The Last Flight

Eva meets Dex in a park. Eva tells Dex she is still uneasy over being watched by the feds and that she is not sleeping or eating. Dex tells her what Fish has told him: His operatives found that the girl she met for the drug deal was trying to avoid arrest by helping the feds. Fish’s people, he says, have “neutralized” her (140). Although Eva is determined to get out of this life, she knows for now she must return to her basement lab and then back to the streets of Berkeley.

Claire Googles to figure out how bodies are recovered from plane crashes at sea, hoping no one can say definitively her own wasn’t among them. She is more concerned over the possibility that Eva is alive and now a potential problem for her. However, she knows Eva’s boarding pass was scanned and reasons that means she had to be on the plane. Eva’s phone receives a voicemail—a woman asking if she is alright without identifying who she is.

The next day, Claire taps into emails from Rory to Bruce Corcoran about the mysterious Charlie. Corcoran assures Rory that he has already reminded Charlie about the nondisclosure agreement Charlie signed before leaving the Cook Foundation. Claire wonders who this Charlie is, certain only that he must be connected to the mystery surrounding the death of Rory’s first wife. Claire searches the thumb drive with her husband’s files and finds a letter from Rory’s first wife, dated the week before she died in the housefire. Far from being interested in any weekend reconciliation, as Rory had suggested, she wanted time and space to be by herself. Claire “know[s] firsthand how Rory reacts when a woman tries to leave him” (147).

No sooner does Eva begin cooking up the drugs in her basement than Liz becomes suspicious of Eva’s late-night absences and the curious smells from her apartment. Through Dex, Eva understands she is not to return to selling yet. The long nights in the makeshift lab give Eva a chance to recall how she first got involved with Fish’s organization: A boyfriend in one of her chemistry classes, a jock, introduced her to the lucrative world of the underground drug business and introduced her to Dex. She and her boyfriend had been nabbed by campus security a few months later while making drugs in one of the campus’s chem labs. Despite being a scholarship student, she was summarily expelled after her boyfriend double-crossed her.

Eva ventures out to meet Dex near the university’s football stadium. She tells him she is still paranoid, but Dex assures her that Fish neutralized the problem. Eva wants to pump Dex for information about how Fish’s organization works, hoping to use that as leverage with the federal agents tracking Fish. Dex stays evasive, and Eva realizes that he is “both comrade and captor” (155).

When Eva gets home, she impulsively Googles the names of her biological family, only to find that her mother is dead. Painfully, Eva relives what she remembers about her time in foster care after her mother (and then her mother’s parents) declined to take care of her. Her mother’s death strikes her as a “new rejection, a new heartbreak” (156).

Claire heads to the coffeeshop to meet Kelly. She will join Kelly and work for the catering business. The two stop at Kelly’s house on the way to a party, and Claire finds herself responding to the warm, domestic feel of the place, which reminds her how lonely she is now. She meets both Kelly’s mother and her teenaged daughter. Claire is surprised at how easy being Eva has become, but she makes one slip: Kelly’s daughter is working on a project for an art history class on the paintings of Jasper Johns and Basquiat, and Claire helps the girl to understand the complexity of the painters. Kelly asks her how she knows so much about art. Claire deflects, urging Kelly to enjoy the feeling of being overwhelmed by all her responsibilities as a single mother. Claire admits that she is on the run from a bad marriage and is hiding out in a friend’s apartment until she can figure out where to go. “It takes a lot of courage to start over” (162), Kelly says.

Catering the swanky dinner keeps Claire busy until she notices a couple in an obvious confrontation. Claire sees the man is bullying the woman: “I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of that kind of anger” (164). Later she sees the man grab the woman by the arm and try to restrain her. Forgetting her charade, Claire intercedes, putting herself between the warring partners. The heated exchange that follows draws several partygoers to record the confrontation on their phones.

It is December, two months before the crash. Eva begins to keep a record of Dex’s activities, hoping to compile material sufficient to broker a deal with the feds when the time comes. She is surprised when Dex appears at her door the day she and Liz were to go Christmas tree shopping. He cautions her that last week’s order was more than 100 pills short. Eva promises she will take care of the problem in a marathon session that night.

Going to the tree farm with Liz gives Eva a taste of freedom. Liz tells Eva that her daughter will not be visiting for the holidays, a “quiet sadness on her face” (170). Two days later the tree they picked out is delivered to Liz’s apartment. As they finish decorating the tree, Liz gifts Eva with a handblown ornament: a blue bird she says is a “harbinger of happiness” (171). Eva says she bought nothing for Liz, but Liz assures her that “her friendship” is gift enough. Eva tells Liz that she found out her mother is dead. Staring at the decorated tree, Eva feels “something shift inside her, something shiny and vulnerable and dangerous rising to the surface, breaking through her hard exterior” (173).

That night, as Eva sits alone in her dark apartment, Agent Castro comes to her door. He assures her he can help but that time is running out. He gives her his card and departs.