Chapter 39 Kobe
Kobe
Dominique stilled as the wind scooped up my words and stole them away. He turned, a resigned smile amplifying the ever-present sorrow that lived behind his eyes. It sat on the surface tonight. He didn’t seem surprised to see me.
He knew.
“Hello, Kobe.”
“You lied to me.” It wasn’t what I planned to say, but it was what came out. The initial shock at discovering my boyfriend, the man I loved, was a killer, had briefly morphed to anger, but it was a wave of betrayal and hurt that nearly brought me to my knees.
He wore the battered brown leather coat I adored that turned him ruggedly handsome.
Tucking his hands in his pockets, he peered up and down the street.
“I suppose you might view it that way, but you’re wrong.
I never lied. What I didn’t do was correct your assumptions.
You created your own narrative for my life, and I simply went along with it. ”
“Cosette—”
“Is my granddaughter.”
I’d come to that conclusion, but the truth of how and why had made it impossible to absorb. Even now, I didn’t want it to be true. “But… No. She’s not. She calls you—”
“Papa, as I taught her.”
“Is she… Oh, Jesus, Dom. I… I don’t understand.” I didn’t want to understand.
“Yes, you do, Kobe. You’re a smart man, and you see it all perfectly clearly now.”
I didn’t, but I saw enough.
Dominique held my gaze, not in a challenging way but like a man on the edge of the world, succumbed to fate, whatever that fate might be. Heart bare. Soul lost. Veins bled dry from years of suffering.
He looked exhausted.
“You killed them.” Why was I asking something I already knew? I didn’t want to hear it, but I had to.
Dominique grimaced as though ashamed, as though the very idea made him sick, but he didn’t deny it. “Yes.”
“Why?”
He seemed to consider but shook his head with resignation.
I suspected the complexity of the answer did not lend well to an easy explanation.
Not in a snowstorm. Not in the street. Not like this between two men who had so recently found love with each other.
I couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe that his feelings toward me were part of a ruse.
The wind picked up, flapping my hair into my eyes and pelting icy snow against my numb cheeks. The cold didn’t penetrate. A fire blazed hot in my core, burning me from the inside out.
Dominique barely flinched. Like he didn’t feel it. Like he couldn’t. He stood perfectly still and silent as though waiting for my judgment.
“Tell me,” I demanded, the words harsher than I intended.
He nodded, studied the street again, then said, “Not here.”
“Would you rather do it at the station?”
“If that’s where you want me, Kobe, I will go willingly.”
I wanted to scream, How dare you put me in this position.
How dare you let me love you without telling me everything.
Except, hadn’t I freely decided to stand on the side of justice long before I understood the truth?
Hadn’t I expressed my hatred for those men?
Hadn’t I spoken my true feelings aloud many times in his presence?
Was that why? Did he expect a kindred spirit? Forgiveness? Understanding?
“Give me your keys.”
Dominique removed his hands from his pockets, keys in one, phone in the other. He held them both out.
I took them, glaring daggers, more upset than I could express, but was it because of the deception or the things he’d done?
I wasn’t prepared to analyze that quandary.
“Keep your hands where I can see them. Are you armed?”
“No, Kobe.” He held his hands aloft. “You can check, but do you honestly believe I could ever harm you?”
No, I didn’t, but I was angry and hurt and confused. A nimiety of constantly changing emotions hit me from every angle, and I felt battered and bruised to the bone, my heart cleaved in half.
I didn’t check his pockets. I didn’t pull out handcuffs or frisk him or read him his rights.
“Get in the car. Passenger side.”
Dominique complied, keeping his hands in sight the entire time.
I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. Not the station. Not a church with a confessional. Not his house or mine or anywhere public where we might be seen or overheard.
The roads were a mess. Progress was slow. I drove to the place I’d been less than an hour ago. A place where the raw truth would be forced into the open. A place I knew Dominique wouldn’t be able to summon a lie.
His daughter’s grave.
Nothing in Dominique’s body language changed when I pulled onto the weaving cemetery roads. I parked in the same spot I had earlier. The vortex of snow against the black sky made it impossible to see beyond the headlights. It caught in the wiper blades and gathered on the hood.
I hoped Bastian had left. This wasn’t something he needed to witness.
After hearing about the killings on the news, the siblings had assumed the truth.
Making a pact, they decided to keep the secret to themselves.
Vindication, Bastian had told me. Justice.
He did something I could never have done, but I love him for it.
As the bodies accumulated, Jolie approached her brother.
It’s not enough, she’d said. She wanted the police to know Angelique’s name.
She wanted them to know that her three-year-old accusations of rape had been real.
She wanted validation for her friend. She wanted Yates’s career.
Bastian had warned her off. He said it might jeopardize what Dominique was doing and put him in danger.
He was right.
She didn’t listen. Jolie carried her own guilt, convinced she had failed her best friend by not fighting hard enough on the night of the attack. She wanted a chance to fix it.
I killed the engine. Without a word, I got out of the car and forged a path through the tundra to the grave. The old tracks I’d made in the snow had long since vanished.
Dominique followed, his muffled footfall keeping time with mine.
At the headstone, I stopped.
Dominique joined me.
Snow accumulated on the arched top of the marker, covering the carefully placed yellow chrysanthemums, perfectly preserved in their frozen state. The single white rose was barely visible, blending with the soft flakes surrounding it, like it slept on a bed of cotton.
Angelique Sauvage, the granite read. Better known to her friends as Gigi.
May 14, 2008 – June 4, 2023
Fifteen years old. Nine months after she and her friend reported an incident of rape to a negligent constable. Nine months. Enough time to grow an unwanted baby in her belly before taking her own life.
“Sauvage?” I asked.
“Her mother’s last name.”
I had assumed. Hell, I had assumed a lot of things, so it was time for the truth. “Start from the beginning.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Dominique tipped his head to the sky and closed his eyes. Snowflakes landed in his hair and on his cheeks. They melted against his warm skin, running rivers down his face, but they did not hide his tears.
“I met Candice at university. She was an extroverted pharmacy student.
I was an introverted med student, struggling with my sexuality.
Catholic upbringing for the win. I was desperately trying to convert my feelings into something more hetero, while abjectly denying my attraction to men.
She asked me out, so I said yes. I quickly learned that I was in over my head.
I was not straight, and no matter how badly I wanted it, I was also not bi.
I was a fake. A twenty-year-old gay virgin with a girlfriend, but I was not a quitter.
“Candy got pregnant in our second month of dating. It was a shock to both of us, but she wanted to have the baby. I didn’t know what to think.
The relationship was never going to survive, that much was obvious, but it took me six months after she announced the pregnancy to find the courage to tell her I was gay.
I ended things but promised I would be a father to our child no matter what.
I accepted the responsibility, and I wasn’t running out.
I would do my part. She was mad. Rightfully.
She had been expecting a wedding. She did not want to be a single mom in university.
“Angelique was born in May the following year.” Dominique gestured to the date on the headstone.
“Candy gave the baby her last name since she was the primary caregiver, and we were not married or planning to be. I suspect she was trying to hurt me, but I understood. She took a year off school but never took to being a mom. I think it surprised her, this lack of desire. Motherhood is something most women assume is innate. It’s not always.
It wasn’t for her. When the following year rolled around, and Angelique was sixteen months old, Candy approached me and asked if I wanted to be a full-time parent.
She would willingly give me custody and walk away. ”
“Jesus. Really?”
Dominique nodded. “Of course I said yes. Candy may not have loved being a mother, but it was the opposite for me. I adored our daughter. Angelique’s legal name was Sauvage, and I never changed it. It was the only part of her mother she would ever have. I let her have that gift. That memory.”
“So you raised her alone?”
“Yes. It was not easy while I was in school, but I figured it out. My parents were… not unkind, but they didn’t love that I had a child out of wedlock and so young.
They slipped farther from my life when I came out.
I moved to Gatineau after I graduated, so it wasn’t like we were neighbors. I got a job. Life stabilized.”
Dominique grew quiet. When I glanced his way, I noticed his eyes first. They swam with unshed tears. His chin quivered despite how intensely he clenched his jaw, and I could only imagine what he envisioned.
“I need to know everything, Dom.”
“I know.” He scrubbed his face, a strangled sob escaping before I watched him push his grief away, firm his resolve, clear his throat, and continue.