Chapter 19: The Real Birthday

I showed Ryder the screen.

He read it twice, the way he reads weather.

"Do you believe him?"

"I believe he means it tonight." I turned the phone over on the step. "I stopped planning around what Remo means a long time ago."

I didn't answer the text.

The next morning I called the agent and told her I was going to the party.

She was quiet for a while.

"Then go," she said. "Wear something you can walk fast in. And don't do anything brave."

"I'm a pilot. We don't do brave. We do checklists."

"Good. Do a checklist."

On March ninth I caught the first flight out of Anchorage to O'Hare with Ryder beside me in his grandfather's funeral suit.

He'd had the shoulders let out.

"For the occasion," he said.

"What occasion?"

"I don't know yet. I'll find out when you do it."

Pop picked us up in the Buick.

He looked at the white bakery box on my lap.

"That from the bakery?"

"The one on Thirty-First Street. Where Mom used to go."

"How many?"

"Thirty-one."

He nodded at the windshield.

"Your mother would've checked them twice," he said. "Check them twice."

I checked them twice.

The hotel was on the Gold Coast, a block off the lake, all limestone and doormen in long gray coats.

Pop pulled up out front and put the Buick in park in the no-parking zone.

"I'll be right here," he said.

"They'll tow you."

"Let them try. I've got a cannoli in the glove box for emergencies."

The ballroom was on the top floor.

The elevator opened on noise and music and a wall of glass.

Beyond the glass, Lake Michigan was black. A hundred white lights were rising off the beach and lining up in the dark.

Drones.

They spelled a name.

LISETTA.

Somebody cheered. Then everybody cheered.

It was the same crowd.

I knew half of them by their shoes. Women who'd stood on the terrace in October with champagne. Men who'd laughed.

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