Chapter Two
Kiera
There are two folders in the bottom drawer, and it’s the thin one that undoes me.
I find them both on a Tuesday in March, looking for a policy number.
The one at the back is fat as a phone book, and I know what it is before I open it because Garth told me years ago in the flat voice he uses for things he’s decided not to feel.
I’ve always known where your mother is. Eleven years of somebody following Ivy around, photographing her getting into cars.
The one in front of it is nine pages long.
EDWARDS, LOGAN G.—LOCATE. Opened three weeks after he left.
Closed fourteen months later, and most of those pages are one man explaining, in increasingly careful language, what cannot be done.
No death certificate. No employer, no vehicle, no lease, no account anywhere in the country attached to that name after a certain November.
The conclusion is a guess, and the investigator says so: a nineteen-year-old doesn’t simply stop existing, so he’s changed his name.
He added that once a petition is sealed, there is no way to search forward from the name he started with. You’d need to already know the answer.
The last page isn’t a report. It’s a note. It says he’s sorry, and that in his experience, when they’re this thorough, this young, they don’t want to be found. It’s usually kinder to let them stay lost.
Underneath it, in my stepfather’s handwriting, one word.
Continue.
Then fourteen years of nothing, because there was nothing to continue with.
The second search is stapled behind the first.
It’s four pages long, and it’s dated six years ago—the winter Garth got his first bad scan and told nobody, including me.
A different firm. Different tools. Somebody ran archival image searches against seventeen years of published photography, which apparently you can do now.
They came back with one hit.
It’s a car race in Portugal. The photograph isn’t of him at all—it’s a wide shot of a hospitality enclosure, and the subject is Jaxon Corbin with a sponsor’s board behind him. But there’s a man at the edge of the frame in a three-quarter profile, half-turned, not intended to be in it.
Probable match. Not evidentiary. No accreditation record for the individual. No further avenue.
Closed.
I sit on the floor of the study with the folders in my lap for a long time. Eleven years on my mother. Fourteen months on his son, and then a photograph he wasn’t supposed to be in.
***
I know the name in the caption, obviously. Everyone does.
I also know it in a different way. Corbin Industries came across my desk eighteen months ago as a possible co-investor, and I read forty pages on the family before we passed on it.
What I don’t know is whether the man at the edge of the frame is a thirty-five-year-old version of a boy I knew when I was seven. A photograph taken at an angle, from behind glass.
I look at it for four days.
Then I find out that Jaxon Corbin keeps a shop in Culver City where his car lives between races. I put on the outfit I wear to tell people things they don’t want to hear, and I drive there on a Saturday with a nine-page folder on the passenger seat.
There’s a man leaning against a workbench with a headset around his neck, and he isn’t what I expected. He goes very still when I say the name.
“I’m looking for Logan Edwards.”
He takes the headset off. Doesn’t hurry about it.
“Don’t know him.”
“I think you do.” My hands stay where he can see them, which I don’t decide to do so much as notice afterward.
“I don’t have a photograph of him. I have a photograph of you, and a man behind your left shoulder in Estoril six years ago that a computer thinks is him with sixty-one percent confidence. That’s what I’ve got.”
Something moves behind his eyes and is gone. “Who are you?”
“Kiera Durham. My mother married his father.”
“Then you know his father threw him out.”
“I was eight and standing in the hall.” I hold his eyes. “I’m not here for money. I don’t want anything from him. I’m not going to tell anyone where he is, including my mother, especially my mother.”
“People turn up,” he says. “Every few years, somebody turns up. His stepmother’s had two goes at it.”
Of course she has.
“I’m aware of what she is,” I say. “I can’t prove I’m not like her. All I can give you is a name and a phone number. You can put both in the trash, and then in a few months, a man who’s spent seventeen years being angry at his father will find out he missed the end of it by a month.”
His jaw works.
“He’ll be angry,” he says, and it isn’t a warning so much as a question.
“Then he’ll be angry,” I say. “But he’ll know. That’s the part I care about.”
I leave my number on the back of a parts invoice. He doesn’t say he’ll call.
Nine days later, my stepfather’s phone rings.
***
He arrives on a Thursday, and I’m ready for all of it except the actual size of him in the doorway.
I have had eleven days to prepare. I have prepared.
I told myself that the boy who walked out of this house when I was eight owes me precisely nothing, that he will not remember me, that the last thing he saw of my family was my mother dismantling his.
Whatever he decides to feel about me is his business and not a thing I get a vote in.
Then I open the door, and he’s standing there in a suit with the jacket still buttoned, black hair, blue eyes that come to mine and stay. My whole body forgets its instructions.
He doesn’t know me. I watch him not recognize me. There’s a stretch of about four seconds where he looks at me the way a man looks at a woman he has just met and finds interesting. I feel it land somewhere low and unfamiliar. I don’t know how to react and have no idea what to do with my hands.
Then I say my name.
I watch it land—the name, the house, the staircase. Then, he makes the connection to my last name, and everything in his face just…closes. Not slowly. Like a hand over a candle.
Ivy’s daughter.
He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to. It’s in his shoulders and the way his eyes go past me to the hall like there might be something in it more worth looking at.
I knew. I knew. I built the whole day around knowing.
It still takes the floor out from under me. Yet I still walk him up the stairs with my voice completely level—because that’s the thing I’m good at.
***
I don’t fall apart in the hallway afterward.
I go up to my room, and I sit on the end of my bed in the dark with my shoes still on. I stay there for a little over an hour, doing nothing whatsoever. Not crying. Just gone, the way I used to go when I was small, and my mother said she’d come and didn’t.
I tell myself it isn’t about him. It’s about the day and Garth’s face when the door opened.
At some point, I get up, take my shoes off, and go check on my stepfather like I do every night. He’s asleep, and his hand is outside the blanket. I put it back under.
I’ll come back tomorrow, Logan said.
That’s the only part that matters. That’s all of it.
I say that to myself about four times before I fall asleep.
***
He comes at ten, but Garth is asleep.
“The medication makes him drowsy,” I say. “He’ll be up within the hour, if you want to wait.”
I fully expect him to leave. He looks at me for a second, then says, “I’ll wait,” and steps past me into the house. My pulse does something stupid.
We end up in the front room. He takes the chair by the window without asking, which is one of the things I’m already learning about him.
He commands a room like the question of whether he should has never once occurred to him.
No jacket today. White shirt, sleeves buttoned at the wrist.
I notice that, too, and I don’t know why.
“You’re still at Wilder House,” I say, because the quiet is doing something to me.
“For now.”
“You live in London.”
“Most of the time.”
“Doing what?”
He glances at me. “Finance. I run a firm.”
I wait. He doesn’t elaborate, which I find genuinely irritating, and something in me decides to be irritating back.
“I looked you up,” I say. “There isn’t much.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Barely.
“No,” he agrees. “There isn’t.”
“I’m head of operations at Edwards Capital.” I hadn’t planned to say it. “So I know what it takes to be that hard to find. It’s expensive.”
He turns his head fully then, and it’s the first time all morning he’s actually looked at me. I struggle to hold his gaze.
“It was,” he says.
The quiet comes back. But it’s a different quiet.
And I hear myself say, “You were cold yesterday.”
I don’t know where it comes from. Two minutes ago, I was managing him.
He doesn’t pretend not to understand. He leans forward, forearms on his thighs, and looks at the floor for a second.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Because of my mother.”
“You’re not her.” His voice is even. “But you’re standing in the middle of everything she did. And everything he let her do.” A pause. “That’s not fair to you. But it’s still true.”
I think that might be the most honest thing anyone has said to me in this house in nine years.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For her. For what she did to you—to both of you.”
He looks up, and there’s something wary in it, like he’s checking the sentence for a hook.
“I don’t need an apology.”
“I know,” I say. “You’re getting one anyway. I’ve had it for a while, and I’m tired of holding it.”
Something in his face shifts. Not softens. Shifts.
“Can we try to be cordial?” I ask. “You’re going to be here. I’m going to be here. It would be easier if we weren’t doing—” I gesture at the space between us “—this.”
“Cordial,” he repeats, like the word is faintly ridiculous.
“Yes.”
“Alright.” He leans back. “Cordial.”
“Good.” It comes out too fast, and I hear it. So does he.
“You did that when you were eight, too,” he says.
I blink. “Did what?”
“Agreed with people quickly so they’d stop looking at you.”
Heat goes up my neck, immediate and total, because he’s right. He was in this house for one year while I was in it, and I didn’t think he had registered a single thing about me.
“You were terrifying when I was eight,” I say, to say something.
“Was I?”
“You never spoke. You looked like you were summing everyone up.”
He laughs. It’s short and surprised, and it changes his entire face. I feel it go through me like something dropped.
“I was,” he says.
“And now?”
“Still am.” He looks at me. “You talk more.”
“I had to grow into it.”
“It suits you.”
He stands.
Not toward the door. Toward me. His approach is slow enough that I could stand up, cross the room, and put a chair between us. There’s a second where both of us know that option’s available.
I don’t move.
“Kiera.”
“Yes?”
He stops close enough that I have to tip my head back.
His hand comes up and settles along my jaw, thumb just under my cheekbone.
He doesn’t do anything else. He waits. He isn’t asking; there’s nothing on his face that’s asking.
He’s just letting the moment sit there open, with the door still behind him and my legs still working.
My breath goes shallow. I lean into his hand. It’s barely anything—more of a decision not to pull back than a movement.
He reads it, and he moves.
His mouth is on mine—firm and demanding, not gentle.
I’m being consumed, not kissed. My hands climb his chest and around his neck; my fingers curling into the hair at his nape.
He makes a low sound against my lips, and his other hand finds my waist and pulls.
The space between us stops existing, and I am not thinking about my stepfather or my mother or the fact that this man has known the adult me for approximately thirty hours.
I’m not thinking at all. That’s the part that should frighten me.
“Kiera?”
The nurse’s voice, from the hall, not close.
We come apart fast. He steps back with his jaw set and drags a hand through his hair. I turn toward the window and put myself back together with my hands shaking.
By the time she reaches the doorway, I’m fine. I am completely fine.
“He’s awake,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say, and my voice is perfectly steady. I hate how good I am at that.
***
Garth is sitting up when we come in. He’s had the nurse do his hair, which tells me exactly how much this visit means and exactly how much he’d deny it.
Logan takes the chair on the right side of the bed this time. It takes him a moment. I watch it take him a moment.
They talk about nothing for twenty minutes—a trial back east, the weather in London, a man they both knew who’s dead now. It’s stilted and careful, and it’s the single best thing that has happened in this house in many years.
Then my stepfather says, “I want to ask you for something.”
Logan goes still.
“There’s no one running my firm,” Garth says.
“There hasn’t been, properly, since spring. Kiera’s holding operations together, and she shouldn’t have to. But the board is starting to circle.”
He takes a breath he clearly needs. “Take it. On an interim basis. Just until I’m stable, or until I’m not. Then it’s yours to do whatever you like with.”
The word sits in the room.
Interim.
Logan’s face doesn’t move at all.
“No,” he says.
“Logan—”
“I came to see whether you were dying.” He says it flatly, without cruelty, which somehow makes it worse. “That’s what I came for. Not a chair, not a title, not a company. I’m not taking anything from you. I stopped taking things from you when I was eighteen.”
Garth closes his eyes. “Alright,” he says.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” Logan says and stands.
He’s gone inside a minute. I hear the front door, then the car, and then nothing.
My stepfather is looking at the ceiling, his hand lying open on the blanket. It takes me until now to understand that he wasn’t asking for a chief executive.
He was simply asking his son to stay longer.
“Garth.”
“Don’t,” he says quietly. “It was a bad idea. I’ve had a lot of them.”
I sit down on the edge of the bed and put my hand over his. I think about a folder with nine pages in it, and one word written at the bottom in his handwriting.
Continue.
I’m going to have to go and find him.
Again.