His big mass of keys lay right next to a half-eaten takeout container of sushi. I turned quickly, expecting to see him coming back with chopsticks in hand, but the lobby remained empty. I held the keys against my shirtfront so they wouldn’t jingle and tiptoed over to the parking garage elevator.
The first time I’d seen it I’d expected Harold’s garage to be all white marble and inlaid floors. But it was like any garage I’d ever been in: echoing concrete and the wintry smell of exhaust. I could see our car from the open elevator doors, slumped among the Mercedes and BMWs. Some shitty rich kid had written CHOAD in the dirt on its back window.
I stared long enough to assure myself it was there, long enough for the shadows in the corners of the garage to sharpen and the taste of dust and iron to coat my tongue—the taste of bad luck. I stepped back into the elevator and stabbed at the Lobby button till the doors slid shut.
It was nearly five when I stepped onto the sidewalk, and New York was doing that perfect early evening thing where it plays itself. It makes you forget the trash piles and the twenty-dollar sandwiches and the time that guy showed you his dick on the F train, just by etching its skyline in gold and throwing the scent of sugared pecans in your face, right as someone who looks like Leonardo DiCaprio slouches by mumbling into his iPhone. Cheap trick.
Tonight it didn’t work on me, because I was zinging with adrenaline, and my brain kept peeling back the corner of a strange new world I couldn’t imagine living in, one where my mom was just gone. I was being insane. It hadn’t even been an hour. But the wrongness of the envelope in my room and the dread coiling in my gut told me I was right to panic.
The title page. Was it a warning? An invitation? A clue? The person who’d left it had been inside my room. His hand had hung over my pillow a moment before dropping the envelope.
Maybe it was a taunt: I see you, and locked doors and elevator keys aren’t enough to keep me out. But if it was a clue—if there was something in that story, some hint or message—I had to read it. And there was only one place I could think of where I might find a copy of Tales from the Hinterland.
I jogged the eight blocks there, because I wanted to jolt some of the spiky energy from my limbs. I knew where Ellery Finch lived because his dad was Jonathan Abrams-Finch, and richer than God, and therefore lived in a building that not only made ours look like a homeless shelter but had been written about twice in the New York Times style section. Not that I make a habit of reading about the lives of the rich, but Audrey does, and any mention of Mr. Abrams-Finch inspired her to loudly complain about extreme wealth being wasted on non-hot guys.
His doorman looked a lot like mine, but older. He scowled through his fancy gray mustache when he saw me.
“I’m here to see Ellery Finch,” I said.
He squinted at me. “Who?”
I sighed. “Ellery Djan, um, something Abrams-Finch?”
The man sighed back at me, like I’d passed a test he was certain I’d fail. “Whose name might I give?”
“Alice Crewe. Wait—Alice Proserpine. Tell him Alice Proserpine.”
The man picked up an old rotary telephone and hit a button, then I swear he started talking in a fake British accent. He apologized for my arrival and existence, letting his mustache droop with disappointment as the person on the other end agreed to come down for me.
I kept my eyes on the art deco elevator, so beautiful I wanted to cut it up into bracelets. Drama class felt miles away, but now it was creeping up on me: Finch’s question. My answer. The weird thrill and curious shame of it. What would he think of my showing up here?
I schooled my expression to flatness, but when the elevator doors slid open, my vision blurred over with tears. Finch’s familiar face looked like an island to a drowning swimmer.
His eyes widened and he made a move forward, maybe to put an arm around me. I put ice in my eyes and walked sideways into the elevator before he could.
“Thanks for, um. I can come up?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Of course you can, Alice.”
He liked saying names, I noticed. First or last or both at once. Maybe in real life it was meant to be friendly, but names were dangerous in a fairy tale. I’d wondered before if that was why Althea had changed hers to something so outlandish. A Potemkin front so good nobody would want to look behind it.
I blinked away the fairy cobwebs. This wasn’t a book, this was life. I had to tighten my shit up. The elevator doors shushed shut, sealing us inside a tiny, opulent room. There was a low Louis Quinze–looking bench against the wall and a chandelier hanging over our heads. A chandelier. In an elevator. Finch caught me looking at it and laughed before I could.
“My stepmom’s a big believer in ‘you can never be too loaded or too thin or too covered in ugly diamonds.’ That’s a saying, right? If it wasn’t before, then she made it up.” He seemed nervous again. I saw it even through my self-pity and fear, and it made me feel the tiniest bit better about being there.
As did the fact that he didn’t immediately demand to know why I was darkening his vintage elevator door. I’d shown up unannounced enough times in my life—with my mom, her face plastered with a smile, our suitcases tucked benignly behind our legs—to know what it looked like when someone wishes you hadn’t come. Ellery Finch definitely didn’t wish I hadn’t come.
Harold’s place was the nicest I’d ever seen till that point, but Ellery’s was something else entirely. It was like a country manor straight out of a thick English book about pheasant season and eligibility. You almost expected to see Mr. Darcy skulking around a corner looking pissed.
“Nobody’s home but our housekeeper,” Finch said. “My stepmom’s at soul bikes or whatever, and my dad’s pretty much always out. It’s not easy running a sweatshop empire all by yourself, you know?”
I startled at this, but he didn’t even look around when he said it. I followed him across the carpet, studded with pieces of tasteful furniture that would’ve made Harold weep with envy. Finch must’ve been used to showing people around, because he took me straight to the view. It was disorienting to look out the high windows and see not the sweep of a rainy moor, but early evening advancing on Central Park. It made me forget the ugly thing he’d just said.
Finch let me look for a minute, then smiled. The nervous was back. “So. You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“To … see me. On purpose.”
Oh, god. He was echoing the words he’d said when he asked me out. “No! No, I just…”
“I’m kidding. Sorry, I know I’m bad at it, but I just can’t stop.”
He waited attentively for me to speak, and suddenly I wanted to slow everything down. I had my hand on my phone, ringer turned up, but Harold’s violated apartment felt very far away. Until Ella called back, I had nowhere to go. And the sooner I got what I wanted from Finch, the sooner I’d go right back to being alone. “Can I have a glass of water?” I blurted.
His eyes registered curiosity before melting into that easygoing Finch expression. The one he wore like armor. “Of course. Are you hungry?”
“Yeah,” I said, even if it wasn’t quite true. “I’m starving.”
Finch led me into the kitchen. His housekeeper, Anna, looked like a retired Bond girl and sounded like an unretired Bond villain. She was about sixty, and clucked around Finch while making us an endless stream of tiny sugar-powdered pancakes served with tart red jam. We didn’t talk much, and the friendly sounds of sizzling and the funny conversation she kept up with the batter under her breath made it so it didn’t feel weird. When our hands were good and sticky with jam, she brought little finger bowls to the table, which seemed a bit much for an after-school snack. By seven p.m. she had us de-jammed and the kitchen spotless. She kissed Finch’s forehead, grabbed her big Mary Poppins bag, and let herself out.