The Bona Fide Fraud - Chapter 12 Losing Her

Now, in the youth hostel, Gemma put down Our Mutual Friend. There was a body in the Thames, early in the story. She didn’t like reading thatthe description of a waterlogged dead body. Gemma’s days were long now, since news had gotten around that Willow Blair had killed herself in that selfsame river, weighting her pockets with stones and jumping off the Westminster Bridge, leaving a suicide note in her bread box.

Gemma thought about Will every day. Every hour. She remembered the way Will covered her face with her hands or her hoodie when she felt vulnerable. The high, bubblegum sound of her voice. Willow rolled her rings around her fingers. She had those two cigarette burns on her upper arm and a scar on one hand from a hot pan of cream-cheese brownies. She chopped onions fast and hard with an outsize heavy knife, something she had learned to do from a cooking video. She smelled like jasmine and sometimes like coffee with cream and sugar. There was a lemony spray she put on her hair.

Willow Blair was the type of girl teachers never thought worked to her full potential. The type of girl who blew off studying and yet filled her favorite books with sticky notes. Will refused to strive for greatness or to work toward other people’s definitions of success. She struggled to wrest herself from men who wanted to dominate her and women who wanted her exclusive attention. She refused, over and over, to give any single person her devotion, preferring instead to make a home for herself that she defined on her own terms, and of which she was master. She had accepted her parents’ money but not their control of her identity, and had taken advantage of her good fortune to reinvent herself, to find a different way of living. It was a particular kind of bravery, one that often got mistaken for selfishness or laziness. She was the type of girl you might think was nothing more than a private-school blonde, but you’d be very wrong if you went no deeper than that.

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Today, when the hostel woke up and the backpackers began staggering to the bathroom, Gemma went out. She spent the day as she often did, on self-improvement. She walked through the halls of the British Museum for a couple of hours, learning the names of paintings and drinking a series of Cokes from small bottles. She stood in a bookshop for an hour and committed a map of Colombia to memory, then learned by heart a chapter of a book called Wealth Management: Eight Core Principles.

She wanted to call Paolo, but she could not.

She wouldn’t answer any calls except the one she was waiting for.