Page 95 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Jane shook her head. She couldn’t play this game anymore. She needed words, assurances.

“It’s all right.” Andrew gave her that careful look again, like she was missing something important.

Jane looked around the room, desperate for some kind of understanding. What could she be missing in this bare space?

The bare space.

Nick had gotten rid of his things. He had either sold them or given them away. Was he cleverly foiling the police so they didn’t have anywhere to plant their listening devices?

Jane couldn’t stand any more. She sat on the floor, tears of relief flooding from her eyes. That had to be the answer. Nick hadn’t left them. He was fucking with the pigs. The almost-empty apartment was just another one of Nick’s games.

“Jinx?” Andrew was clearly concerned.

“I’m all right.” She wiped her tears. She felt foolish for making such a scene. “Please don’t tell Nick I was so upset. Please.”

Andrew opened his mouth to respond, but a cough came out instead. Jane winced at the wet, congested sound. He coughed again, then again, and finally walked into the kitchen where he found a glass drying by the sink.

Jane wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She looked around the room again, noticing a small cardboard box beside the hideous chair. Her heart fluttered at the sight of the framed photo resting on the top.

Nick had given away almost everything but this—

Jane and Nick last Christmas at the Hillsborough house. Smiling for the camera, but not for each other, despite the proprietary arm Nick had draped over her shoulders. Jane had been out on tour for the previous three weeks. She had come back to find Nick antsy and distracted. He had kept insisting there was nothing wrong. Jane had kept begging him to speak. It had gone on like that for hours, sunset to sunrise, until finally, Nick had told Jane about meeting Laura Juneau.

He had been smoking a cigarette outside the front gates of the Queller Bayside Home. This was after the cocaine bust in Alameda County. Both he and Andrew were serving their court-mandated sentence. That Nick had met Laura was pure happenstance. For months, she’d been looking for a way into Queller. She had approached countless patients and staff in search of someone, anyone, who could help find proof that her husband had been screwed over by the system.

In Nick, Laura had found a truly sympathetic listener. For most of his life, he had been told by those in authority that he didn’t matter, that he wasn’t smart enough or from the right family or that he did not belong. Pulling in Andrew must have been even easier. Her brother had spent most of his life focused on his own wants and needs. Directing that attention toward another person’s tragedy was his way out of the darkness.

I felt so selfish when I heard her story, Andrew had told Jane. I thought I was suffering, but I had no idea what true suffering really is.

Jane wasn’t sure at what point Nick had brought in other people. That’s what he did best—collected stragglers, outsiders, people like him who felt that their voices were not being heard. By that Christmas night at the Hillsborough house when Nick had finally told Jane about the plan, there were dozens of people in other cities who were ready to change the world.

Was it Laura who’d first come up with the idea? Not just Oslo, but San Francisco, Chicago, and New York?

Queller Healthcare was one company in one state doing bad things to good people, but going public would infuse the company with enough cash to take their program of neglect nationwide. The competition was clearly working from the same business plan. Nick had told Jane stories about treatment facilities in Georgia and Alabama that were kicking patients out into the streets. An institution in Maryland had been caught dropping mentally incapacitated patients at bus stops in the harshest cold of winter. Illinois had a waitlist that effectively denied coverage for years.

As Nick had explained, Martin would be the first target, but meaningful change required meaningful acts of resistance. They had to show the rest of the country, the rest of the world, what was happening to these poor, abandoned people. They had to take a page from ACT UP, the Weather Underground, the United Freedom Front, and shake these corrupt institutions to their very foundations.

Which was fantastical.

Wasn’t it?

The truth was that Nick was always either outraged or excited about something. He wrote to politicians demanding action. Mailed angry letters to the editors of the San Francisco Gate. Volunteered alongside Jane at homeless shelters and AIDS clinics. He was constantly drawing ideas for incredible inventions, or scribbling notes about new business ventures. Jane always encouraged him because Nick following through on these ideas was another matter entirely. Either he thought the people who could help him were too stupid or too intransigent, or he would grow bored and move on to another thing.

She had assumed that Laura Juneau was one of the things Nick would move on from. When she’d realized that this time was different, that Andrew was involved, too, that they were both deadly serious about their fantastical plans, Jane couldn’t back out. She was too afraid that Nick would go on without her. That she would be left behind. A niggling voice inside of Jane always reminded her that she needed Nick far more than he needed her.

“Jinx.” Andrew was waiting for her attention. He was holding the Christmas photograph in his hands. He opened the back of the frame. A tiny key was taped to the cardboard.

Jane caught herself before she could ask what he was doing. She glanced nervously around the room. Nick had told them cameras could be hidden in lamps, tucked inside potted plants or secreted behind air-conditioning vents.

She realized now that Nick had removed all the vents. Nothing was left but the open mouths of the ducts that had been cut into the walls.

It’s only paranoia if you’re wrong.

Andrew handed Jane the key. She slipped it into her back pocket. He returned the photo to its place on the cardboard box.

As quietly as possible, he pushed the heavy, overstuffed chair over onto its side.

“What—” the word slipped out before she could catch it. Jane stared her curiosity into her brother.