A Life Betrayed (Montreal #2)

Chapter Twenty-Four

W hen Mathias had returned to the safe house the previous evening, Rayan had been moments from coming clean about his conversation with Allen. It couldn’t stay buried between them, despite Rayan’s growing dread of how Mathias would react when he found out. But before he could tell him, Mathias had revealed his intention to leave, and Rayan knew if he brought it up then, it would destroy any chance of getting the man out of Montreal. Perhaps if he waited until they were out of the country, he would be able to convince Mathias of his reasoning.

Even as he thought it, Rayan cringed at his own naivety. He was thinking like a philosophy student. Mathias didn’t give a shit about a well-reasoned argument. He viewed loyalty in absolutes—you were either friend or foe, with him or against him. Philosophical arguments might be even-tempered. Mathias was not.

The simple fact remained: Rayan had made his decision, and he had to be willing to live with the fallout. While he couldn’t bear to lose what they had—and he continued to blindly tell himself it wouldn’t come to that—the prospect of losing Mathias entirely to prison—or worse—was unthinkable. If he wanted to keep Mathias safe long enough to get him out, Rayan would have to keep his mouth shut.

In the end, there wasn’t much for Rayan to prepare. He was already living out of a duffel bag, having returned once again to a transient life. There were parallels, to be sure. He felt a familiar unsteadiness, the same way his abrupt exit from Toronto had kicked up dust from the past. But this was different. This time, he wasn’t going alone.

Nothing in his old apartment was worth going back for. Mathias had assured him everything else could be settled after they’d left, lest they risk setting off any surveillance alarm bells. Despite his initial reluctance, Mathias was curiously prepared when it came to the logistics of disappearing. Then again, it made sense that Mathias—who never left anything to chance—would have a contingency plan. He was unsentimental that way—things were things, money was money, people were people. Rayan secretly counted himself as the exception to that last rule.

One thing remained unresolved. It had started as a wisp of an idea and was launched fully into being by Mathias’s words the night Rayan had seen his life condensed into a bleak stack of paperwork. The man’s assertion had rung true—Rayan had always been a passive participant in the events of his past, thrown quickly into their paralyzing grip and allowing the guilt and shame to control him. He couldn’t put right past wrongs, but he could decide how to confront them.

Mathias had stayed over, and Rayan lay in bed, listening to him in the shower while the morning sunlight broke through the gaps in the window blinds. Mathias emerged from the bathroom with an air of grim determination that followed him out to the living room, where he plucked his jacket from the back of the sofa and shrugged it on. Rayan met him at the door as he was pulling on his coat. He brought a hand to Mathias’s chin and lowered his face to kiss him. Only then did some of the stiffness leave the man’s shoulders.

He held Rayan close for a moment, exhaling into his neck, and then released him. “There are things to take care of. I’ll be in touch.”

After Mathias left, Rayan looked up the hospital he’d seen named in his mother’s coroner’s report and called the patient records department. He was directed through a series of bureaucratic gatekeepers only to be told that none of the records from the time of her death had been digitalized. Short of submitting an official information request to access a storeroom of archived medical files, there was no way of determining exactly where she’d ended up. As for his brother, Rayan was given a number and told the section of the cemetery in Laval where he’d been buried in a pauper’s grave.

Resolute, Rayan decided to take his chances and venture from the safe house despite the risk. When he got to the cemetery, he walked through the rows of small wooden markers until he came upon the one bearing his brother’s number. He stood there for a long time, looking down at the grass-covered section of dirt as though it would somehow translate to repentance. It pained him to think his brother had ended up here, nameless and forgotten.

Instead of heading back, Rayan caught a bus and rode it east across the suburb. The Islamic Cemetery of Quebec was a short walk from the bus stop. He found himself rooted outside the gate, his courage deserting him.

Forgive me, Mama.

As though she had conjured him, a short, balding man appeared by the front door of the squat brick building inside the compound and began walking toward Rayan. He lifted the latch on the gate and beckoned him inside. “ As-salamu alaikum .”

Rayan repeated the greeting woodenly.

“Are you here to offer du‘ā’s today, young man?”

“No, I don’t… I’m nonpracticing.”

The man gave him a kind smile. “Son, all are welcome here. I’m Imam Amir. What can I help you with?”

“I’d like to see the plots.”

The imam nodded. “Are they coming from a facility? We can help make the arrangements.”

“They’re already gone. But I wanted something…” He wasn’t sure what he wanted—just not a number on a wooden marker.

“To honor their memory?”

Rayan nodded.

“Come with me.” Imam Amir ushered him into the building and led Rayan through a series of corridors that smelled of agarwood and sparked a flurry of memories, like a key unlocking a cage.

“Who are you wanting to memorialize?”

“My mother. And my brother.”

The imam stopped to look at him. “We’ll want two plaques, then. Side by side so they can be together.”

Rayan’s breath stalled in his lungs. The two of them, lost separately to the world beyond, would finally be reunited. While he could no longer be with their mother, the least he could do was ensure that Tahir didn’t share the same fate.

“Together,” Rayan murmured, astonished at the peace that thought brought him.

They walked outside to a large area of land behind the building, filled with modest graves. The imam paused to recite a short greeting to the cemetery’s inhabitants, wishing them peace. Rayan gazed out across the grassy field, where a line of mature oaks marked the perimeter. In the far corner by the boundary fence was a stone garden dotted with small concrete plaques.

Imam Amir led him down to the garden and gestured toward several available spots. “We know a ritual burial isn’t always possible. Family may live overseas or have been put to rest elsewhere, so the plaques allow us to hold a place in their honor.”

Rayan stopped when he reached a section of the garden that was shaded by nearby trees, tranquil, quiet. “Here.”

“A beautiful place. Inside, we can discuss your chosen verses.”

Rayan followed him back through the cemetery and into the reception building. The man opened the door to a small room off the hallway and stepped inside. From the doorway, Rayan could see the prayer rug in the corner, positioned before an alcove in the wall where the Quran lay open. He froze, unable to cross the threshold. To him, it was no longer anything but superstition, yet to his mother, it had been important. He could not bring what he’d become through that door.

“I can’t,” Rayan said, a tightness in his throat.

The old man turned and gave him a thoughtful look. “Wherever your life has taken you, son, and the ways in which you have strayed from the path, know that Allah’s divine mercy has the power to pardon even the gravest sins.” Imam Amir pulled out a chair across from the desk and indicated for Rayan to sit.

He made his way into the room, and they both sat down, the imam reaching for his glasses resting on the desk and placing them carefully on the bridge of his nose. “Now, let us talk of your mother and brother. Tell me their names.”

Rayan said their names and, like a river bursting its banks, began to speak—about his mother and those Saturday mornings, the books she’d given him, the nights when he’d been sick and she’d kneel by his bed, stroking his hair. He spoke of his brother and the fights they’d had, the rivalry, and those days on the street with nothing but the knowledge that each was all the other had. Before him, Imam Amir sat perfectly still, listening.

Rayan spoke until the words dried up in his mouth and he fell silent. Then the imam picked up his pen and, in scrawling cursive, wrote two separate lines of scripture onto a sheet of paper. He slid it toward Rayan, and it was as though the man had known his mother and Tahir without ever having met them. Rayan nodded, and Imam Amir smiled, gathering everything up into a neat bundle.

“The plaques will be ready in a few weeks and installed shortly after.” The imam took Rayan’s payment and stood. “It was a pleasure meeting you, young man.”

Rayan got to his feet and was struck by a resounding sadness. To think he’d denied them this peace for all those years. “I should’ve done this a long time ago.”

Imam Amir laid a hand on Rayan’s shoulder. “But you are here now. And that is all that matters.”

Mathias’s mother was unusually reserved when he arrived at her apartment that afternoon. Now that the decision had been made, there was a list of things that required his attention, and he wanted to make the most of the lull that had followed their interference in Truman’s plan. Allen had gone quiet, but he knew it was only a matter of time before she appeared to lay down the next obstacle for him to vault over.

His mother stood at the front door, her forehead furrowing, before leading Mathias into the kitchen and reaching for the kettle to heat water for coffee. This wasn’t one of his regular calls—she was well aware that he wouldn’t willingly visit her more than once in the span of a month. Even that had been too frequent for Mathias, the need to leave kicking in as soon as he set foot inside. It felt oddly freeing to be here on his own terms rather than out of some misplaced sense of filial duty.

Marguerite made the coffee in silence, and Mathias took a seat at the kitchen table, watching her. As an adult, he’d grown accustomed to her endless chatter, but this felt more like the mother of his childhood—cold, sullen. They’d shared the same space but had always seemed to occupy different parts of it. When Mathias was young, she would breeze past him without a word, as if he was in her way and it was easier to simply pretend he wasn’t there. Unless she needed him, of course, and then there was nowhere in the apartment to hide. Even then, he’d known it wasn’t really him she needed—he just happened to be the person closest.

His mother placed two cups of coffee down on the table and sat across from him. She pressed her lined lips together, small wrinkles appearing at the corners of her mouth. Despite the impromptu nature of his visit, her makeup was applied perfectly.

“This is unexpected,” she said.

“You’re always at me to come by, so here I am.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Something’s different. You’re different.”

Mathias realized on some level, she already knew he was leaving—she was primed for it. His mother could smell desertion coming from a mile away. His gaze moved to the collection of vitamins and supplements lined up along the kitchen counter, a shrine to his mother’s unrelenting effort to maintain herself and delay the inevitable. Staring at the jars and vials, he recalled another bottle—small, amber, with a prescription label affixed to the front.

“When I was eleven,” Mathias said, the memory coming back to him in slow motion, “he called to say he wouldn’t come anymore, and you emptied a bottle of pills into your hand. Said if I didn’t call him back and make him change his mind, you’d swallow them.”

His mother bristled. “That’s what you want to do—come here and rehash old memories? When did you get so nostalgic?”

“I picked up the phone, but I left off the last number.”

His mother stood jerkily, picking up the cups of untouched coffee as though rescinding her offer.

“I stood there, pretending it rang and rang.” Mathias looked up at her. “Because I wanted you to do it.”

The cups trembled in his mother’s hands. “Is this some cruel joke? Why are you talking about this all of a sudden?”

“I was eleven, with a father who didn’t want me and a mother I wanted dead.”

She stepped away from the table and slammed the cups down on the kitchen counter, the coffee sloshing over the tops and spilling down the sides.

“He changed his mind anyway, didn’t he?” Mathias said. “Then ten years later, he changed it back. This time for good.”

Her blue eyes burned. “You think I don’t know you hate me? You think you haven’t made that clear all these years?”

“And you don’t hate me?” he spat. “I was raised knowing everything went bad after I came along.”

His mother didn’t deny it, and he didn’t expect her to. If Mathias had been a pawn, an object in their poisonous love affair, she had been too. Except his mother had chosen her fate, and that was too pathetic to hate.

“I don’t think that anymore,” he said quietly. “Maybe that’s what’s different.”

Marguerite blinked, her face wiped clean. She stared at him, her eyes welling with tears. “I just wanted him to love me more than anyone else.”

Mathias felt a tearing in his chest. How petty. What a shallow riptide he’d been pulled into. He’d been tossed about in its turbulence for too long.

“I’m going away,” he said. “I might not be back.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Nothing.” Everything . “It felt like time for a change.” Mathias stood and pulled out a slip of paper from his jacket. He placed it on the table. “I’ve made arrangements. Monthly payments into an account under your name. You’ll be taken care of.”

“And you?”

He thought of the darkened room with the locked door, dinners of cold canned soup alone at the kitchen table, the glare of the television as it taunted him with lives so unlike his own—fathers who doted on their children, mothers who remembered birthdays.

Mathias smirked. “If I learned one thing from you, it was that I can take care of myself.”