Hannah, their new marketing director.
“Good morning. I promise I’m usually around a lot more than this.”
Hannah looked up from her screen. “It’s your company. I make no judgments.”
Lark held up her left hand and wiggled the fingers. “Kind of a prehoneymoon.”
“Oh my gosh! Congratulations!”
They didn’t know each other well enough for anything more than that, so Lark withdrew. She wanted to check in with Callie to squee over the good news, but her general manager–slash–roommate had headphones on and was hunched intently over her screen.
Lark went into her office, sat down, and touched the keyboard to wake up her computer. Her in-box was flooded with unopened messages—she hadn’t been paying much attention to work email in Palm Springs—but seeing them was more reassuring than stressful. She had work to do, which meant this thing she was creating was real.
Half an hour later there was a soft knock, and Callie slipped in through the half-open door, closing it behind her. Her face was so grave that Lark’s first thought was that somebody had died.
“Are you okay?”
Callie sat down in one of the guest chairs, unlocked her phone, and handed it to Lark. “You need to see this.”
Callie had shared Lark’s Instagram photo from the mall on her own Facebook feed. Lark’s big smile and Trip’s I’m-trying-to-be-cool grin in the atrium of Montclair Place. If their engagement bothered Callie, why had she gone to the trouble of sharing it?
“I put your picture up on Facebook,” Callie said haltingly, “thinking it would be fun for my family and friends back home in Lincoln to see it. I mean, some of them have met you, and they’ve all seen plenty of pictures of us.”
“That was nice,” said Lark guardedly.
“Look at the
