Sliver Of Truth

“I can’t,” I answered, running one hand over my head, feeling the stiff, spiky pieces.

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“He’s dead, Ridley.”

“You don’t believe that. And even if he is…I still-” I found I couldn’t finish my sentence.

“You still what?”

“I still need to know who he was. You of all people should understand that.”

He reached across the table and grabbed both of my hands. I looked into his beautiful face, those sea-glass green eyes, the soft lines at their corners, the dark stubble on his perfect jaw. His mouth was the most delicious shade of pink, like raspberry candy. I felt that physical pull to him.

He lowered his eyes for a minute, then raised them to me again.

“I was thinking about what Esme said. About changing our names and getting as far away from here as possible. Maybe we could do that. You and me. We could go anywhere in the world. Just start over. Start our own family. Just disappear. I want to let go. I want to move on. I feel like I’ve wasted so much of my life with this thing, with all the anger. It’s possible, isn’t it, just to walk away?”

Everything inside me wanted to tell him yes, yes, it is possible, and let’s go. We could open some kind of tiki bar in the Caribbean or find an olive farm in Tuscany. I’ll shift off my lousy family and the nightmare of Max and who he might have been. We’ll have children and tell them we were both orphans, no family at all. They’d never be touched by the poison in each of our pasts. They’d have a clean slate. It sounded like a beautiful idea and for a split second I could almost believe it was possible. But we can’t do that, can we? You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself. You can walk away and hide from the people who made you, but you’ll always hear them calling your name. At least that’s true for me.

I didn’t say any of these things. But I know he saw my emotions play out on my face. He released my hands and leaned back in his chair. He started working his nail against a corner of laminate that was coming off the table. I saw him abandon his fantasy with a long exhale.

“So what now?” he asked. I didn’t hear disappointment, only resignation, in his voice, as though he’d already known it wasn’t possible for us. I hesitated only briefly before I told him about the text message, my meeting at the Cloisters. About Grant and the phone call I had to make.

“You saw it, too,” I said. “The website. It was up on your computer. There was streaming video of a street in London. How did you log on?”

He shook his head. “I never saw it. I told you, I didn’t go back to the studio that night.” There was something oddly still about his face and I wasn’t sure if I believed him. But I nodded. “And you didn’t send that text message?”

He shook his head. “No, of course not.” After a beat: “Who do you think sent you this message, Ridley? Who are you expecting to find up there?”

I didn’t know the answer to that. Did I expect to go and find Max waiting for me with answers to every question I had about him in my heart? That his answers would enable me to make peace with who he was and what he had done? Maybe part of me thought that might happen. But a larger part of me had no idea, wasn’t even convinced that this was such a good idea. I know: duh.

We were there, Jake and I, in that place where silence is an answer, where you know each other so well that some questions don’t require a response.

I took a sip of my coffee and kept my eyes on the door to the street, as I had done since arriving.

“I need you to promise me something,” I said.

“What?”

“If he’s alive, if we find him, I need to know you won’t hurt him.”

He gave me a flat look. “Is that what you think? That I want revenge on Max Smiley?”

“Isn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything for a second, just lifted his eyes to the ceiling. Then: “Why are you so interested in protecting him?”

“He’s my father,” I said.

“He’s your biological father,” he said, shifting forward in his seat.

“Yes. That counts for something. There are things I need from him even now, just like there are things you need from your biological parents. You get that, right?”

He nodded slowly. “I get that.” Then: “The thing I’m most interested in is protecting you, Ridley. I don’t want to see you get hurt. That’s my only agenda.”

“What do you need to protect me from?” I asked.

“Mostly from yourself. I’m trying to keep you from getting in over your head.”

“Are you being purposely vague? What aren’t you telling me?”

We had a staring contest then, which he lost. He cast his eyes to the table and didn’t look up again. Jake seemed like a black box to me sometimes. I had the feeling that I wouldn’t know everything there was to know about him until our lives were in a burning wreckage all around us.

“Call your Web guy,” suggested Jake after a minute of silence. “We might at least have a better idea of what we’re walking into.”

He hadn’t answered my questions. He hadn’t given me the promise I’d asked for. I was starting to regret that I’d told him about the meeting at all.