Page 136 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“Did you get all that?”

Zoe’s voice comes back warm and a little smug, exactly the way I like it.

“Oh, I got it. I got it all. Dennis Hobbs is going down.”

As I walk away from Hobbs's office, I picture myself in one of those action movies, completely unbothered by the bright orange explosion directly behind me. My Wonder Woman boots hit the marble floor in a slow motion victory strut, fireballs shooting off in every direction, the whole building going up in flames. The force of it blowing wind in my hair with a cinematic blast.

And I have a little smirk on my face and don’t look back because I just completed Mission Impossible.

28

JEREMIAH

Chapter playlist:

Money for Nothing — Sultans

America the Beautiful — Leslie Odom Jr.

Iset the mug down on the kitchen island and look out at the backyard, at the pool I haven’t had the time to use yet, at a sky so clean and blue it looks like a movie. October in Southern California. The locals call it "locals' summer," not too hot. Not too cold. The tourists have gone home and taken the crowds with them, so a guy can show up to a beach on a Tuesday and have four hundred yards of sand to himself.

I’ve got the day off today. Fall camp wrapped, the season’s three games in, and Irvine is two and one, which is not nothing for a brand-new expansion team. Coach runs a tighter room than Corpus Christi ever did, and I like it. I like my teammates. I like the equipment staff who remember how I tape my sticks without being told twice. It’s been an adjustment, learning how to vibe with a new roster, but it’s a good one.

I’m a little tired today. I could stay on this couch and play video games until my thumbs go numb. Or I could drive down to the beach and do absolutely nothing productive with sand between my toes.

Or I could think about her again, which is what I actually end up doing no matter which one I pick. I’ve been thinking about her nonstop for three months.

My cousins have been a good distraction. Nate and Memo are closest to me here in Orange County. Memo has a lot of responsibilities at the Abbey which gives him a little free time for a movie or ice cream every now and then, but I have lunch with Nate about once a week. He’s in Laguna Beach, which is right down the coast from my house in Newport. Nacho, Dante, Roman, and the rest of the wild cousins and tíos are a little further drive from me in LA. But it’s still closer than family has been since I left home for college all those years ago.

My mother is a different story. Burbank isn’t far, geographically. She still hasn’t driven down to Orange County once. I went to one of her press events last month instead, stood next to her for eleven photos while she introduced me as “my son, the Olympian,” like she’d had anything to do with my success. It made her happy. Or it made the headline happy. Hard to tell those apart with her.

She can’t hurt me anymore. I’ve said that to myself enough times now that I mostly believe it. I’m an adult now. I’ve put the past behind me. All forgiven. All forgotten.

Erica is the one I can’t talk myself into forgetting.

I haven’t heard from her since the night of the gala. It still lands somewhere between grief and dread every single morning, like my chest hasn’t gotten the memo that this is just what my life is now.

But I still check every day. I scan the internet for DC news searches. Robberies. Missing jewelry. Nothing, nothing, nothing, for months.

Until three weeks ago, I stumbled upon this article:

Recovered Nazi art and diamonds worth over $200 million, turned in anonymously.

Sources point to a vault at the Four Seasons in DC. Removed sometime in July. The details stay vague on purpose, the article said, though plenty of people online were happy to speculate. Vigilantes. Fortune hunters. Lots of comments joking to check on George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s whereabouts in July.

Then I went down the internet rabbit hole for the next few days. Every post and article was just variations of the other.

Three lost paintings hang in the Met now, one of the biggest Nazi-art recoveries in history. The diamonds believed to be Nazi loot, linked to descendants of a WW2 German general, now living in Argentina.

Argentina. The couple with German accents at the gala. From there, I began running my own personal inventory of every strange thing I noticed about my time with Erica. Nothing about that woman ever fully added up.

That time she just so happened to be at the Four Seasons, wearing a suit and tie. Her hair was slicked back into a tight bun, and she kept looking over her shoulder. I thought she was just being cute. How she said she had a “friend” staying at the hotel. Zoe, pushing that housekeeping cart. Then there was that thing Erica said to me the last night I’d seen her.

“It’s already in motion. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.”

I know in my gut it was her.

I scoured the internet for America Armitage. I searched her birthdate, did a reverse image search from pictures taken on the red carpet. All that came up was one grainy yearbook photo from a high school in Brooklyn and nothing else, like she’d been erased on purpose. Then, because apparently I have no self-preservation instinct where she’s concerned, I went further and found a six-year-old article about an attempted theft of the Friendship Jewel at the Bellenden Museum six years ago.