Chapter 51
SHANGHAI, CHINA
The decision to audition for the ballet in Shanghai had been a strategic one for Evie Gray.
Her parents weren’t entirely thrilled when she told them about it; at least Italy had been only an eight-hour flight that they could theoretically board with a moment’s notice.
But if Evie was selected for this ballet, they might not see her for a long while—which, if she was being totally honest, she’d intended.
Evie loved her parents, but she also resented them in a lot of ways for allowing Mr. Button to capture her and her brother’s childhoods.
If they hadn’t agreed to let Mr. Button use their children as his guinea pigs for his method, maybe Adam would still be here today.
She knew it wasn’t fair to blame them entirely—they had thought Mr. Button wanted the best for them, and they wanted to give their children the best. But she did blame them a little.
She was just glad they were all free, at last, from Mr. Button.
When the plane landed in the coastal city, she headed straight over to the assigned dormitories in Huangpu to register her arrival and drop her things off. But she didn’t linger long; as soon as she could, she left the dorms and headed to the nearest station.
This was how she found her way on the metro from the epicenter of the bustling city to a smaller town on the outskirts, where she had to walk from the metro stop, down a long residential pathway with houses on either side of the lanes, following the directions she’d written for herself in her notepad.
She felt jittery as she traipsed down the narrow path, probably because of the amount of airplane coffee she’d consumed in anxious anticipation for this very moment.
She finally reached the street and the house that matched the description in her notes and knocked on the door three times.
For several moments, there was no sound or sign of any movement behind the door. She raised her fist to knock again, and was surprised when the door swung open, revealing the round face of a supposed dead man.
“Henry Xu,” Evie said with a nod.
He looked nothing like the tense, buttoned-up man she’d seen months ago.
This version of Henry looked … happy. His skin was darker and had a healthier glow.
Henry wordlessly stepped to the side to let her in, and she obliged, stepping over the threshold into the living room.
Evie noticed an older woman sitting comfortably on one of the couches, sipping tea and watching what appeared to be a Chinese drama. The woman paid them no mind, completely engrossed.
“Should we speak in here?” Evie asked.
Henry shook his head. “Ma hates it when I speak over the television,” he said with a smile that revealed the crooked lines of crow’s-feet around his eyes. “Let’s go into the dining area. It’s just through those doors.”
She followed Henry into the adjoining room, watching him close the doors behind him and then gesture for her to take a seat.
She did just that, and he joined her, taking the seat opposite.
Henry was the first to speak then. “You’re a very persistent person,” he said. “I’m not even sure how you found me, but I have to say, it is impressive.”
“You were hard to find,” Evie admitted.
After everything with Adam and Adelina, Evie had spent months researching the Buttons, trying to piece together her theory about the tampering she was certain Mr. Button had done.
Her research into the Buttons had also involved research into their senior staffers—those who might be part of the cleanup crew, as well as any other parties that would have known about the accidents.
She’d looked into their online profiles, including anything that had been written about them in the countless articles published about the Button Estate.
Henry had been the main employee she had centered her research on, as he had not only been one of Mr. Button’s longest-serving employees but, as his secretary, was also likely privy to the most intimate details of Mr. Button’s day-to-day dealings.
At the time, she didn’t find much—only small, seemingly inconsequential and nonspecific details, such as where he’d lived before moving to the States and how long he’d been working for the estate.
It had not proved useful for Adam and Adelina, but it had come in handy once she’d decided to look into Henry’s so-called death.
“How did you know I was alive?” he asked her.
“Well, at first it was wishful thinking. But then I had a hunch that, as Mr. Button’s longest and most loyal employee, you probably had some resources available to you, and that if you were alive, the most likely option given the high-profile nature of the case—the only option really—would be for you to leave the country.
I figured you would go by a different name here, so I had to go through the online directory of your town once I’d found out where you’d grown up.
After many failed attempts, I managed to look up your mom.
The rest I worked out through a series of educated guesses and trial and error.
” She was making it sound easier than it actually was; in truth, it had taken her the entire year, and even then, it felt like she had just gotten lucky.
“Wow,” Henry said, looking and sounding impressed about all that went into finding him.
“I of course received all thirty-six of your phone calls, as well as your encrypted messages that you were not trying to turn me in, or to sell my story or expose me in any way, and that you just wanted to say hi. Honestly, that made me laugh. You remind me so much of the kids.”
“The kids? You mean Mr. Button’s children?” she asked.
He nodded, his face dropping a little at the mention of them. “You have the same intelligence and determination as all of them,” he said.
She thought that was very kind of him to say. Honestly, it was kind of Henry generally to have not turned her away. She imagined that her very presence here was risking quite a lot for him already.
She’d meant it, though, that she did not plan on turning anyone in. She would receive no joy in doing that.
“So you’ve come here to say hi, have you?” he asked.
“Yes, and to see how you’re actually doing.”
“I’m well,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation.
“Just well?” she questioned.
“Very well,” he repeated. “I’m living the life I always hoped to live in my retirement.
I spend my time outside most days urban foraging and, on occasion, indulging my ma by watching a romance drama with her.
It’s a good life.” He paused and looked at her as if he were trying to pierce her thoughts. “What of you, Evelyn?” he asked.
“Me?”
“You surely didn’t come all this way for that alone.”
She took a breath and then slowly nodded. “You’re right,” she said, drumming her fingers on the table as she worked up the courage to just ask. “I wanted to know what really happened,” she said.
Henry’s face gave nothing away. “What do you mean?” he asked, though his lack of reaction told her that he had been anticipating this.
“I … I want to know why you took the fall for them. I know it wasn’t you that killed Mr. Button.
I know there is probably some intricate machine behind all of the weird crap that has happened in these past few years, but I want to know the truth in its entirety once and for all.
I’m tired of being kept in the dark. I want to know how you’re still alive, how you pulled all of this off.
I know I’m asking for a lot here, and I know you have no reason to trust me, but I promise I won’t tell anyone.
You can even search me for recording devices.
I have no desire to turn you or anyone else in,” she said.
Henry looked at her thoughtfully for a long while before he finally spoke.
“I believe what you say, Miss Gray,” he said.
“Not because I believe you, per se, but because I have a sophisticated network of RF detectors installed that would have sounded off if you did have a recording device on your person. I also have no worries about you telling anyone because there are people, powerful people, who would prevent you from doing that. So in that case, Miss Gray, I am happy to tell you what really happened.”
Evie wondered who these people were. Probably the same network of powerful people who protected the heirs in the first place.
“Thank you, Henry. I really appreciate it,” she said.
Henry looked down and threaded his fingers together.
“It is a long story. I’ll try my best to tell you everything.
” He looked at her and then, with only the slightest bit of hesitation, started speaking in a low voice.
“Well, I might as well start from the beginning, when I first got the job over sixteen years ago …”
For the next two hours, Henry recounted as much as he could of the events that led to that night.
He started from the beginning, right in the Garden of Eden, where five children—seven if you counted Evie and her brother—had their childhoods stolen from right under them.
Eden being the main office—the meta and somewhat cringe nickname Mr. Button gave his workspace.
Henry told her how he watched as these children were forced to become experiments, and how he was complicit in all of their pain, and tried his hardest over the years to love and protect them as much as he could, trying to help them grow in a place with not much light.
But there was only so much you could do in those conditions.
Not every rose can rise up through concrete foundations.
He told her how these five traumatized children became brilliant and how with that brilliance, the immense pressure on them never waned.
Pressure that was fostered and encouraged by Mr. Button all the time.
And Henry watched this pressure ravage them in different ways. Fola, the perfectionist; Romeo, the ghost; Perdita, the mediator; Bilal, the self-punisher; and Octavius. Henry said his name with a certain sadness. Octavius, the broken.
He spoke about the night Adam died in fine detail, filling in the blanks she had desperately wanted to hear for all these years. And then he told her what he knew of Adelina’s death—though, he admitted, he was not privy to those details in the same way.
He then told her a secret that very few people knew: Mr. Button was dying of cancer and had asked one of his children to help him end his life.
That child had refused, and had called on the help of his other siblings to fight back against the request of their dying, abusive father.
None of the children wanted him to die, but what happened next was a matter of fate.
Henry was not in the room when any of this occurred. The only reason he knew about it was the same reason he knew much of what happened around the Button Manor.
And then Henry told her another secret, one only he and the now-deceased billionaire knew.
There were cameras everywhere.
It was no secret that Mr. Button was a paranoid man, scared that his enemies would be spying on him, trying to steal all of his genius inventions. He was so paranoid that he made it a point to declare to anyone that would listen that he did not believe in the use of CCTV.
But there were cameras, just ones no one knew about. Not even his security. Cameras only Mr. Button and Henry knew about.
They were all over the Manor, all over Eden, and all over Olympus, where Mr. Button had died.
No one knew about these cameras, because the cameras were hidden in the taxidermized heads of the dead animals he had strung all over, always watching their every move in the house.
Mr. Button did this to keep watch over his children; he wanted to make sure they were not slacking, and that he was aware of any and all liabilities in this experiment of his.
It was Henry’s best-kept secret. The footage was saved on a weekly basis and checked by Henry, and then kept in an external hard drive that only the two of them had access to.
This footage, Henry informed her, was long gone. Destroyed before he even made his confession.
Because, like Evie, at some point during the day after Mr. Button’s death, as the police conducted their investigation, Henry had begun suspecting that the heirs knew more than they were letting on.
He snuck away to look at the footage from the cameras in Olympus and saw the events unfold, even if he could not hear exactly what had passed as there was no sound.
He knew that even though the children had not directly killed their father, if this footage got out, there was a strong chance that they would still receive some blame and he could not let that happen.
He knew that Chief Waxler strongly suspected that it was one of the children and would eventually find something that would connect one or more of them to the crime scene, and so Henry knew then what he needed to do.
Evie listened to Henry’s second confession in silence, and by the end of it all, she felt a bone-chilling cold run through her.
“The reason I did what I did was because in a strange way, I did kill Mr. Button. My silence meant that those kids grew up in a pressure chamber, and if I had intervened earlier, there would have been no explosion. I refuse to let them pay for the wrongdoings of the adults in their lives. Those kids deserved way more than me or their father. In the same way, you and Adam deserved more, so much more. I would have been okay with wasting away in a prison cell if it meant that they would be okay. Do you understand?” Henry asked.
She nodded. She did understand. It was all so messed up, but she understood it now.
“Good.” Henry sighed. The lines on his forehead had grown more and more prominent as he recounted the past. “I truly am sorry, Evelyn, for everything.”
Evie wiped her face with the backs of her hands and nodded, not accepting or rejecting his apology, just letting it hang in the air.
“Thanks for telling me everything,” she said after a few minutes. In the background she could still hear Henry’s mother’s drama playing.
“No problem,” he said.
She got up, ready to leave this place now and finally move on to the future after years of sinking into the dark pits of the past.
“I hope you have a good life, Henry Xu,” Evie said. And it was hopefully the last thing she’d ever say to him.
“You too, Evelyn.”
It wasn’t until later on, when she had already taken the long metro ride back into the city and returned to her dorm, that Evie realized she hadn’t found out how Henry pulled off his death trick.
She also realized that it did not matter how.
What mattered was that no one else had died.
What mattered was that Henry Xu was alive.