A Life Betrayed (Montreal #2)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

T he students were restless that afternoon. Rayan pushed the desks aside and laid out large squares of paper on the floor and small jars of black paint. He asked them to write one word in their native language about what being here meant to them.

“Not in French, monsieur?”

“Not today.”

They’d been excited then, released from the stuffy confines of an imposed language and allowed free expression. The words bloomed on the paper like flowers, many of which he recognized: family, money, peace.

Rayan picked up his own brush, trailed it in the paint, and pulled it inexpertly across a blank piece of paper. He remembered how his mother had guided his hand as she taught him the Arabic alphabet—the stroke of a pen unlocking each letter like a code.

The word looked strange written down. For him, not tethered to any real cultural history, it had never been a place or a country. It had always meant a person. Someone who tied him to the world, helped him determine his place in it. His mother, his brother, and now…

After the lesson, the students rolled up their papers and took them home. They were part of a cultural immersion class for youth, which Rayan taught at the newly opened Calais Center for New Migrants. In recent years, the coastal town had found itself inundated with people fleeing conflict across the Mediterranean, arriving in Europe on makeshift boats and inflatable rafts after battling treacherous conditions. From Calais, many attempted another perilous journey across the English Channel, a journey some never completed. In Rayan’s classes were children who’d lost parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

Northern France was dotted with towns like this, reeling with an influx of migrants who knew little of the language, the culture, or what the future would look like. Eventually, many of the refugees would be distributed around the rest of the country or across the border to Germany, Belgium, or the UK.

The center taught acclimation courses and provided resources and amenities to those in limbo. Rayan had started as a volunteer in the kitchens before the center manager had pushed him to take on one of the classes. He’d discovered Rayan spoke Arabic and declared his Quebec dialect quaint, viewing him as the perfect cross-cultural ambassador, despite Rayan having arrived in France only several months prior. Rayan’s first instinct was to decline, compelled by a deep-rooted need to remain hidden. But then he’d remembered Professor Hofstein and his mitzvahs. The greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Rayan finished packing up the classroom, rolled up the piece of paper with his painted scrawl, and made his way to the exit, where he saw one of his students waiting on the steps outside.

“Do we get to do that again next week, monsieur?” the boy asked as Rayan passed him. Omar was his name, and he’d come here with his family from Syria. He was short and reedy, his jet-black hair sticking straight up.

“We’ll see.”

“My mama says they don’t like seeing the letters. She tells me not to write them down.”

Rayan stopped on the bottom step. “Some people don’t like things that are different. Doesn’t mean they’re not important.” He looked at Omar pointedly. “Do you think they’re important?”

The kid nodded.

“There we go.”

“Anyway, thanks, akhi .” Omar shot him a cheeky smile and sprinted off across the courtyard.

Rayan stood, his hand gripping the handrail. Then he let out a breath. “ Akhi ,” he said quietly, tasting the word again.

The walk from the center to the house took Rayan along the harbor. He slowed as he approached the row of buildings by the entrance to the dock. The sign above the warehouse at the end of the row read Importations Fleurdelisé. Rayan grinned at the thought of making an unexpected stop—he could already picture the scowl of irritation on the man’s face . Instead, he crossed the road and rounded the corner past a brightly painted souvenir kiosk.

The house sat on a quiet street a few blocks from the ocean. Narrow but tall, it was made of solid white brick and had withstood war and Nazi invasion. After turning the key in the lock, Rayan stepped inside to find it warm. Mathias usually left after Rayan in the morning and always kept the heat on. They’d left Montreal at the tail end of winter and had spent the spring and summer in the mild climes of coastal France. It would soon be their first winter here, and while it wasn’t balmy Cyprus, it wouldn’t get nearly as frigid as Canada.

Rayan took off his shoes and placed them on the rack in the hallway beside a pair of black leather Oxfords. Sometimes Rayan opened the wardrobe just to see their clothes hanging together. He remembered once thinking it an utter fantasy to wake every morning in Mathias’s bed. Now Rayan awoke each day to the man’s face or the curve of his neck, with Mathias’s back pressed against him or his arm wrapped around him, and it took a second to convince himself it was real.

Rayan had wondered what it would be like to be together after spending so much time rationing contact. In some ways, it resembled those early years, when he’d wait each morning for the moment Mathias arrived at the Collections office, and the man was almost always tired, sometimes hungover, and usually preoccupied with a situation that needed righting. Rayan’s most important job would be to get Mathias’s coffee. It still felt like the most important task of the day.

But getting to this point hadn’t been easy. After their arrival in France, Mathias had moved through the initial days with purposeful efficiency—making arrangements and tying up loose ends they’d left back in Montreal. Then he’d ground to a sudden halt as though his inner mechanism had broken down. For two weeks, he didn’t leave the house. He would sit smoking on the balcony, looking out at the sea or staring at the same page of the newspaper. Some days, he simply remained in bed, refusing to eat. Rayan had never seen him like this. Unsure what to do, Rayan had continued through the rituals of the day—making food, walking to the store for groceries, and bringing back books, which he’d leave around the house, hoping Mathias might take an interest. Mathias’s mood had scared him, reminding him of another time, when his mother had grown so listless it was like she was no longer there.

At night, Rayan had lain beside Mathias with his hands clenched at his sides, desperate to reach out and hold him, but the man would not be touched. He knew that the structure Mathias had built to make sense of the world and his place in it had disappeared. He’d gone from having everything—status, power, respect—to nothing. He also knew Mathias hadn’t told him everything about their hurried exit from the country, only that they could no longer return. Mathias’s departure from Montreal had come on the back of a string of betrayals, and Rayan’s actions had further compounded the ordeal. While Rayan had steeled himself to face the full force of Mathias’s wrath, he’d been unprepared for the pain in the man’s eyes when he’d confronted him.

And then one morning, as though a switch had flipped, Mathias got out of bed and went to the bathroom to shower and shave. He’d dressed carefully in one of his suits, placed a series of documents in a small case, and left the house. When he returned later that afternoon, he was more himself than Rayan had seen him in weeks. He’d taken Rayan against the wall in the hallway, quick and furious, and later, as they lay intertwined in bed, had told him he’d purchased a local art-and-antiques-import business.

“I didn’t know you were interested in art,” Rayan remarked.

“I’m not,” Mathias said with a shrug. “The owner was desperate to sell, and I got it for a bargain. Hasn’t run a profit in years, but the client list is solid, and I like a challenge.”

It wasn’t so much that he liked a challenge—more that he needed one. Mathias measured himself by what he pushed up against—the harder, the better. That was what had been missing after he cut ties with the family, rendering him aimless and lost.

The business was good for him. While not quite like skimming a percentage off multimillion-dollar construction contracts, the enterprise came with its own set of difficulties. Calais was a microcosm of Montreal. There were wheels to be greased and favors to be negotiated. In a short time, Mathias had managed to integrate himself with the inner workings of the town. Clients began to come to him from around the country and farther afield, with bespoke requests and often astounding amounts of money.

In contrast, Rayan had found himself drawn to the plight of the people who continued to flock to the small seaside village, set adrift in a new land—buoyed by hope but dogged by tragedy. He felt a pull to the work that he couldn’t explain. Before leaving Montreal, he’d sent Professor Hofstein his completed thesis in the mail, with no return address. He hadn’t expected anything to come of it and merely wanted to close out the chapter. Rayan had been surprised, months later, to get the email from the university with his confirmation, asking for an address to send his degree certificate. Either the RCMP’s inquiry had led to nothing, or the university was simply happy to take his money without question. Rayan hadn’t replied—he had no need for a certificate—but he’d felt a quiet pride at seeing his name beside the title of his degree. He’d wanted to see if he could do it, and now that it was done, Rayan had no interest in taking it any further.

Teaching at the center had started as a temporary preoccupation but become something bigger, more important. The pay was next to nothing—as Mathias took pains to point out. He would observe Rayan as he gathered his materials each morning. “They keep coming, and they’ll just keep shipping them out. How will a few months of learning French change any of that?”

“It’s something though, isn’t it?”

And Mathias would sigh, shaking his head. Rayan knew what it was like to have nothing, and he knew what it was like to feel that knowledge gave him something.

Rayan walked into the kitchen, dropped his bag, and placed the rolled-up piece of paper on the counter. He took out a stockpot from the cabinet, filled it with water, and put it on the stove to boil. From down the hall came a click and then a soft thud as the front door opened and closed. Rayan hadn’t expected him back for another few hours.

Mathias strode into the kitchen, and his eyes fell on the paper from Rayan’s class. He plucked it from the counter and unrolled it, one eyebrow raised. “I thought you were supposed to be teaching them French,” he said, dropping it back down.

Rayan shrugged. “Sometimes you need to make peace with the old to learn something new.”

“Two years of philosophy, and now you’re a fucking oracle?”

Rayan snickered. “A little early, isn’t it? Not like you to slack off.”

“Who’s slacking?” Mathias said with a smirk. “I got my hands on an original Monet.”

The skills that had served Mathias so well in the family had proven effectively transferrable. Rayan knew he didn’t tell him everything about the business, no doubt to avoid implicating him. There were bound to be aspects of it that brushed up against the law—or at least stretched the interpretation of it. Mathias was well-versed in the ways the world worked and how best to place himself in it. Nothing had changed there.

Mathias stepped over to the fridge, and as he passed, his hand grazed the small of Rayan’s back. Rayan remembered a time when he would have given anything for that casual brush of contact. Now it came easily, built into the groove of the day without him realizing. Rayan caught Mathias’s arm, moving to kiss him—seamless, like a song paused and then restarted.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” Mathias murmured, pushing him up against the counter.

“Who said anything about not finishing?” Rayan asked, his arms encircling the man’s neck, and he tilted his chin to capture Mathias’s mouth once again.

Behind him, the piece of paper curled on the counter, the curves of black paint forming a neat word that contained multitudes: home .