Prologue #2
But he'd kept it for twenty years—moved it from apartment to apartment, and he'd never been able to explain to himself why. Except that maybe some part of him needed the proof. Not that Angel Salazar had existed. He knew that. But that Noah Chase had a right to exist, instead.
He held the envelope out to her and didn’t say a word.
She looked at his face first. Then the envelope. She took it carefully, like she wasn't sure she should—as if the edges might draw blood.
He watched her pull out the paperwork. Watched her eyes shift across a name, an image, proof of a teenage boy with dark eyes and a nose that wasn't quite Noah's nose and a last name that wasn't Noah's name.
An address in Seattle on a street where the original building had since been torn down and replaced with condominiums. A social security number that hadn't been used since he’d turned seventeen.
Ziggy went very still. It was something she did when she wasn’t sure how to process information.
Like the day he told her he didn’t want to be friends anymore.
That he wanted more, but he also wasn’t willing to give her up as his producer, so if she couldn’t be his girlfriend and work with him, then he’d rather have the latter because that was more important.
She’d nearly walked out the door. He hadn’t blamed her for being angry. He hadn’t worded it very well, and he’d been doing whatever he could to show her just how much he cared. Only, now he was about to break both their hearts.
“What the hell is this?” She lifted her chin, locking gazes with him. “How do you have this? How long have you been sitting on it, and why?
“Look at the next document.” Damn, he was a coward. He should just come out and tell her, but he couldn’t. He was ashamed.
Ashamed of where he came from. Of whom he once was.
But he was also embarrassed by the fact that he still had an ounce of loyalty to the man he’d once called dad.
Ziggy shuffled the pages, and exactly six seconds later, her hand came to her throat. She gasped taking a small, stumbling step backward.
He reached for her, steadying her on her heels before she fell over.
“This has to be some cruel joke.” She waved the papers. “You can’t be him. You wouldn’t lie to me like that. You wouldn’t keep this from me. Not after everything we’ve been through. Not after we… after we…”
“I had to,” Noah said. “I’ve had to keep it a secret from everyone since the day my aunt, uncle, and I made Angel disappear.”
Her gaze went from the papers shaking in her hands to his face.
“You’re Angel fucking Salazar.” It was a statement, but it felt like an accusation.
She dropped the papers on the coffee table, turned, and strolled across the room to where, under the TV, he had a small drink stand.
She lifted the Tequila bottle and poured herself more than necessary.
“Go easy on that stuff,” he said.
“You don’t get to manage me, right now.” She tossed back half the glass before facing him again.
“I get why you want to bury the story. I do. But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me a month ago when the executives handed it to us, or when you watched me spend a month chasing every clue I could find to make the story happen. ”
“Because I knew I’d be able to direct the search,” he admitted.
“I can’t believe you’d waste my time like that. Waste our resources when you could’ve just told me.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t even sure I was going to tell you until you walked through that door.”
Another gasp, this one sharper, followed by a curse word directed at him.
“I don’t want to be the story. I don’t want to go back and relive my past,” he said.
“It’s the twentieth anniversary of Salazar’s arrest. Everyone’s looking for you. What if someone does get that interview that Matias keeps rejecting, and he rats you out?”
“He won’t.” Noah lifted his glass and made his way across the room. This view was supposed to be his refuge, not his prison. “I visited my dad when I was fifteen. It was right after my mom died.”
“That had to have been really hard.”
“I was angry at the world. I blamed him for her death. I wanted to tell him that, and I did. All he had to say was that no matter what, all he ever wanted was to protect me. I told him if he wanted to do that, then I didn’t want anyone to ever know he was my father.
He told me that whatever I chose to do with my life, he would do his best to protect me, and if that meant never speaking to the public, or speaking about me, then that’s what he’d do.
” A rumble lifted from his chest. The bones of a laugh, but not a live one. More like a sarcastic snort.
“I left Seattle with my aunt and uncle after we buried my mom. A few years after that, we decided to make Angel disappear. It wasn’t easy.
I had to cut all ties with what little family I had left.
” Noah hadn’t told this story to a single soul, and he wasn’t sure why he was giving her so much detail other than he felt as though he owed her.
“After a nose job and a name change, I worked my ass off to get through college and become Noah Chase. A young, poor kid, who kept his head down and followed a dream.”
“Why did you come back to Seattle?”
Of all the questions she could’ve asked, that wasn’t one he’d anticipated. “I just wanted to see if I could, and I’d gotten a job interview. I was twenty-two. Young and scared to death. But maybe it was a test. I took the job, and my father kept his promise.”
She stood there in the middle of his living room with a glass in her hands, staring at him like she was looking at a stranger.
Maybe she was.
“I went and saw my father about a year after I moved back.”
“Why?”
“I wanted him to know what he’d done hadn’t broken me.
That I became a good person despite him.
I also wanted to make sure he was going to keep his promise since I was going to be in front of the camera.
” Noah shook his head and laughed. “He told me that he loved me. That he always loved my mom and me. That he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me again.
He was in prison, and there was no way he was ever getting out. Too many life sentences to serve.”
“He’s kept his promise.”
“He has,” Noah agreed. He filled his glass and turned back to the big window.
It was so different living out on the Island.
There were no city lights. No busy streets.
Just water. And nature. And darkness. “You want to know what’s never really made sense to me?
” He tried not to spend too much time thinking about this, but sometimes, late at night, he couldn't stop himself.
“My dad was always there. Every single hockey game. Parent-teacher conferences, school plays, the science fair where I built a terrible model of the solar system. He told me that it was about knowing the planets and their placement, not being an artist, which I wasn’t.
” He turned back to face the one woman who’d never judged him.
Not once. And yet, tonight, she looked at him differently.
"He was the kind of father who roughhoused with you and also made you eat your dinner and showed up when he said he would.
He said ‘I love you’ like he meant it, and I believed him.
I had no reason not to. Then the cops came.
And they had everything—DNA, physical evidence, twelve women.
And a year later, he admitted all of it and was convicted.
He looked at me across that courtroom, and he said, ‘I love you, Angel.’ Like those two things could live in the same body, and I was just supposed to accept that. "
“You were a kid,” Ziggy said softly.
"Fourteen when he'd been arrested." He held her gaze.
"And at fourteen, the man who killed those women was not my father.
At least, not the father I knew." He looked back out over the Sound.
The dark sky and murky waters touched like lovers.
All he could see were the flickering lights of boats moving like they were somewhere between the clouds and the sound.
"But I'm not fourteen anymore. I've had twenty years to sit with both of those things being true at the same time. He was a good father, and he’s a serial killer. And I’ll carry that for the rest of my life.
" He rubbed the back of his neck. "What I won’t do is carry it on camera. I’m not going to sit across from him with a microphone and a live feed and ask him why he murdered twelve women.
And I am never—not for a story, not for ratings, not for the launch of a show I have waited years to get—going to be Angel Salazar again.
" He looked at her. "So, we’re going to bury it.
We tell the station we hit dead ends on the son.
That he's gone dark. And that Matias wouldn't come to the camera. It dies quietly, and we move on."
She stared into her drink like it had all the answers.
He watched her, waiting for the argument she hadn't made yet—the one about his show being called Unfiltered with Noah Chase and the irony of a truth-seeker burying his own truth.
"Okay," she said instead.
He exhaled like he had the day he’d been sitting in the courtroom, and they read his father’s consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
“We kill the story,” she agreed. “There are four other ones we’ve been working on. We can have a great show without it.” She smiled. It was a big one, though there was no sparkle in her eyes. But it was something. He hated that he was going to crush her again.
“Thank you,” he said. “There’s one more thing we need to discuss.”
“I’m not sure I can take more. I’ve barely processed that.” She lifted the glass to her lips. “But we’ll deal with it together.”
He’d never cared about anyone like he cared for Ziggy.
It had taken him years to admit it. And now he was going to walk away.
He had to. “Whatever this is—I can’t—I'm not—" He stopped and cleared his throat. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. And it’s not just about this stuff with my dad, although that’s a big part of it.
That part of my life still lingers. And because of it, I can’t really fully give myself to anyone.
But with us, it’s more. It’s our professional relationship. I don’t want to mess that up.”
“You’re joking, right? You’re breaking up with me, now?”
“I don’t want to hurt you. I just—”
“I should have seen this one coming,” she said with an even voice. She was good that when she didn’t want to lose her shit. "You don't have to build a speech around it."
"It's not a speech."
“I’ve seen you do this with the women you dated before me.
” She set her glass down, gracefully moved across the room, and lifted her bag, tugging the strap over her shoulder.
“You have different speeches for different breakups. My work is my life, and it’s not fair to anyone.
I can’t commit right now. I’m not a relationship kind of guy.
I guess mine is a combo of your serial killer dad and the fact that we work together. ”
“Oh, come on, that’s not fair. And don’t tell me that you don’t already look at me differently now that you know my secret, because I can see it all over your face.”
“You’re still Noah to me.” She held his gaze without flinching.
“Right.”
“You’re so good at hiding in your work, and now this.
Or maybe you’ve always hidden behind it, and you just were never able to say it before.
” She inched closer and pressed her hand to his chest. “Who your father is doesn’t make up who you are, and I know you.
I see you. But if you want to push me away and use us working together as your excuse, I’m not going to beg for your attention. ”
“I’m sorry, I really am,” he said. “But I am going to beg you to stay on as producer. You're the best I've ever worked with, and we are magic together.”
“I’m not going to quit my job because our fling came to an end.” She held up her hand before he could argue that they hadn’t ever been a fling. Truthfully, he was glad he hadn’t gotten the chance to, because leaving it like this was probably best. “Tomorrow, we’ll go in and handle the story.”
"You don't have to. I can do that myself.”
“We’re a team.” She turned and headed for the door. Pausing, she glanced over her shoulder. "For the record? The boy in that photograph?" She glanced at the coffee table, then back at him. "That's not who I see."
She was out the door a few seconds later.
He stood in the middle of the unpacked house and listened to the Audi back down the drive, and then the silence that settled in behind it. Below the bluff, the Sound did what it always did—flowed, patient and cold, keeping everything it was given.
He picked up the papers on the coffee table. They would go back into his safe.
Some things, no matter how long he carried them, never got lighter. He'd just gotten better at pretending they did.