This Secret Thing, стр. 59
“Look for papers, notebooks, legal pads, flash drives, floppy disks—anything that could contain a list,” she’d instructed Micah when they arrived. “And look for anything with the name Lois on it.”
“Lois?” Micah asked. “Is that, like, your mom’s code name or something?”
“No. It’s her silent partner. No one can figure out who she is. I read about it online. Someone who—if we could find out who she is—could probably tell us anything we want to know about that list.”
But they’d found none of those things so far.
She stood in front of the warped mirror on top of an old vanity that her mother had shoved into the corner and stared at her grubby reflection. She wiped away a smear of dust that had blended with the sweat on her face and decided she should’ve foregone the makeup she had so carefully applied and worn athletic shorts and an old T-shirt. She glanced over at Micah, flipping through a box of things that belonged to her father, oblivious to her presence. She shouldn’t have cared at all what she looked like for him. He’d hardly noticed.
“We’ve got just those boxes left,” she said, pointing at a stack of boxes behind him. “And then we’re done.”
He looked over at the last boxes and nodded. “I’ve basically lost hope that there’s anything in here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d hoped we’d find the list.”
He shrugged. “At least we tried.” He held up a magazine, an old Sports Illustrated. “You mind if I keep this?” he asked.
She didn’t know why he would want some old magazine, but she didn’t figure anyone would miss it, so she nodded. “You can keep anything you want from that box,” she said.
“Whose stuff is it?” he asked.
She shrugged. “My dad’s.”
“How long have they been divorced?” He closed up the box, taking nothing else from it.
“Since I was two. I don’t remember them ever being together.”
“That’s kinda sad,” he said. “I can’t imagine my parents not being together.”
She wanted to ask: But you can imagine your father with a prostitute? But she didn’t. Mostly because she didn’t want to say the word prostitute to Micah Berg.
As if he were reading her mind, he said, “You’re probably wondering why I’d be looking for what I’m looking for if that was the case?”
She gave him a smile without showing any teeth. “Little bit, yeah.”
“I wouldn’t have thought him capable of something like that, but with everything that’s happened, he’s just been—I don’t know—different. Toward me, toward my mom. He seems like he doesn’t really want to be at home, like he’s sad all the time. And when I overheard him talking about . . .” He paused, then continued. “Well, about your mom’s arrest.” He glanced over at her apologetically. “He seemed like he was talking about it as more than just neighborhood news, as if he—I don’t know—had some involvement, or knowledge. Maybe.” He looked around the small room crammed with stuff. “I could’ve been wrong.” He sighed. “I hope I am.”
“I hope you are, too.”
The silence between them stretched uncomfortably, so she turned to the last stack of boxes and opened the top one. The sight of a whole stack of papers renewed her hope. She picked up the stack, thinking that underneath there could be a drive or disk or anything that could contain the file. But she found nothing under the papers, so she dropped to the ground and began going through them, discovering legal papers from her parents’ divorce, a whole pile of them traded between their attorneys for years.
Some of the papers mentioned her. Her father, unsurprisingly, had not fought her mother for custody. But that was the only thing, from the looks of it, that he hadn’t fought her on. Violet sorted through them, trying to make sense of the legal jargon, to understand just what had transpired between her parents. It had been, from the looks of things, a bitter divorce. Her father had had the better attorney. If there was a winner in the divorce, he had won, conceding to give her mother the home they’d shared but leaving her with little support to afford it. She found pages of back-and-forth between the attorneys over this issue. How could her father have done that to them, to her? Her mother had never told her any of this, and of course, she did not remember. As far back as her memory went, they’d always been OK, better than OK, really. They’d always had the money to do whatever they wanted. Something must have changed. And then it dawned on her what had.
Micah came over and sat down beside her, his eyebrows raised hopefully. “Is there something in that box?”
She shook her head, feeling ashamed, though she didn’t know why exactly. It wasn’t her divorce. But in a way, it was. And the decisions that had come after, as her mother had built her business with a relentless drive Violet never understood, as she somehow got involved with this prostitution ring, all of it had started here, in these papers, as her mother had fought to keep her daughter in her home, to provide for her child. No wonder Norah had taken this storage room out in Violet’s name. She hadn’t wanted her ex anywhere near her things, because he seemed intent on taking whatever he could from her. The client list wasn’t in this storage unit, Violet understood. But their past was—a past her mother wanted to lock up and walk away from. Violet pulled the stack of papers to her chest.
“Seriously. If it’s bad, just tell me,” Micah said. “Don’t hide it. I need to know.”
She shook her head again. “It has nothing to do with your dad. I promise.”
He tried to tug