Ava pressed her forehead to the cool plastic of the window. Below, the ground crew in their orange vests cleared the area. The plane turned, paused, and then the engines roared and the whole world tilted backward.
Wheels up.
Chicago fell away beneath her, the lake a vast blue sheet to the east, the grid of streets shrinking into a map. The plane banked gently, and sunlight broke through the window in a clean white bar across her lap.
Ava looked out at the clouds building on the horizon, huge and slow and impossibly white, and felt something in her chest unclench for the first time in seven days.
She was going to London. She was in her seat. The sky was waiting.
Chapter Seventeen
A Summer of Museums and Ordinary Days in London
London in July smelled like rain that had just decided not to fall.
Ava learned this on her third day, walking with her mother through Hyde Park with ice cream melting faster than either of them could eat it. The air was soft and green and full of the sound of distant traffic, and the Serpentine glittered every time the clouds thinned. A swan eyed Ava's cone with professional interest.
"Do not feed the swan," Elena said.
"I was not going to feed the swan."
"You were thinking about it."
Ava was, a little. She took a defiant bite instead.
It was strange, how ordinary everything was. After the spring of cameras and lawyers and her father's exhausted voice on the phone, ordinary felt like a language she had to relearn. Mornings in the little rented flat near the conference center. Her mother leaving for the hospital sessions with her badge and her sensible shoes. Ava with a transit pass and a paperback and the whole enormous city to herself.
She went to the British Museum and stood in front of the Rosetta Stone for twenty minutes while a tour group flowed around her like water around a rock. She went to the Natural History Museum and stared up at the blue whale skeleton until her neck hurt. She took a riverboat to Greenwich and stood on the prime meridian with one foot in each hemisphere and felt, for the first time in weeks, exactly her age.
At the Tower of London, a girl about her age stared at her for a full minute before whispering to her mother, loud enough for the whole queue to hear, "That is the seat girl." Ava signed the girl's guidebook with a borrowed pen, because refusing felt meaner than the staring. On the Tube home she told Elena, "I am famous in exactly one country for sitting down correctly." Elena laughed so hard she missed their stop.
That night a message lit up Elena's phone from a conference colleague. The Atlas story had come up in a panel on corporate accountability. "They used your name," Elena said, reading it aloud. "Respectfully." Ava considered this. "Tell them I charge a speaking fee now." "You do not," Elena said. "I might," Ava said.
Her mother watched her. Ava knew she was being watched. Elena Reyes was a surgeon, which meant she was professionally trained to notice the small wrong things before they became big wrong things, and she had been watching her daughter the way she might watch a patient after a difficult operation.
Ava found it both annoying and comforting, in roughly equal measure.
One evening they cooked together in the flat's tiny kitchen, which was really just a hopeful corner of the living room. Elena chopped vegetables with surgical precision. Ava was in charge of stirring, a job she performed with deep suspicion toward the recipe.
"Your father called," Elena said, not looking up from the cutting board. "The board voted. The findings go public next week."
Ava stirred. "Is that good?"
"It is honest. Whether it is good depends on who you ask." Elena scraped diced onion into the pan. It hissed. "Whitmore Industries is threatening to move their account. Your father says let them."
Ava thought about Charles Whitmore, silver hair and folded arms, the satisfied smile when he thought she had surrendered. She had not thought about him in days. It felt like remembering a character from a book she had finished.
"Do you think he is sorry?" Ava asked. "The apology, I mean. Do you think he meant it?"
Elena was quiet for a moment. "I think he is a man who got used to the world rearranging itself around him, and then one day it did not. Whether that produces sorrow or only embarrassment, I cannot say."
"That is a very doctor answer."
"I am a very doctor person."
They ate on the couch with the plates balanced on their knees, watching a British baking show where everyone was impossibly polite about collapsing cakes. Halfway through, Elena muted it during a commercial and turned to face Ava fully.
"Sweetheart," she said, and Ava braced herself, because sweetheart in that tone meant a real question was coming. "Are you all right? Truly. Not the brave face. The truth."
Ava considered lying. It would have been easy, and it would have ended the conversation, and her mother would have pretended to believe her. Instead she said, "I have nightmares sometimes. Not bad ones. Just the cabin, and everybody looking at me, and I cannot find my boarding pass."
Elena nodded slowly. "That makes sense."
"And sometimes I get angry," Ava went on, surprised at herself. "Not at him. At the part where I had to call Dad. I keep thinking, what if my father had been a plumber? Would 2A still have been mine?"
"It was yours," Elena said firmly. "The manifest said so before anyone knew your name. That is the whole point, baby. That is what your father has been trying to prove."