Promises I Made

For Charles and Margurite Baker, who taught us all

what it means to keep a promise

Everyone's a millionaire where promises are concerned.

—
Ovid

When I think about what happened in Playa Hermosa, it's not the gold that gets me. Gold is like money. Something tangible that can be obtained, lost, regained.

But trust, faith, love . . . Well, those things are a lot more tricky. Where do you find trust once it's lost? How do you make someone believe in you when you've given them every reason not to? And how can someone love you when you've proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that doing so is dangerous to them, and to everything and everyone they love?

Those are the kinds of things I thought about after Cormac and I arrived in Seattle. I was too numb to do much thinking before then, too focused on the growing distance between Parker and me, too busy imagining him in jail for a crime we'd all committed.

And then there was my mother. Renee. All the times she'd
called me Gracie. All the times she'd pushed the hair out of my eyes, called me her daughter. It had been a lie. Of course, I'd known Cormac and Renee weren't my biological parents. That Parker and I had been adopted by them to run cons with wealthy suburbanites as our victims. But somehow I'd believed that Renee loved me. That she was my mother in every important sense of the word. I'd believed it even when Parker had called me out on my naivety, even when it set me against him, the one person who'd proved over and over that he'd do anything for me.

Knowing that Renee had taken the gold left me hollowed out, like all the little bits of love and security and hope I'd been accumulating had been sucked out of me all at once. I thought it would get better with time, that I'd adjust to the reality of the situation like I'd always done before. But this time was different. The emptiness was palpable, a black hole that seemed to gather more power with each passing day. Sometimes I thought I would disappear inside it completely.

We'd all sacrificed in the name of the Playa Hermosa con. Cormac was on the run, forced to be cautious even with the underground network of contacts we usually relied on. With twenty million dollars in gold at stake; there had to be at least a few fellow grifters who would use information about our whereabouts as a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the meantime, that's where Parker was: in jail. I hadn't seen or talked to him since the night of the Fairchild con. I didn't even dare send him a letter, and the loss of him sat like a lead weight on my chest.

My sacrifices might seem insignificant in comparison, but they didn't feel that way. I'd come to love Selena, the only real friend I'd ever had. And I loved Logan Fairchild and his parents, too. Stealing from them—especially with the knowledge of Warren Fairchild's mental illness—had blown out the tiny light I'd kept burning in the darkest corners of my heart. The light that told me I was better than a life on the grift, that I was only doing it because I had to, because after a string of lousy foster homes and no contact with my real parents, Cormac, Renee, and Parker were the only family I had.

Parker had tried to show me the better parts of myself, to keep those parts alive, and I'd abandoned him in Los Angeles when I'd chosen to run with Cormac. Now I knew the truth about who I was, and I didn't waste any more time trying to fight it. I spent the time in Seattle settling into the role of Cormac's daughter as he worked to con a rich divorcée, hoping to get us flush enough to go after Renee and our share of the Playa Hermosa take. In the meantime, I waited for Cormac to follow through on his promise to get help for Parker, to go back for him or find him a lawyer, to do
something
to get him out of jail. I waited for nearly five months, until I couldn't wait any longer. Until the thought of Parker locked up started to unravel me.

Then I used everything Cormac and Renee had taught me and I did it myself.

I waited until Cormac and Miranda left for the theater to steal the money. I didn't know how much we had left; I wasn't even entirely sure where Cormac kept it. But I knew he'd had to liquidate the single gold bar left by Renee to fund the Seattle job, and I knew he was super paranoid. That made me think he was keeping the money close, that he wouldn't risk a bank, even with the new IDs he'd managed to get us through one of the few sources he still trusted. It was one of the reasons he'd chosen Seattle; the last job we'd done there had only lasted two months—long enough to make a few connections but not so long that we were well known in the area.

I stayed in my room until I heard the front door shut, then went to the window, watching as Cormac opened the passenger door of Miranda's Mercedes. Miranda climbed
in, long red hair brushing across her ivory shoulders, bare except for the thin straps of her green gown. She laughed up at Cormac, handsome as ever in a custom tux Miranda had bought him after he surprised her with season tickets to the ballet.

Guilt plucked at my insides. Like all the people we'd stolen from, Miranda was just trying to find some kind of happiness. Sure, she was rich, if only because her ex-husband, William Mayer, was a real estate developer responsible for half the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle.

But I'd learned the hard way that money didn't tell the whole story, and I felt bad about what Cormac was doing to her. What we were both doing to her. She'd already suffered a high-profile divorce after William was caught having an affair with their daughter's twenty-year-old best friend. Miranda had gotten a hefty settlement, but what good did that do her? Did it make her less ashamed when she saw her family on the front page? Did it lessen her daughter's embarrassment at college?

I doubted it.

And now Cormac and I had moved into Miranda's mansion overlooking Lake Washington, and if Cormac had his way, we'd add insult to injury by stealing what little she had left: her financial security.

I was doing Miranda a favor by stealing Cormac's money. Our money. Maybe he wouldn't be able to keep up the ruse. Maybe she'd figure out that he wasn't a rich tech refugee who'd left the business after selling his start-up for millions
of dollars. Maybe she'd even figure it out in time to stop him. But I doubted it. Cormac always landed on his feet. The rest of us were just there to break his fall.

Cormac closed the passenger door and hurried around to the driver's side of the Mercedes. Even now he had the walk of someone who had it all, someone who'd always had it all. Fit and trim in his tux, dark hair just beginning to gray near his temples, he didn't look any worse for wear after Renee's betrayal.

I knew I couldn't say the same. I'd lost weight since coming to Seattle. A lot of weight. My old clothes had hung on me until Miranda insisted on taking me shopping, and my pale face stood out in stark contrast to my newly dyed black hair, a color that only served to bring out the smudges taking up residence under my eyes. It didn't matter. I avoided mirrors now. I didn't recognize the reflection. I wasn't sure I wanted to.

I watched Cormac back out of the driveway, then reached for the backpack I'd stuffed into my closet. It had the few things I needed and the even fewer things that mattered to me: some clothes and toiletries, my laptop, a leather bracelet I'd found in a surf shop in Bellevue that reminded me of the ones Parker wore to cover up his scars, my wallet with my Seattle driver's license in the name of Julie Montrose.

Before Playa Hermosa, we'd always kept the same first names for continuity, and Parker and I had been immediately enrolled in the local high school of whatever town we were
working. But in Seattle, Cormac was running scared, unsure how much the police would be able to get out of Parker. We had to use different first names, and to avoid the exposure of enrolling me in school he'd told Miranda that I'd graduated from high school the year before and was taking a gap year before college. I'd spent the last three months of what should have been my junior year reading in my room while endless rain beaded the windows, leaving the house only to take long walks in Bellevue Square, sitting on the benches that lined the shores of the lake while rain pattered against my Windbreaker. The house and town had become a kind of purgatory, a place where there was no past and no future. Just minutes stretching into hours stretching into days. Part of me wanted to stay here forever. I was so tired. So, so tired. The thought of making my way back to Los Angeles, of trying to figure out a way to help Parker, made me want to curl into a ball and sleep forever.

But then I'd think of Parker in jail. I'd remember his words to me during our last phone call the night of the Fairchild con:
It's you and me. No matter what.
Then the urge to reach him would become almost unbearable, and I'd have to force myself to stay put. To wait until I had a plan.

Finally I'd admitted that I would never have a plan. Not an airtight one. I had no idea how much money Cormac had left. No idea if Selena would help me or how I would even communicate with Parker without being taken into custody myself. But I couldn't count on Cormac, and I couldn't stay in the guest bedroom at Miranda's house forever. Making a
move was the only choice I had left.

I watched the Mercedes disappear around the corner, then headed for the hallway.

The house was quiet as I made my way down the stairs to the big master bedroom. I'd never lived in a house where the master was on the first floor, but here it was, right off the formal living room that no one used. I hurried past the front door, crossed the foyer, and opened one of the double doors.

I'd only ever glimpsed the room from the doorway on the couple of occasions I'd had to ask Cormac something. Then I had waited for him to come to the door, cringing, trying not to think about what he and Miranda were doing in there. Con or no con, his relationship with her still felt like a betrayal of Renee, which was crazy under the circumstances. Proof that I was fucked in the head.

I stood in the doorway and looked around the room, trying to get my bearings. There was a giant Cal king bed covered in an understated floral duvet, two nightstands, a massive armoire that I knew housed the television and media equipment, and two large dressers. Some kind of filmy nightgown lay across an upholstered bench at the foot of the bed, and a pair of oxfords that I recognized as Cormac's stood neatly in front of one of the walk-in closets.

I started with the nightstands. I didn't expect the money to be there; Cormac was better than that. But I'd learned to rule out the obvious first, then to move toward the more obscure possibilities.

The nightstand on the left must have been Cormac's. It
contained two financial-type books with men in suits on the cover, a pack of breath mints, a stress ball, nail clippers, and, much to my horror, a half-used package of condoms. I pulled out the drawer and checked the underside, then felt in the back of the compartment for something that might be taped there.

Nothing.

I replaced the drawer and moved to the other night table. Hand cream, two nail files, a hairbrush, a journal, some old birthday cards, lip balm, and, surprisingly, an inhaler. I hadn't been aware that Miranda had asthma.

I closed the drawer and made my way methodically around the room. Mattress (between it and the box spring), dressers (check drawers for a false bottom, remove them to see if something is taped inside, pull them away from the wall to see if something is hidden behind them), closets (look behind clothes and inside shoes, and scan the walls for a safe or a hidden panel), armoire (check behind everything, including the TV, and in the drawers that house DVDs). Finally I looked under the bench at the foot of the bed, catching a whiff of Miranda's perfume, grassy and fresh, when I moved the nightgown.

Nothing.

I stood there, looking around the room, trying to figure out what I'd missed. Cormac would want to keep the money close in case we had to run. It had to be here.

My gaze landed on everything I'd already checked: closets, dressers, bench, bed, nightstands.

Nightstands.

I'd removed the drawer in the nightstand that was
obviously Cormac's, but I hadn't done the same for the one on Miranda's side of the bed. Subconsciously I'd assumed he wouldn't go to the trouble of putting it somewhere that might be difficult to access, but maybe in such tight quarters the allure of an unlikely hiding spot outweighed the fact that it was a few feet away from where he slept.

I moved across the room and pulled out the nightstand drawer. After setting it on the floor, I reached into the back of the drawer compartment and felt around. It only took me a second to find the smooth rectangle stuck to the back. Now that I'd discovered it, I wasn't surprised. It was just like Cormac to play that kind of head game, to hide something right under the nose of the person who might be looking for it. He probably felt a little thrill of excitement every time Miranda opened her nightstand, more proof that he was smarter and better than the rest of us.

I felt for the edge of the paper and pulled. It came away with a soft rip, and when I had it in my hand, I saw that it was an envelope, tacky along the outside edges where the tape had held it in place.

My heart beat wildly as I slipped a finger under the seal. When it was open, I removed a stack of bills that wasn't nearly as thick as it should have been, then started counting, piling hundreds on the plush white carpet.

I was halfway through the stack when dread began to bloom in my chest. By the time I was done counting, my breath was coming fast and shallow.

Twenty-nine hundred dollars.

That was all that was left of the gold Cormac had
liquidated a little less than five months ago. He'd been secretive about the sale price, but when I looked online, the price of a gold bar had been somewhere around thirty-five thousand dollars. Even allowing for the fact that he'd probably had to sell it through a commodities fence, he must have cleared thirty thousand and change. Which meant we'd gone through a lot of money since leaving Playa Hermosa.

True, we'd spent a month in a hotel and another in a high-end condo on the water before we'd moved in with Miranda. We'd needed clothes and food, and Cormac had leased a car through a shady series of arrangements that took us from an auto mechanic in Bothell to a BMW dealership downtown. All in the name of the con, of course. All in the name of getting Miranda to see Cormac as the wealthy entrepreneur he claimed to be.

I should have expected us to be almost out of money. Still, it came as a shock, and I hesitated over the stacks of bills, wondering if I should leave Cormac something, before putting them all back in the envelope and stuffing it quickly into my backpack.

Cormac had used more than his share of the money to rebound. Parker had gone to jail for it and hadn't seen a dime. I'd use every cent of what was left to get him out of trouble if I could, and I wouldn't waste any more time feeling bad for Cormac.

He was on his own now.

We all were.