Chapter 44 #2
He wanted me to trust him. That's all he wanted, and I was busy protecting myself that I'd never considered what my silence was doing to him.
I flop back against my chair, my insides going slack. I’d been holding myself so tight, bracing myself for being in this room with him, but now he’s told me something I never even considered. He wasn't prying. He was asking out of curiosity.
He was hoping I’d trust him enough to tell him.
He opens his mouth to say something, but stops. I sense that he’s grappling with something he can't easily articulate.
“Say it,” I say. “Whatever’s on your mind, just say it. Don’t hold back.” My voice softens. “It's time we were honest with one another.”
He lets out a sigh, nodding. “I ... I thought my father was putting you up to something.”
“Your father?” I cry in disbelief.
“I wasn't sure what, but I had a feeling that maybe he had a hand in all this …”
I sit there in utter shock.
“Like I said,” he continues, “I don't trust that man to do the right thing by me. He hired you behind my back. He wanted an external consultant, he said, and then those few times when I saw you and him talking—”
“I explained why,” I cry, irritated. “I was doing a security audit for him!”
“I still didn’t trust the way he managed it all, hiring you, and not telling me.
Asking you for constant updates. I was sure he was up to something, only, I didn't know what.” He sounds dejected, his head lowering to his chest. “For a while, I genuinely thought he might have found a way to drag you into this.”
“But why?” I’m not following his train of thought, and for a moment, I wonder if Matteo really has lost his mind.
“You don't know him, Elizabeth. You don't know what he's capable of. He did stuff like this with Rio and Raquel. He's not stupid. He knows you and I ...” He stops, stares at the tattoo on his wrist. “He knows,” he says, slowly, not looking at me, “that there was something going on between us.”
Was.
I breathe out slowly, considering this new possibility. .
“So you see my suspicion of you wasn't solely based on what Alex told me. It was also because of my father’s behaviour, him hiring you then having you working for me. I know it doesn't make sense ...”
But I think I'm starting to realize. And now I recall there were a few times when Matteo would ask me if I’d seen his father. His suspicions that something wasn’t quite right started way back then.
Paul would ask me to email him an update, or ask me to have a meeting in his office.
I thought it was strange at the time, and I felt caught in a spiderweb of family drama.
But now I'm starting to see that maybe Matteo's suspicion of me might have formed earlier. Alex framing me just played into it.
“I wish I could turn back the clock and do things differently,” Matteo says, his sad eyes burning into mine.
“I wish I could make you see that I didn’t blindly accept Alex’s theory completely.
There were other things. And then what I heard from your friends at the wedding, it confirmed that maybe I didn’t know you at all. I wish you’d been more open with me.”
I grit my teeth together, because looking back, I wish I had, too.
“It didn’t help that I was discovering things about you for the first time from your friends. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t asked you about Vlad before we left.”
The more he talks, the more I understand Matteo's actions. I press my hand across my neck, realizing that I have played a part in this mess. I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, and placing the blame squarely on him, but I should have been transparent, if not from the start, then at least after we became intimate.
“Okay,” I say, reluctantly, because the part of me I always kept hidden now has to see the light.
“I … hid things … from you,” I say, slowly, afraid of what I’ll see when I look at him.
I catch a flicker of curiosity in his eyes.
“I ... own up, and I don’t feel good about it but ...
” I stop, because this is harder than I thought, telling this man that I deliberately withheld things from him.
I swallow, stare at the desk, at his pen and diary, and his phone, at anything but him.
“I hid things about my past, about Vlad, about Takumi ...” I lift my gaze to his.
He’s listening intently.
“I hadn’t seen Vlad for three years. And Takumi, the first time I saw him was when I met Vlad for the first time, though, after that, we worked on something … something that got messed up, and that’s when we all went our separate ways.”
He doesn’t interrupt, or ask questions, just takes it all in, sitting back in his chair, hands clasped loosely over his stomach. He seems almost ... relieved. I stare at my hands, then clasp them together, then rest them on the desk, then place them on my lap. I inhale a long steadying breath.
“I shouldn’t have shut you down when you asked. I should have given you the answers you were looking for, and I'm sorry that I didn't.”
His eyes soften, erasing the fear that I saw in them earlier. “I wish you had.”
That hurt he talked about, the one buried deep, and hiding inside him, for Matteo, it was trust. He needed to trust me, and he couldn't with me being secretive.
“We’re both guilty of something,” he says.
I meet his eyes, defiant. “We are.”
“Will you ever forgive me?”
“Uh.” My mouth turns drier. “There's something else I need to tell you.”
He sits forward, hands on the desk, his soft expression hardening again. “What?”
A few seconds pass before I can answer. The back of my neck feels clammy, and my stomach feels queasy. “I didn't answer whenever you asked about my past, about Vlad, because ...” This is something I’ve avoided talking about, after the interrogation, even with Vlad.
“Elizabeth?”
“I used to be a hacker.” I get the words out quickly.
He gasps, going still, not even blinking as my confession dangles like a sword above us. For a moment, neither of us speaks. And when he finally does, he says something I never expected.
“I had an idea that you might have been.”
Surprise jolts me forward. “You did? Then why didn't you say?”
He chuckles, and it hits me, how much I miss that sound. How much I miss the lightness and joy. How much I miss us.
“It was just a thought after—” He pauses, and it's my turn to be scared.
“After what?”
“There's something I need to tell you,” he says.
I sink back against my chair. “I don't know if I can handle more shocking news.”
“I hope you won't hate me more than you already do.”
Now I'm really scared. “W-what is it?”
“I asked Alex to do a background check on Vlad.”
I open my mouth to protest but no words come out.
“I'm sorry.” Matteo looks so apologetic. “But I had to. He seemed to have some sort of hold over you, and you were always so vague about him, I didn't understand what you didn't want to tell me. I had to find out.”
I let that rest a while, and mull it over in my head, looking at my behavior from his viewpoint, I can see why.
“I ... get it ...” I say, finally. Because I do.
He stares at me as if he's expecting me to freak out any moment now. “You're not joking. You mean it, that you understand?”
“You’re the head of cybersecurity? I’d expect nothing less.”
“Phew.” He wipes his brow, with an exaggerated motion. “And ... based on Alex’s intel, I started to wonder if maybe you'd been a hacker too.”
“What was his intel?”
“That Vlad was caught in some sort of cybercrime investigation, years ago.”
“Why didn't you just ask me?”
He scoffs. “Would you have told me? No. You wouldn’t have. You were always so vague in your answers, Elizabeth. Always so evasive.”
I hang my head in shame and regret. When I look up, he's watching me carefully. There’s no judgment, or irritation in his expression.
I scratch my neck. “I-I wanted to tell you, but I ... just ... couldn't.”
“But why?” I hear the desperation in his voice. “We were so ... so good together. We were so close. I felt like I could tell you anything.”
He's making me feel even worse about myself. “I-I was scared that if I told you, you might feel obligated to tell your father, and then he'd fire me. And that’s what I was the most scared of. I couldn’t afford to lose this contract.”
“My father doesn’t know?” He sounds surprised.
“No,” I cry, surprised by his question. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have hired me.”
Matteo looks like he’s thinking about something, trying to figure out a puzzle.
He deserves to know why I stayed quiet. “I was vague about Vlad because talking about him meant talking about all of it.”
“About what?” he asks softly.
“When I aged out of foster care, I was angry, broke and lonely. I spent most of my time online. Vlad found me through a coding forum. At first it was just programming and security discussions. Then he introduced me to a group.”
“A hacking group.”
“Yes … we thought we were exposing bad people.
Corrupt corporations. Wealthy people who buried things they didn't want the public to know about.
We told ourselves we were doing the right thing.
But we weren't, now that I look back on it. We hacked systems we had no business touching. Some people in the group pushed things too far.”
Matteo doesn't interrupt.
“One operation went wrong. Someone made a mistake and left clues behind. Once the authorities found one thread, they kept pulling until the whole thing unraveled. Vlad took the fall for most of it, but they questioned all of us. The courts concluded that we, the rest of us in the group, were just following Vlad and doing what he said. He positioned himself as the principal operator, the strategist, and the one who planned everything. He made it clear that people like me, Takumi, and the others, were inexperienced hangers on. We were also so much younger. Even though I got off lightly, the investigators still hauled me in and interrogated me aggressively, like I was a criminal. I was terrified and felt powerless.”
The memory makes my stomach twist.