Chapter 28 Damian
The message came through the Aegis public contact form a few days after the late-night clip. The intake software flagged it low-priority, and my heart flagged it as nothing of the kind.
Four sentences. The sender had seen the coverage. He'd recognized the name Damian Vaughn and the face next to the famous woman. The fourth sentence said he still had the book.
He signed it Eric. A last name I had never searched, because it wasn't the one he'd had at thirteen. Adopted at sixteen, it would turn out. Eleven months after our placement ended badly for both of us. Which is why every record I ever pulled in fifteen years had dead-ended into nothing.
I read it twice. Then I verified before I let myself feel, and I ran a background check on a man who gave me the only funny thing I owned as a child.
The household caught me at it and arranged themselves around the dining table to watch me be a person.
"Is Eric going to be required to submit fingerprints?" Brady asked. "Asking for the man."
"I'm running a standard check," I said.
"He's running a standard check," Brady told Thomas. "On his childhood best friend. The one who gave him the book. We love a healthy attachment style."
"Eric has known him since he was thirteen," Thomas observed mildly. "He probably expects nothing less than a full background investigation. It would be a betrayal of their bond if Damian didn't run one."
"Thank you," I said. "Someone gets it."
Maren reached over and put her hand flat on the trackpad, covering it, the way she does when she's about to be gentle and immovable at the same time.
"The file is clean," she said. "The man is real. The only thing left to verify is in person." She looked at the screen, then at me. "Pick somewhere halfway. Neutral ground. You like neutral ground."
I reviewed six diners in Bakersfield before I chose one. She did not make fun of me for reviewing six. She knew that for me, choosing the room was how I survive the thing that happens in it.
We drove up on a Saturday, all four of us.
At the diner, Maren and the brothers took a booth by the window and gave me the room, present and two steps back, the way they'd given me the cemetery in Riverside. I sat across from a stranger who had once been the closest thing I had to a brother before I had two of those.
Eric was a high-school shop teacher now. He had a wedding ring and laugh lines. He had the careful shoulders of a man who had also spent years waiting for floors to move out from under him.
The first sixty seconds were unbearable. We were not built, men like us, for the moment where the waiting ends.
"You got tall," he said.
"You got married," I said.
"I did." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, and I recognized the gesture, because it was mine, because we'd learned it in the same houses. "You got famous, sort of… adjacent to famous."
"I'm dating someone famous," I said. "I'm just the security."
"That's not what the internet says."
Then he reached into a canvas bag and put a paperback on the table between us. The spine was destroyed. The cover was laminated, badly, by what was clearly a fourteen-year-old's idea of packing tape applied with enormous love and no skill.
The comedian's memoir. The funniest thing I'd ever held.
I took my own copy out of my jacket, the one I'd carried up from Los Angeles, the one I'd read a dozen times, and I set it down beside his.
Two wrecked books, side by side, like proof of life. And the sixty seconds ended.
We talked for two hours, but we talked about the placement only once.
"That house," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"You got out okay?"
"Eventually. You?"
"Eventually."
That was the whole of it. Everything after, we talked about at length.
"I looked for you," he said, somewhere in the second hour. "I want you to know that. I ran your name. The old one. I never found it."
"The system failed us in opposite directions," I said. "Your paperwork hid you. My paperwork couldn't find you because it was looking for a ghost."
He told me he had a 7-year-old daughter. "I’ve been telling her for years, that she has an uncle out there somewhere, a man I grew up with."
I had to look out the window for a full minute after that one.
Before we parted, Eric pushed his copy of the book across the table at me, and reached for mine.
"Let’s trade. It's a shop-teacher thing." He tapped the laminated cover. "We've each spent decades protecting the other guy's book without knowing it. Mine's been in a drawer in Bakersfield. Yours has been in a duffel. We may as well make it official."
So we swapped. His ruined book for mine.
And somewhere around the second hour Brady had wandered over and adopted Eric conversationally, the way Brady adopts everyone.
By the time the check came Maren had issued a standing dinner invitation and Eric had accepted it before he'd finished saying he couldn't possibly.
That night, back home, I went upstairs alone and came back down for the hammer.
Maren found me in my room with picture hooks and a level. She sat on the edge of the bed and watched, and she didn't offer to help, because she understood that this was a thing I had to do with my own hands.
I hung the child's drawing at age 6 first, with five windows and a yellow sun.
"Why five windows?" she'd asked me once.
"So everyone could have one," I'd said, and only heard the answer land thirty years late.
I hung my mother's photograph beside it. The young woman on the porch step, squinting, laughing at whoever held the camera.
And beside that, I hung the picture Maren had taken at the diner an hour before we left, two men and two ruined paperbacks, printed at a pharmacy on the way home.
Then I stepped back and left a space. A real one. Deliberate. Empty wall to the right of the diner photo.
"Not filling that?" Maren asked.
"It's load-bearing," I said. "That space holds whatever comes next. I'm leaving room for it on purpose."
She didn't ask what came next. She knew me. She knew I kept promises slowly so they hold.
I took out the notebook last. Nine entries, nine endings, written at nine different ages in nine different versions of my own handwriting. The Cranes never got an entry, because you only write the ending, and there wasn't one.
I added a tenth line. It was not an ending. It was just today's date.
For the first time in my life, the wall had things on it that were staying, and the only thing I had left to do was leave room for her.