39. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
I’D HARBORED SEVERAL shames in my lifetime.
Most of them the results of occupational hazard—Fallen Marines.
Friends I wished I’d have reached out to before they’d gone out on their own terms…
Others had been poor choices made in response to those traumas.
None of them could usurp the guilt I carried at finding out my wife had miscarried at twelve weeks.
Or that I was the reason she’d kept the secret.
By the time I’d uncovered the truth in the form of a clinic visit paid for via credit card rather than billed to our joint insurance, it was too late.
There were some things that were unforgivable, but what I’d done was insurmountable.
Leaving her alone to grieve, to wander the world on autopilot while I resented her for checking out of our life? I would never forgive myself for that. But making her believe that she couldn’t compete with my rigid expectations for our life in the first place was what haunted me.
I’d coasted through the year in dysregulated patterns of working, drinking, and sleeping.
Watching her on the cameras of our home as she cried while packing her things.
Tracking her all over the country, stupidly thinking that as long as I knew where she was and I could intercept any problems before they met her, keeping her safe would be enough.
But that’d been peak delusion. I fucked up. I failed her.
One job. One fucking promise. And I’d failed.
Nineah didn’t move. My confession hanging between us, my shame, her dawning, neither of us broke the silence. Her expression frozen, her body rigid as she processed the truth, she stared through me like she didn’t even see me.
“I can’t go back,” I admitted. “I can never demand that you talk to me. I can’t hold you and I can’t cry with you. I’ll never be able to share that weight while it mattered.”
“Abraham,” she whispered.
“But I am so sorry.” Fuck, I was sorry. A sorry man. A sorry husband. A sorry father to a child I’d never get to meet. “I’m sorry, Nineah.”
One hand wringing the other, her breaths suddenly came in shallow pants. All over again, I was losing her and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t even lock my shit down.
“I love you. I can’t explain the ways that I love you because it’s not something I can study or track or predict. It just exists. And I can’t… Tell me what you need. Because I will make sure you have it. If you want children, we’ll have children. I’ll—”
“Stop it! Just stop it!” she screamed.
I halted.
Her chest heaving, her eyes filling with tears, she unlocked her fingers and that’s when I realized her hands were shaking.
“Nineah.”
“I’m not good for you,” she whispered. “I never have been.”
She choked on a sob and the brokenness of the sound made the air thin, like the moments before an ambush. Tears streaming violently down her cheeks, she cussed.
I reached for her but she stepped back, shaking her head. “No, please. I need you… Please, just listen.” The desperation in her tone tripping every internal alarm I fucking had, the misery in her eyes flaying me, I did as she asked.
“Before I say anything, I need you to understand that it was never supposed to be like this. I-I didn’t…
I never planned…” Stopping herself, she drew in two deep breaths.
“I was so young, and poor, and stupid. The kind of stupid that didn’t know how dangerous the world was back then.
All I knew was what I’d been through as a kid.
That my clothes didn’t fit, that having to share a room with three other people sucked, and that if I wanted to eat, I had to steal food from anywhere I could get away with because I was always hungry,” she sobbed.
“So when I was ten, I learned how to code. How to gain access to places I wasn’t supposed to.
And when I got good at that, I learned how to hide everything I did so no one would catch me.
I got so good, that I eventually learned that people would pay me for information they might not otherwise be able to get.
“At first, it seemed harmless,” she said.
“Contact information of estranged family members, addresses of deadbeats who weren’t paying child support.
I told myself I was helping people and they were helping me.
But then someone wanted something illegal.
The ID number and location of a prisoner at a maximum security facility in Virginia.
They were going to pay more than triple what I was taking in and I…
I didn’t say no. I was caught immediately.
I came home from school one day to a special agent sitting in my foster mom’s living room.
That was the day I learned that people, especially men trust what they can see and all SSA Nathan Ross saw was a helpless fourteen-year-old in a charter school uniform with braces, crying about wanting to find her father so she could write to him or whatever bullshit lie I’d come up with on the spot.
And then he made a mistake. He let me go.
No record, no arrest, just a warning I never heeded. ”
My instincts firing, everything telling me to shut this conversation down, I ignored all of it and she continued.
“After that, I knew I wasn’t going to stop,” she whispered.
“So, I got smarter. I stopped trading information for money and started collecting it, sorting it, paying attention to its trends. I spent four years learning what someone else might need before they knew it themselves. Then after high school, I enlisted. I selected an admin MOS, I kept my head down, and I listened because people have a habit of talking in front of those they write off. And when I got out, I used my GI Bill to get credentials, I used the credentials to get a job, and then I used that job to ensure I was never poor again.”
The way she said the words left an acrid flavor in my mouth. “What does that mean?”
Nineah didn’t make eye contact. “I patented inventions, specifically the kind profitable corporations would pay millions to kill, and they did.”
“How much?” I demanded.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll never be able to spend a dime of it.”
Tears welling in her eyes, she looked more like a heartbroken young woman than the lethally talented asset she was and it was incongruous with this conversation.
Still, I knew guilt. My demons fed on it.
I spent half of most nights up with it. Yet, nothing I’d carried with me for twenty years matched the shit in her eyes.
“A couple of years into my position at FX, a courier I still can’t find to this day delivered a mailer to me with a small vial of blood and a testing kit for one person.
I don’t know how I knew what it meant, or what it was for, but I did.
I tossed the kit and sent the blood to a third party lab a long with my own sample.
It confirmed what I suspected. I had a sibling. A sister.
“Within days, I received a message on my personal cell with a URL and a warning not to tell anyone if I ever wanted to see her alive. I still think about that night. How many other things I might have done if I’d just taken to a second to think…
” She closed her eyes. “But I didn’t. I didn’t call anyone.
I didn’t do anything. I sat down at my computer and copied the link, which turned out to be a secure chatroom where someone named Claudius propositioned me.
They wanted me to track a munitions shipment and in exchange, I’d get the location of my sister.
“I don’t know how they found me. I didn’t have a front facing role in FX and up to that point, I’d been extremely selective with who I sold to.
But I knew right then, I wasn’t going to do it.
I’d already changed too much. Matthias was the first genuinely good person besides Zajre that I’d ever met and I knew that if I betrayed him, then he was wrong about me and I…
I couldn’t cross that line. So the next morning, I went into work and I told him everything.
About the DNA test, the blackmail, the shipment number.
All of it. The URL crashed within minutes and I never heard from Claudius again.
Matthias promised to help me look for my sister, but we searched for months after that to no avail.
It was as if she’d never even existed. I stupidly thought that was the end of it.
” When she opened her eyes again, I recognized the same faraway stare of the woman who’d signed our divorce papers on autopilot.
Nineah faced me and it was then I finally had a name for that look.
Grief.
Core-shaking, heart-mangling grief.
“After I gave Matthias what I had, he handed the intel over to Virginia’s federal office, but there was no follow-up.
No sense of urgency. They treated it like nothing more than a tip-line call.
Until two months later, when that serial number was traced to a recovered shipment that went missing in J-Bad a week prior. ”
There was a tinny noise I sometimes experienced.
A result of having been in close proximity to too many explosions for too many years.
These days, I only heard it sometimes. During a panic attack, or after a night terror.
However, in this moment, that sound buzzed around the inside of my skull like a fly had found itself trapped there and was panicking.
Wanting to believe I’d heard her incorrectly, that she was mistaken, or that I was, I opened my mouth to speak, but Nineah met my gaze head on and I saw the truth.
The next few minutes moved through molasses as I stared at her.
“Six Marines gone because I let Claudius go,” she whispered. “If all of those weapons are recovered even two hours earlier, they would all still be alive. And you and I would’ve never met.”