Page 114

Fulfilling the promise of the ouroboros.
Creation from destruction.
Life from death.
Ruby might have been the first, but I have a heart-sickening feeling that Erica was the last. I try not to think about how many others there have been in between then and now. There’ll be plenty of time to dwell on that later. Right now, I need to focus on one thing—extricating myself from the place in a way that will cause the least amount of suspicion.
“What happened after you talked to Greta?”
“I knew I didn’t want to stay there, that’s for damn sure.” Ingrid stands and makes her way to the row of sinks along the wall. Sheturns on the tap and starts splashing her face with water. “At that point, I had two thousand dollars in apartment-sitting money. Enough to get me far away from that place. But I also knew there’d be a lot more money coming if I stayed.”
The cash. Dangled in front of us at the end of each week. Yet another way the Bartholomew trapped us. It certainly kept me there another night.
“I decided to stay,” Ingrid says. “I didn’t know for how long. Maybe another week. Maybe two. But I wanted to feel safe, so I—”
“Bought a gun.”
Ingrid looks at me in the mirror above the sink, her brows arched. “So you found it. Good.”
“Why did you leave it there in the first place?”
“Because something happened,” Ingrid says, her voice getting quiet. “And if I tell you what it is, you’re totally going to hate me forever.”
I join her by the sink. “I won’t. I promise.”
“You will,” Ingrid says, now using a damp paper towel to clean the back of her neck. “And I totally deserve it.”
“Ingrid, just tell me.”
“That gun cost me everything I had. That two grand I had saved up? Gone, like that.” She snaps her fingers, and I can see the chipped remains of her blue nail polish. “So I asked Leslie if I could get an advance on my apartment-sitting money. Nothing huge. Just a week’s pay early. She told me that wasn’t possible. But then she said that I could have five thousand dollars—not a loan or an advance, but five grand with no strings attached—if I did one little thing.”
“What was it?”
Ingrid stalls by examining a strand of her black-as-pitch hair. When she looks in the mirror, there’s disgust in her eyes. As if she hates every single thing about herself.
“To cut you,” she says. “When we crashed in the lobby, that wasn’t an accident. Leslie paid me to do it.”
I recall that moment with vivid clarity, like it’s a movie beingprojected right there on the bathroom wall. Me burdened with my two grocery bags. Ingrid rushing down the stairs, her eyes on her phone. Then the collision, our bodies ricocheting, the groceries falling, me suddenly bleeding. In the chaotic aftermath, I didn’t have time to give too much thought as to how my arm had been cut.
Now I know the truth.
“I had a Swiss army knife,” Ingrid says, unable to look at me. “I held it against my phone, with just the tip of the blade exposed. And right when we crashed, I sliced your arm. Leslie told me it shouldn’t be a big cut. Just enough to draw blood.”
I back away from her. First one step. Then another.
“Why... why would they need you to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Ingrid says. “I didn’t ask. By then, I had my suspicions about what she was. Whatallof them are. And I guess I thought it was some kind of test. Like they were trying to convert me. Enticing me to join them. But at the time, I was too desperate to ask questions. All I could think about was that five thousand dollars, and how much I needed it to get away from that place.”
I keep moving away from her until I’m on the other side of the bathroom, sinking into an open stall and dropping onto the toilet seat. Ingrid rushes toward me and drops to her knees.
“I’m so sorry, Juju,” she says. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
A bubble of anger rises in my chest, hot and bilious. But it’s not directed at Ingrid. I can’t blame her for what she did. She was broke and desperate and saw an easy way to make a lot of money. If our roles were reversed, I might have done the same thing, no questions asked.
No, my anger is reserved for Leslie and everyone else in the Bartholomew for exploiting that desperation and turning it into a weapon.
“You’re forgiven,” I tell Ingrid. “You did what you needed to do to survive.”