Sliver Of Truth

“We need to go there. And we need a computer to try our luck getting into that website. I’d like to check my e-mail, too, in case Grant sent me anything before he-” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence. These were the things I’d been thinking about as I’d washed and dressed. I wanted to somehow take back control of my trashed existence. I didn’t like the broken person with the bleached blond hair, Max’s daughter injured and in hiding from various threats. I wanted to be me again.

“Are you up to it?” he asked skeptically.

“Not really. But what are our choices, sit around here waiting for the cops or for one of Max’s enemies to come after us? Better to be proactive, don’t you think?”

“I was thinking we should turn ourselves in,” he said, coming to stand beside me.

“No,” I said quickly, certainly. “Not yet.”

The thought of being trapped somewhere filled me with dread. A window was closing. If I didn’t find Max soon, he’d be gone for good like the ghost that he was. There’d be time to pay for whatever mistakes I’d made. But later.

I turned to Dylan and was surprised to find him so close.

“I fucked up, Ridley. You were right-we’re out of our league here.” It was a simple admission of error, nothing dramatic or even regretful about it. I liked the ease with which he could admit that he’d made mistakes. I think it’s a good quality in a person.

He put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t like being so close to him, didn’t like his scent, the warmth of his body. I wanted to move away but found that I couldn’t, and moved in closer instead. He pulled me to him and then his lips were on mine. I felt heat travel through my body. It was in a desperate seeking of comfort that I let him kiss me, that I kissed him back. I felt his arms enfold me. He held me with conviction but also with care, with tenderness. Jake always kissed me with a kind of reverence, a painful gentleness. Dylan kissed me as if he owned me, as if he knew me. I pulled away from him, pushed him back, then slapped him hard. The sound my hand made against his face was a satisfying smack. It felt good. Almost as good as it had felt to kiss him.

“Asshole,” I said, hating my pulse for racing and hating the mutinous heat on my face.

“That’s three,” he said with a big smile. He put his hand lovingly to his face as though I’d kissed him there.

“You think because you’ve read a few of my e-mails, listened in on my conversations, that you know something about me.”

He put his hands in his pockets and cast his eyes to the floor.

“Well, you don’t. Okay?”

He nodded. I couldn’t see if he’d stopped smiling but I didn’t think so. I put my bag over my shoulder and walked toward the door.

“Are we going or what?”

I COULD TELL you that it was cool, that the sky was a flat, dead concrete gray, and that the sun was trapped hopelessly behind thick cloud cover. But it was England and late autumn, so yeah. We drove in silence toward the city. I kept my eyes closed or turned out the window, so as not to invite any conversation from Dylan. I had a million questions but I wished I could get my answers from somewhere else.

For a while, I tried to retrieve some of the missing fragments of my memory: how I’d gotten to England, what had happened to me, how I’d come to check myself in to the Covent Garden Hotel, whose voice I heard in my head, asking the same question over and over. But I was overcome with a terrible foreboding that discouraged me from mentally exploring my recent past. Maybe some things were better off forgotten.

Eventually I got bored ignoring Dylan and turned to him.

“I was a shit to kiss you like that,” he said as soon as I did. “You’ve got enough going on. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you. I just…”

He didn’t finish and the sentence hung between us.

“Will you tell me about your mother?” I asked.

“You don’t want to hear my sad story.”

“I do,” I said. I felt the urge to reach out to him, to touch him where I’d slapped him or to put my hand on his arm. But I didn’t. “I really want to know.”

There’d been crime-scene photographs in the file. Alice Grace was beaten to death and left to die in an alley behind the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris in 1985.

He released a sigh. Then: “I always thought, growing up, that my parents were in the hotel business, that they traveled the world buying struggling hotels and turning them into five-star properties. That had been my mother’s family business and I never questioned it. It wasn’t until long after my mother was killed that I learned the truth. That my parents were both former intelligence officers with British Special Forces and that upon their retirement from military service before I was born, they were recruited by Interpol.”

He watched the road and didn’t even glance at me. I could see that he had a white-knuckled grip on the wheel.