by Ruthie Knox
“I assumed they meant, be glad nobody knew about you.”
Ben didn’t move, but he seemed to sit taller in his chair. He was a very commanding man in a wingback. “Because I’m gay,” he said.
“Well, not exactly,” Judah corrected. “More because I committed a crime and got away with it. And because I’m gay. Or I was. With you.”
“But you’re not anymore.”
Judah cleared his throat and looked at the ceiling as if he hoped his salvation would arrive from that direction. “I don’t know that I’d say that.”
“Seems to me like you should’ve made up your mind by now,” Ben said mildly.
Judah glanced at Katie, and she attempted to beam the words Tell the truth, asshole, directly into his head.
“I am,” he said, as if he’d received the message. “I mean, I’m not—” He turned back to Ben and suddenly sat up straighter, his posture telegraphing resolution. “Look, Ben, I’m sorry. That’s what I wanted you to know. I’m sorry about what happened with your dad, and I’m sorry I let you take the heat. But mostly I’m sorry I left you behind like you were …”
“A dirty little secret?” Ben suggested.
Judah winced. “Nothing. Like you were nothing. I didn’t … I never planned for that to happen the way it did, but I didn’t stop it, and I should have. It’s—” He faltered again, then met Ben’s direct gaze and seemed to find the words he needed. “I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but that was the worst one. By far the worst. And I’ve never stopped thinking about it and feeling like shit about it, not for a single day in fifteen years. I’m sorry. I loved you, and I’m sorry.”
The two men stared at each other. Ben’s lips twitched, and he looked down at his hands. “Did you?”
“Yeah, I did. And I’m sorry for … I’m going to come out. Soon. And you might get some flack for that, too, if they figure out who you are or that I’ve been over here. And if you’re in the closet—”
“I’ve never been in the closet.”
Judah made a strangled sound.
“Since that summer,” Ben clarified. “I’ve been out since I walked out of jail. But I kept my mouth shut about you, obviously.”
“Thank you,” Judah said. He took a deep breath. “So I guess I just want to apologize in advance for whatever they put you through. I can give you guys a security team if you want, or whatever you—”
“We’ll manage.”
The room went awkward again with the interruption, everyone conscious of not belonging there, of not knowing how to smooth over the strangeness of the situation.
It wasn’t the glorious reunion Katie had hoped for, but it was a start. Definitely Judah’s best apology so far. She kind of wanted to give him a hug, but the complete lack of ease in the room made that impossible. She was just beginning to wonder whether she ought to try to engineer an escape for all three of them when Melissa said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
The woman rose to her feet, her shaking hands clutching and unclutching at her skirt. “You ruined everything for him,” she said. “Everything. And now you come to our house and say ‘sorry’ like that makes up for it? Like we’re supposed to believe you’ve been crying yourself to sleep over this for years?”
Judah’s lips parted, but Melissa cut him off before he could reply. “We know what you’ve been doing. Ben keeps buying magazines with your stupid face on them, and I’ve seen the pictures. All your women. Touring in Europe and the Middle East. And Ben’s just been—he’s been—” She gestured around the small room, her mouth twisted with disgust. “Stuck here.”
“Mel,” Ben said, his voice carrying a warning.
“No, Ben,” she said. “He ruined your life. He deserves to hear it, and if you’re not going to tell him, I’ll tell him.” She turned on Judah again. “Ben was going to be an officer, just like our father, and you took that away from him. He lost years of his life moping around Pella, and Dad wasn’t the same either, and they never talked again, never. I tried to make them talk, tried to fix it—but I couldn’t. Someone had to take care of Dad. I never got to do half the things I was going to do—”
“Mel,” Ben interrupted quietly.
“He ruined your life,” she repeated.
“No, he didn’t.”
“Of course he did.”
“I like my life.”
She made a face. “It’s not what you deserved. You lost West Point, and Dad …”
“Dad was a lost cause.”
“Not if you’d gone to West Point.”
“Even then. He was never going to come around. I was always going to be a disappointment to him.”
“Ben, he disowned you.”
“He made me choose,” Ben said. His eyes fixed on Judah. “I chose. That’s all.”
The room fell silent again, and Katie became aware of Melissa’s breathing. She was sucking in deep, ragged breaths, and her skin was ghostly pale.
“Are you all right?” Katie asked.
Ben looked at his sister. “You need a paper bag?”
Melissa shook her head.
Ben got up anyway and went into the kitchen. He returned with a brown sandwich bag and handed it to Melissa, who sat down in her chair and held it over her mouth. Which was a relief, because she’d started to whoop a little on each inhale. “She hyperventilates,” Ben explained unnecessarily. Melissa breathed into the bag.
“And she’s probably the one who’s been threatening you,” he added.
Melissa’s eyes widened. The room filled with the sound of collapsing paper as she inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. After a minute or two that felt like a month, her breathing began to calm.
Ben turned his back on them and hunkered down in front of his sister, his hand on her knee. “Nobody knew what happened at Dad’s house but me, you, Jude, and Dad, and he’s long gone. If somebody’s been threatening Judah over that night, it has to be you.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Judah. “Unless you told somebody?”
Judah shook his head.
Ben looked at his sister. “Mel?”
The bag dropped away from her mouth as she lowered her chin and closed her eyes. Somehow, her body conveyed the answer Ben was looking for. He let out a deep exhale and dropped his head, a weary disappointment settling over him.
“She lived with Dad,” he said quietly. “Until he died. That was a couple of years ago, and she hasn’t really been … She’s had a hard time since then.”
“What kind of hard time?” Sean asked.
Ben looked at his sister. “Is it okay if I tell them? I probably have to. It sounds like you could be in some trouble for this.”
Her eyes filling with tears, she nodded.
“She’s struggled with anxiety for a long time, and sometimes it’s bad enough that it’s almost paranoia. It got worse after my father died, and the doctor she was going to kept throwing pills at her. Xanax and sleeping pills and something for schizophrenia. Way too many pills. I didn’t know, or I would have …”
He shook his head. “She overdosed on the sleeping pills. Took a whole bottle. I went down to the hospital and brought her home, and she’s been living with me ever since. But I had no idea …”
Again, he turned away to look at his sister. “What’s this all about, Mel? What did you think you were doing?”
She swallowed. “He ruined your life. Both of our lives. And he was gloating about it.”
But her voice came out thready and weak, her conviction gone as thin as tissue paper.
“When was he gloating?” Ben asked. “We hadn’t seen him.”
“In that interview. Talking about you—like he cared about you, when he doesn’t. He never cared about either of us.”
“So you threatened him?”
“I wanted him to know that somebody remembered what he’d done.”
“You wanted him to suffer.”
“Like you suffered.”
“I haven’t suffered, Mel.”
She sighed and looked out the window. “We both have.”
Ben looked at Judah. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He raked his hand through his hair. “I guess not, but Jesus.”
Everyone sat still, and a clock ticked in the silence. Ben crossed back to his chair and took a seat. He rubbed his hands over his knees.
Slowly, Ben’s gaze moved over the room and stopped on Judah. “For the record? I have a good job that I love. A house in a place that I like a lot. I have friends. I’ve had lovers. My life didn’t end when you walked out of that jail.”
“I’m glad,” Judah said.
“But I wished you hadn’t gone. I wished that for a long time.”
Judah inhaled. Exhaled. Finally, he sucked in a deep breath and said, “I wished that, too.”
Silence again. Melissa sniffed quietly and wiped at her eyes.
“Were you ever going to kill him?” Katie blurted out.
Probably not the world’s cleverest question. Caleb had told her more than once that in real life, criminals didn’t confess the way they did in the movies. But Katie wanted to know, and there was Melissa. Why not ask?
The woman shook her head and started to cry.
“She wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Ben told Katie. “She can’t even kill spiders.”
It felt like the truth.
Ben rose to leave the room and came back with another cup of coffee for his sister. Sean leaned forward and spoke low enough that only Katie could hear. “We n-need to interrogate her.”
“Not now,” she whispered. Ben settled a blanket over Melissa’s shoulders.
“She c-could be dangerous.”
She didn’t look dangerous. She’d begun to shake.
“Is your sister going to be okay?” she asked Ben, softly.
He nodded.
“Is she … Do you think we need to bring in the police?”
“No police,” Judah said.
“Look, Judah,” Sean said. “I think you need to c-consider—”
“No police,” he repeated. “Even if you call them, I won’t press charges.”
“She could be dangerous,” Sean insisted.
Ben shook his head. “She’s not dangerous. I give you my word.”
Katie bumped Sean’s shoulder with her own, and his arm came up and around her the way she’d wanted it to. She leaned in, breathing the familiar smell of leather and soap and Sean. “We should go.”
Judah clasped his hands between his knees and stared at Ben and Melissa as if they held the keys to everything he’d ever wanted.
Maybe they did. There was a lot of history between the three of them, a lot of pain, but now there was hope, too.
“You can handle this on your own,” she told him.
He glanced at her. “Yeah,” he said, steady and certain. “I can.”
“They need to be alone,” Katie told Sean. She took his hands and urged him to standing, and even though his expression remained troubled, he followed her lead. They gathered their jackets and slipped out of the house into the cold morning without goodbyes.
Sean jogged down the driveway to talk to the Palmerston agent who was getting out of the car.
Case closed, Katie thought as she pulled the door shut on her career as a field agent.
It hadn’t suited her, and that was fine. She would eventually find some way to spend her days that didn’t require her to cram herself into a persona that didn’t fit. The last few weeks had given her faith in herself, the reinvention she’d been looking for, though not at all in the way she’d expected to find it.
Her breath made a cloud in front of her face, and when she reached Sean’s elbow and he gave her a questioning look, she made a half-hearted effort to smile.
“Back to the hotel?” he asked.
“I guess so.”
Back to the hotel. And then back to Camelot.
They walked down the deserted street, passing one quaint house after another. The sun was up now, the sky clear and cold and blue. Ice crunched under her boots.
Katie held Sean’s hand and wondered how long it would be before he stopped running and went home to San Jose. Would she date the beginning of the end of their relationship from this moment?
She didn’t know. But she didn’t want it to be over.
Chapter Thirty-nine
They left Pella as quickly as they’d arrived.
“I just can’t get over this whole ‘personal jet’ business,” Katie said. She was on her knees in the aisle, rummaging through the drawer between a bank of seats. He wished she would get up. It made him uncomfortable to see her on her knees. “It’s so decadent.”
“It’s not that fancy a p-plane.”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s like, you want to go somewhere, you just walk onto the plane and go. When is life ever that easy?”
“You still need a pilot. And you have to drive to the airport. Some places have security.”
“Plus, no one is making me wear my seat belt, and then there’s the snacks!” She held up a small bag of Cheez-Its. “How can you not think this is decadent?”
“Cheez-Its are decadent?”
“The ability to have Cheez-Its now or at any moment I’d like them during the flight is decadent. Or, if I don’t want Cheez-Its, I can have cookies, or peanuts.”
“You c-can eat what you want on a c-commercial flight.”
“Yeah, but only if I schlep it onboard myself.”
“You’re not c-convincing me this is decadent. You’re just c-convincing me that c-commercial air travel ssucks.”
“That, too. The only downside of having your own plane, as far as I can tell, is that it’s hideously wasteful. I’m trying not to think about our consumption of fossil fuels. Do you buy carbon offsets or anything?”
“I run a c-company in San Jose, ssweetheart. I buy c-carbon offsets every time somebody flushes the t-toilet.”
Katie plopped into the seat next to him with her selections. “That’s good. I’d hate to think of you as the evil corporate type.”
He tried to smile, but with her face so close, it hurt. In six days, Sean had a board meeting to run, during which he would present a new plan to pull the company out of its slump. He’d done the research. No other security agency was offering the kind of social media monitoring he wanted to sell. As best he could tell, no one even had the software to do it yet.
Anderson Owens would be at the vanguard, and the vanguard paid well. It was time to stop screwing around and go home.
“I have to be evil ssometimes,” he said. “Mike isn’t any good at it.”
She reached up, uncertain fingers briefly landing on his cheek, his neck, the side of his face. Her eyes bothered him. Something off there, too.
“You ssstill have a headache?”
“A little one.”
“I think there’s some aspirin in the b-bathroom.”
She smiled sadly at her lap. “See what I mean? Personal jet. I need one of these.” Without looking up, she found his hand with hers and twined their fingers together. “I can’t imagine you ever being evil.”
“That’s because you’re good.”
She met his eyes. “When do you go back?”
He wished he had some means to turn away from her. It wasn’t a blessing, loving someone this much. It was a constant ache, a stitched-up wound always threatening to rip open and make a mess of him.
“Next week.”
She looked out the window. They’d ascended through the rain, and water streamed off the glass in crooked ribbons. “You’ll need help packing up the house,” she said to the sky.
There was nothing spectacular about the words, but they broke him. A crucial support snapped, and he listed sideways into her, wrapping her in his arms, burying his face in her neck. “Help me,” he said.
He didn’t mean for it to come out the way it did, an utterance seamed with desperation, visibly cracked and dangerously vulnerable. He didn’
t mean for her to see him like that.
She only turned and kissed him. “Of course.”
Chapter Forty
Katie lifted the next-to-last piece of the shrine off the living room wall. His kindergarten diploma. Across the top, a row of crayon children held hands like paper dolls, and she imagined Mrs. Owens choosing the frame. Hammering in the nail.
Pointless tears welled up in her eyes, and she lifted one hand to dismiss them and lost her grip on the frame. It slipped from her fingers. The corner stabbed into the top of her foot before flopping over onto the carpeted floor.
“Mother fucker!” Katie lifted her injured foot to cradle it in her hands. She lost her balance, hopped a few times, and came down on her butt, her fall cushioned by the scraping of her back against the edge of the couch. A stacked tower of books slid to the floor.
“What was that?” Sean called from the attic.
“I’m all right,” she said, but she was too out of breath to shout properly, and his feet were already pounding down the stairs. He burst into the room as if he expected to find her dead, and she looked down at her foot, sort of hoping the injury would be terrible.
No such luck. A white-edged scrape, some toothed skin, an anemic welling of blood. If she’d been wearing shoes like a sensible person, she wouldn’t even have the blood to show off.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I just dropped a picture frame on my foot. Sorry if I scared you.”
Sean looked at the wall in front of her. Only a grade school portrait remained, abandoned among rectilinear areas of darker paint that hadn’t faded over the years. A ghost shrine.
“You p-p-packed it up.”
“I thought it was time.”
He dropped to the floor next to her, his head lowered so she couldn’t see his expression. “Luh-let m-me ssseee yuh-your ffoot.”
She didn’t need to glimpse his expression, not when that telltale thickening of his stutter spoke volumes. He had to hate it—not just the sound of his own voice, but the way it tipped his hand whenever he felt vulnerable or threatened.
He’d been tipping his hand a lot since they started packing up the house four days ago. They’d begun in the attic. Katie wore old jeans and brought along her dad’s ancient portable radio, guessing correctly that Sean would want to work without talking and without a lot of fuss.
