Like before, when he’d caught her watching him and Chelsea in the quad, she saw longing in his expression, and she recoiled inwardly, her stomach tightening. She didn’t want him to look at her like that.
“I know,” she said, pulling her hand away.
They sat there in silence—the kind of uncomfortable silence Violet hadn’t experienced in a long time. She didn’t want to push him away, but she couldn’t encourage him either.
She thought of what he’d said last night, right before hanging up, I think it changes everything, and she wondered if there might be just the tiniest grain of truth in those words. She couldn’t help feeling some gratitude, and even a sense of obligation for what he’d done. But was that all she felt?
She shook her head. Of course that was all, she reprimanded herself. She was just confused. This was a lot to process.
Besides, she had other things to tell him, other things she wanted to talk about than her imprint. She leaned forward on her elbows. “What do you know about Dr. Lee?” she finally blurted out. “What has Sara said about him?”
Rafe stared back at her, confused. “Dr. Lee? What’s he got to do with this?” He frowned, but he answered anyway, hesitantly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was walking into. “I know that he’s a psychiatrist. And that he works for whoever runs the Center. I think Sara trusts him, she’s never really said she doesn’t.” He paused. “Come to think of it, she’s never really said much at all about him. Why are you asking? What do you know about him?” And then his lips tightened as a thought occurred to him. “Has he done something to you? Has he . . . has he acted inappropriately with you?”
Rafe’s meaning was crystal clear. He wanted to know if Dr. Lee had made some sort of unwanted advance on her. The idea was almost laughable, partly because it was hard to imagine the rigid Dr. Lee doing anything “inappropriate,” at least of the sexual nature. He seemed like the sort of guy who went home to his stark, spotless apartment and hung his perfectly starched black suit in a row of identical perfectly starched black suits, all on hangers that were equidistant from the next.
Truthfully, she had no idea who the real Dr. Lee was. Not even after reading her grandmother’s journals.
“God, Rafe, are you kidding? No. At least not the way you mean.”
Rafe relaxed, if only a little. “What, then? Why are you asking?”
She remembered the way Dr. Lee had warned Violet about telling anyone about their “arrangement.” And she remembered her grandmother’s handwriting, scrawled on the pages of her diary: Muriel is dead. And I know why. She tried to quit the Circle.
Was this the same as quitting, revealing a secret she’d been cautioned to keep? Could the consequences be just as deadly?
But she knew she couldn’t remain silent forever. She didn’t want to. “Remember when I told you I didn’t want to be on the team anymore, that I was quitting?”
Rafe’s eyes fell away guiltily as he cleared his throat, and Violet could practically read his thoughts. He still blamed himself. He still believed she’d been leaving because of him. “I remember.”
She was the one who reached over then, her fingers hovering near his—not quite touching, but almost. He watched them. “It wasn’t your fault,” she told him in a voice that was infinitely quieter than it had been before. “It wasn’t about you. It was me. I felt like I needed some distance, from you and from the team. That’s when I told Sara I was quitting.” She paused, waiting for him to look up again. When he did, at last, she continued, “But I didn’t change my mind about that, Rafe. I wasn’t the one who decided to stay. It was Dr. Lee. He told me I couldn’t quit. He said there were others . . . those higher up than him in the organization who wouldn’t allow me to just leave.” She whispered now, her words barely a breath as she voiced them aloud for the very first time. “He threatened my family.”
Rafe’s scowl was intense as he sorted through what she’d just revealed to him, and Violet waited for him to say something. She thought he seemed closer to her now, but she’d never noticed him move. It felt as if he’d stretched all the way across the tabletop, until he was somehow sharing her very breath.
He wasn’t, though. He was right where he’d always been. Sitting in the booth across from her, his eyes sliding over her face as he absorbed the accusations she was making.
She waited for him to say she was crazy, that she’d lost her mind. That the imprint she had listened to on a daily basis had finally—completely—driven her mad.
But that wasn’t what he said at all. He just nodded, a brief and decisive gesture. “If this is true . . . if what you’re saying is true, we need to find out what he’s up to.”
Blinking, Violet shifted in the booth. “There’s more,” she explained, reaching into her pocket and sliding the picture across the table. “That’s him,” she told Rafe as she tapped the picture of a younger Dr. Lee—James Lee. “And that,” she said, moving her finger over less than an inch, “is my grandmother.”
He looked up at her, and then back at the picture in front of him.
She nodded. “They knew each other, Rafe. They were on a different team, sorta like ours. They called themselves the Circle of Seven.”
He took a breath, his shoulders tense as he hunched forward, studying the picture. “Your grandmother’s not the only one,” he said at last, and then his finger touched the image too, landing on a girl, probably the youngest in the entire group. She had dark, shoulder-length hair. “That . . .” he said, his voice a whisper, “is my mom.”