Chapter One
Kiera
Seventeen years later
The number comes up at ten past six on a Thursday, and I answer it because Jax never calls. Jax texts. Jax sends photographs of cars I have no use for and captions them with insults. In four years, he’s called me twice, and both times somebody was in a hospital.
“Tell me you’re sitting down,” he says.
“I’m at my desk.” I close the laptop. Outside the window, London has already given up on the day, the way it does in November. “Which is sitting down.”
“Somebody came looking for you.”
I don’t answer.
“A woman. Showed up at the shop in Culver City, knew my name, and wanted to know if I knew you. Left a number.”
I stand, reaching for my jacket. “Good for her.”
“Logan.”
“I don’t know anyone in Los Angeles.” Which is true, in the way a lot of things are true. “I haven’t known anyone there since I was eighteen.”
There’s a pause on the line, and it’s the pause that gets me. Jax doesn’t do those either.
“She says your father’s sick.”
The jacket stays where it is, half off the hook.
Seventeen years, and the man still has the ability to make me stop. I stand there in an office with my name on the door—the name I chose, the one that isn’t his—and let a sentence from six thousand miles away take the floor out from under me.
“How sick,” I say.
“The kind where somebody gets on a plane to find a man who doesn’t exist.”
There’s a version of this where I hang up.
I’ve had that version drafted since I was eighteen: he made his choice, I made mine, and the accounting closed a long time ago.
I’ve rehearsed it in the shower. I’ve rehearsed it at three in the morning more times than I’ll admit to anyone, including Jax, who knows anyway.
What I haven’t rehearsed is the other thing. The one that arrives underneath it, quiet and unwelcome, in a voice that sounds like I’m nine years old.
If you don’t go, that’s the end of it.
“Logan,” Jax says. “You still there?”
“How long have you known?”
“Six hours.” A beat. “I’d have sat on it longer if I thought that’d help. It wouldn’t.”
I look at the window. My reflection looks back—a thirty-five-year-old man in a suit and tie who built a life out of ashes. Blake Capital manages more money than my father’s firm ever has. I have people who report to people who report to me. None of it does a single thing for me right now.
“I’ll go and look at him,” I say. “That’s all. I look, I say what needs saying, and I come back.”
“Sure,” Jax says, in the tone of a man betting against it.
“Don’t.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Paper shifts on his end. “One thing. Don’t get a hotel.”
“Why not?”
“Because hotels have staff, and staff have phones, and by Tuesday half of LA knows Garth Edwards’s son is in town. If you want to be here without being here, there’s a building I stayed in when I needed somewhere nobody was looking.”
He gives me a street I don’t know. “Ask for Wilder. He won’t ask you anything.”
***
The building is exactly where he said it would be but still easy to miss.
No sign. No name over the door, no announcement of what it is or isn’t. Five stories of brick on a quiet block, windows clean, the glass at the entrance throwing warm light onto the pavement. It looks like a place that has deliberately decided not to be interesting.
I stand on the sidewalk with a bag in hand, no return ticket in my pocket, and I think about the fact that I could buy this block. That there’s a house in the hills with my name on a lease inside of two hours if I make one call. That men in my position do not sleep in buildings like this.
Then I think about a phone in a valet’s pocket and my stepmother’s name on a caller ID, and I go in.
The lobby is small and swept. Mailboxes, a laundry room, an office door standing open. The man behind it doesn’t look up when I come in, which I appreciate more than I expect to.
“Blake,” I say.
He looks up then. He’s younger than I thought and built like someone who's done real work with his hands. There’s something in the way he takes me in—the suit, the shoes, the watch—that isn’t impressed and isn’t judging either. Just filing things away.
“Fourth floor,” he says. “End of the hall.”
He puts a key on the edge of the desk. One key, no fob, no paperwork, no card machine. I wait for the rest of it. The rest of it doesn’t come.
“That’s it?”
“Jax vouched.” He goes back to whatever’s in front of him. “Rules are on the fridge. Short version, keep your business your business and let everybody else keep theirs.”
I pick up the key. In seventeen years of moving money for people who make their living being curious, I don’t think anyone has ever handed me anything and asked me for nothing.
The apartment is one bedroom, clean, plain, and quiet in a way my flat in Kensington has never once been. I set the bag on the floor and don’t open it.
A week, maybe. Long enough to see him with my own eyes and decide whether there’s anything to say. Then a flight, and back to my life, where none of this will ultimately matter.
I’ve been in the country for ninety minutes, and I’ve already told myself that twice.
***
The gates are the same. That’s the first thing that gets me—not the house, the gates. Same iron, same slow drag as they open, same sound.
The man in the booth is older than the last time I saw him. I watch him do the math on my face and come up short.
“Name, sir?”
There are two answers. I’ve been giving one of them for seventeen years—the other, I haven’t spoken aloud since I left.
“Edwards,” I say. “Logan Edwards.”
He goes very still. Then he steps back, and the gate starts to move. He doesn’t say anything else, and I put the car in gear before either of us has to.
The drive feels longer than I remember. Everything else is smaller. The lawn, the fountain my father said my mother hated, the pale front of the house with its ridiculous columns—all of it has shrunk to fit inside a man instead of a boy. I hate that it still fits at all.
I park. I sit there with my hands on the wheel the way I did the last time, except the last time I was leaving.
Then I get out, button my jacket, and knock on my father’s door like a stranger—because that’s what I am.
The door opens.
And I forget, for a second, what I came here to do.
The woman is small. That registers first and doesn’t stay important.
Reddish-brown hair, loose, a little of it caught against her jaw.
Green eyes that meet mine and hold there, instead of sliding off, which almost nobody does.
She’s in something soft and unremarkable, and I have absolutely no business noticing how it sits on her.
Something goes through me, low and fast and entirely uninvited. Seventeen years of discipline, and it takes about a second and a half to lose my focus.
I’m thirty-five years old. I don’t do this.
“Hello,” I say, and it comes out rougher than I mean it to.
“You’re…Logan.”
Not a question, quite. She says it like she’s confirming something she’s been holding a long time.
“Yeah.” I look past her, into the hall, because looking at her isn’t working. “And you are?”
Something crosses her face. It’s gone before I can name it.
“Kiera,” she says. “I live here.”
Kiera.
The name goes in slowly before realization hits. A girl on a staircase with her hands clasped. A framed photograph held out in both hands at a car window.
And then the rest of it. The last name I never used because I never had to, because she was never anything to me except a quiet child who had the bad luck to be brought into this house by the woman who emptied it.
Ivy’s daughter.
Everything in me closes like a door.
“Where is he?” I ask.
She doesn’t miss it. I watch her not miss it, and I watch her decide not to say anything about it. Something in the way she absorbs it—without flinching, without arguing, like she’d budgeted for it and still came up short—snags on me and won’t come loose.
I don’t examine that either.
“Upstairs,” she says. “In his room.”
“Let’s get this over with.”
She doesn’t move.
“Before you go up.” Her hands come together in front of her, and I get the sense it’s a thing she does instead of something else. “He’s changed. Since the spring, mostly. It happened fast.”
“I’ve seen sick people.”
“Not him.” She says it without heat, which is somehow worse. “It’s the weight, mainly. And his color. It’s a lot to take in the first time, and he watches for it.”
“Watches for what?”
“Whatever’s on your face when you walk in.” She holds my eyes for a second longer than she needs to. “He’s been rehearsing this. He’ll be sitting up when you get there. He shouldn’t be.”
I look at her, and there’s a flare of something I don’t like, because I’m being handled. By a twenty-five-year-old in a quiet house who has decided I need preparation before seeing my own father.
Except she isn’t wrong that she’d know and I wouldn’t. And under the irritation, underneath it and moving faster, is the thing I don’t want to look at directly:
She’s delivered this before. Not to me. To someone. Possibly to several someone’s, standing right here at the bottom of these stairs, doing the arithmetic on how much of it a person can take.
Seventeen years, and somebody’s been doing this job.
“Noted,” I say.
***
I know before I’m through the door.
You don’t need a diagnosis. You need eyes. The man in that bed has been eaten from the inside out, and whatever he’s got left is being spent on sitting upright against the pillows because his son is coming.
She was right. It doesn’t help.
He’s my father the way a photograph is a person.
“Logan,” he says, and his voice breaks on the second syllable.
I stop a few feet from the bed.
Kiera doesn’t. She goes past me like the room belongs to her, and it does. She crosses to the left side without thinking about it, sits down on the edge of the mattress, and puts her hand over his where it’s lying on the blanket.
He doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t have to. His fingers turn over under hers and close, and the whole thing takes about a second, and neither of them registers it as anything at all.