Chapter 20 What He Did in the Dark #2
He told me he’d gone to his father’s office. Alone, unannounced, and sat down across from the man and got him talking, and recorded every word of it. The transfer. Whitfield. The men in the laneway. All of it, in his father’s own voice, on a phone in his breast pocket.
I went cold all the way through.
“You sat in a room with him alone and baited him into a confession? Are you insane?” I heard my own voice go flat and careful, the voice I use when I’m holding something down.
“He was never going to hurt me. Not really. I’m the heir. I was, anyway.” A grim flick of a smile. “The most valuable thing in that building to him. He’d sooner cut off his own hand.”
“You didn’t know that for certain.”
He held my eyes. “Luke. I grew up reading that man to survive dinner. I know his moves the way you know an interview room. I was never in danger. I promise you that.”
I wanted to be angry. Part of me was, a hot useless part, the part that had spent six days not knowing if he was alive.
But under it was the other thing, the thing I didn’t have a clean name for, watching this man who flinched from being cared for, who’d spent his whole life being managed and handled, walk into the one room in the world built to break him and walk back out with the man in his pocket.
“And then,” he said, “I ended it. Legally. All of it, my side.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I signed it all away.” He said it lightly and it didn’t land lightly.
“The trust. The estate. The inheritance, the board seat they’d kept warm for me, the name.
I had a lawyer draw it up, filed it the morning I walked in.
It’s irrevocable. There’s no version where I’m a Branford anymore, not a cent of it, not a share, nothing he can leave me and nothing he can dangle.
A man can’t be forced to inherit. So I made sure I never could. ”
I sat back.
“Ryan.”
“I know.”
“That’s... Do you understand what you...” I scrubbed a hand down my face. “That’s everything. That’s your whole life,” I didn’t even have the shape of the numbers. I’d never let myself think about the shape of the numbers.
“I walked away from all of it.” Calm. Certain.
“And the recording’s the lock on the door.
If he ever moves on me, on you, on anyone at 51, I put the whole thing in front of people who hate him so much, they will shred his reputation and name to pieces.
It won’t put him in a cell, my lawyer’s clear on that, he’s too careful, the money stops at names that aren’t names.
But it ends him in every room that ever mattered to him.
He knows it. He understood it before I left.
He’s not going to touch us. He can’t afford to. ”
“He could change his mind.” The wary thing wouldn’t let go of me. “Men like that. They wait. You said it yourself, he’s patient. In a year, in five...”
“He won’t. Let me tell you how I know.” Ryan’s voice went flat, the way it does when he’s carrying something that could cut him on the way out.
“A few days ago my uncle came round and told me my father was dying. Bad heart. Two surgeries, more coming, not long left. And I believed it, Luke. I lay awake doing the arithmetic on how much time the man had. I grieved him. Some stupid kid part of me grieved the bastard.” His jaw worked.
“And when I confronted him in that office, he told me he’d made the whole thing up.
Sent David to say it, as a test, to see whether I could still be reeled in by it.
He’s not sick. He faked his own deathbed to find out if I’d come running. ”
I didn’t have a thing to say to that, it was just fucked up.
“So no. He won’t change.” There was no doubt in it anywhere, and that was somehow the saddest part.
“He has never once changed. He’ll spend the rest of his life certain I’ll come crawling back, because in his whole life nobody has ever walked away from him and meant it.
He’ll die waiting.” A small breath. “I don’t need his name, Luke.
I don’t need his money. I’ve got a job. I had a job.
I’ll have it again in a few weeks when the paperwork clears, thanks to you.
” His jaw worked. “The only part that costs me is my mother. She’s going to hear a version of this from him first, and it’ll be the wrong version, and she’ll be hurt.
But I’ll go to her. Not at the house. Somewhere he isn’t. And I’ll make her understand it.”
He stopped. He’d been building to something and I could feel it and I made myself stay quiet and let him get there.
“I had to burn it down to start over,” he said.
“Clean. With nothing of his in it. So that whatever I build next is mine, and he can’t put a hand through the wall of it and rearrange the furniture.
” His eyes came up to mine, and the certainty cracked just enough to let the fear show under it, the real thing, the thing he’d been carrying.
“And I wanted you in what I build next. That’s the part I couldn’t say on the sidewalk.
I pushed you away because I had to make myself safe to keep before I asked you to keep me.
I didn’t do it to leave you. I did it so there’d be something left worth staying with. ”
I couldn’t speak for a second.
“You should have told me,” I managed. “Any of it. I’d have stood next to you.”
“I know you would. That’s exactly why I couldn’t let you.
” He turned my hand over in his, looked at it instead of me.
“You’d have come into that office with me.
You’d have put yourself between me and him.
And he’d have seen, the second he looked at us, exactly what you are to me, and then he’d have had it, the one lever I couldn’t let him have.
” He looked up. “He still doesn’t know. About us.
He sat there and told me he’d had a cop beaten and he had no idea he was describing the man I’m in love with.
I had to sit there and hold my face while he said it.
So no. I wasn’t letting you in that room. Not that one.”
I’d been watching his mouth while he talked, the way you watch the person you’ve missed, and I saw it now, the thing I’d taken for the cold when he walked in. A faint split healing at the corner of his lip.
“He hit you.” Not a question.
His hand went up to it like he’d forgotten it was there. “Once. At the end. When he understood the paper was real and there was nothing left he could say that would land.”
He said it like it was nothing. It was not nothing. A useless fury turned over in me, but too late to be any good to him.
“I’ll kill him,” I said, and meant it for exactly as long as it took to say.
“You’ll do no such thing. He’s not worth your pension.” His thumb moved over my knuckles. “It’s over, Luke. That’s the whole point of all of it. It’s over.”
The cold thing in my chest had turned into something else entirely while he talked. I pulled him back in against me, careful of nothing now, both arms, my mouth in his hair.
“You impossible man,” I said into it. “You went and did the most dangerous thing in the whole case and you did it where I couldn’t watch your back.”
“You did the rest of it where I couldn’t watch yours. We’re even.” His voice was muffled in my shoulder. Then, lighter, the deflection coming back up now that the worst of it was out: “There is one practical consequence.”
“What?”
He pulled back. The grin was rebuilding, shaky, brave.
“I turned down a genuinely obscene amount of money. Generational money. The kind that buys islands.” He spread his hands.
“So it turns out I’m going to need a roommate.
Cabbagetown. Third floor, no elevator, one bad stair.
Rent’s reasonable. The current tenant’s very handsome but emotionally constipated. ”
“Is he?”
“Famously. Hopeless. Took him a kitchen floor and a shower and a beating to say three words.” He was close now, his hand on my jaw, the joke and the fear and the love all running together in his face the way they only ever did with him. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in the room?”
I kissed him.
I kissed him the way I’d wanted to for six days and hadn’t been able to, slow this time, no audience, no danger left in the room, just the lamp and the warmth and the fact of him here and staying.
He went soft against me and then not soft, his hand sliding up into my hair, and I felt the whole thing change pitch the way it does, the want coming up under the relief.
“That’s a yes,” I said against his mouth.
“I love you,” he said, dropping it plain, the way he does now, the way he taught me to. “Roommate. Partner. Whatever the word is. I love you. I’m not doing the rest of my life anywhere you aren’t.”
“Then stop talking,” I said.
He laughed, low, and let me pull him up off the couch.
I got him down the hall with my mouth on his and my hands already working his shirt, and the old careful man in me, the one who measures everything, was nowhere in the room. I’d spent six days thinking I’d lost this. I wasn’t going to be careful with getting it back.
In the bedroom he tried to take over, his hands going to my belt, and I caught his wrists.
“No,” I said. “Let me. You did the dangerous thing alone. Let me have this part.”
Something in his face went still and open at that, the way it had in the shower the night he said it first. He let his hands drop and let me have him.
I undressed him slow. The shirt off his shoulders, my mouth following my hands down the warm line of his chest, his stomach, the soft skin below his navel where his breath was already going short.
When I got his belt loose and dragged his jeans and underwear down and off, he lifted his hips to help, and then he was bare under the lamp, and I had to stop a second and just look at him.