Page 94 of Born for Starlight

"Julian." I gave him the smile I keep for dental work.

"I mean it. What you're doing here. I said on the show, I said this is a woman who came from nothing and gives back, and here you are. Giving back. I feel like I helped make this happen, honestly. Like we made it together."

Across the corridor, ten feet back and holding the wall, Matthew stood with his hands behind him and a face like poured concrete.

And for one bright second in the middle of the worst afternoon of my life, I almost laughed. Because I knew that face. I knew what it cost. Matthew Grainger, sixteen years of intelligence work, a man who could sit through interrogations without blinking, had spent two hours being talked at by Julian Harmon. Every muscle in his jaw was paying for it. He had to be dying, and I got to watch.

Good, I thought. Suffer. As much as I loved him, I still wasn’t totally done with being mad at him. Not totally.

The choir filed past us in the corridor, the ten of them and the woman with the keyboard, back to wherever choirs went in this place. They walked close to the wall with their hands at their sides. The tallest was maybe twelve. Thin. Dark curls pulled back hard. Sharp cheekbones on a face that hadn't grown into them.

Julian watched them go. He put a hand on my arm and dropped his voice to the register he thought was kind.

"You see that older one? The tall girl?" He smiled at me, warm, pleased with his own sensitivity. "She looks exactly like you did at that age. I've seen the photos of you with the Drakoses. It's uncanny. Imagine that, Angelica. You could have been her. That could be you, right there, if it weren't for the Drakos family."

I looked at the girl.

She'd stopped at the end of the corridor to wait for a door to be opened, and she looked back over her shoulder at me. Flat expression. Eyes somewhere else. The look of a child who had learned that whatever came next, there was nothing to do about it but wait, without hope.

The smell came up the corridor behind her, disinfectant over something older, and a small, wet child had been steered through a door, and a toddler with a blanket had watched me with a thumb in her mouth, and this girl had my cheekbones and my curls and my⁠—

I opened my mouth to say something empty and meaningless to Julian.

No words were there.

Nothing was there.

The corridor was very white. The girl was very far away. Somebody was saying my name, and it was⁠—

Chapter Thirty

I saw it happen from ten feet away, and I still didn't know what I was seeing.

Julian said something. I couldn’t quite hear it. Something that had Angelica turning to look at a specific girl from the choir.

Then Julian did his normal babbling. Saying something about a photo and looking like Angelica. But the last part I’d heard perfectly. “That could be you, right there, if it weren't for the Drakos family.”

Fucking bastard.

Motherfucking bastard!

I watched her as if it were in slow-motion. Angelica had been staring at the young girl, and she opened her mouth as she turned back to Julian. She was probably going to say something pleasant. Of course she was. She was nice. Too nice.

But nothing came out.

Nothing.

Her face went blank. There was no performing Angelica.

No real Angelica.

Just nothing.

Fear grabbed me by my throat.

Her eyes were empty. Nothing.

What was left was nothing at all. A woman standing in a hallway who wasn't in the hallway anymore.