CHAPTER TWELVE
Kael — The Accusation
She came to find me instead of waiting for me to come to her, which told me before she said a single word that whatever had happened in the days since I’d let her walk away had changed the shape of things between us again.
“Do you know where the files are.” No greeting. No softness. She stood in the doorway of the storage unit like she’d rehearsed the question the entire walk over and wanted it out before she lost her nerve.
I could have asked her where the question came from.
I already knew — there was only one person cruel enough and precise enough to hand her exactly that accusation at exactly the moment it would do the most damage — but asking would have felt like deflecting, and I’d promised myself, standing in that same doorway a week earlier, that I was done deflecting with her.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know where they are. I have theories. I have four years of narrowing down a list of places your mother might have hidden something that important, and none of my theories have ever panned out into an actual location.”
“Vane says you do know. He says you’ve known for a year.”
“Vane says a great many things designed to put distance between us, because distance between us is the only outcome that benefits him.” I kept my voice level, though something in me wanted very badly to close the space between us and prove, physically, that I had nothing to hide — a desire I recognized as exactly the kind of impulse I’d need to resist if I wanted her to trust anything I said tonight.
“I have a theory about a storage facility in Queens your mother used under one of her old names. I’ve had eyes on it for eight months.
It’s never turned up anything, and I never told you about it because telling you would have meant explaining everything else first, and I wasn’t ready to do that. ”
“That’s not an answer to whether you were withholding something from me. That’s an answer to whether you found it. Those aren’t the same question.”
She was right, and the precision of her catching that distinction — sharper than I’d given her credit for, sharper than I think she’d given herself credit for before this whole thing started — was, infuriatingly, one of the things I loved about her most.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been investigating a lead about your mother’s hiding place for eight months without telling you it existed.
That was withholding. I did it because I didn’t want to give you false hope over a storage unit that’s turned up nothing, and because every time I consider telling you something, I have to weigh it against four years of habit that says the less you know, the safer you are.
I know that habit is the problem. I’m not asking you to forgive it tonight.
I’m telling you the truth because you asked, and because the alternative is losing whatever this is before it’s had a chance to become something real. ”
She was quiet for a long moment, arms crossed, studying me the way she studied her paintings — like she was trying to see past the surface to whatever structure was actually holding it up.
“I need you to understand something,” she said finally.
“Every time I catch you keeping something from me, even for a reason that sounds good, it’s going to cost you more than the last time.
I’m not a project you manage the risk on.
I’m a person, and I get to decide what risks I’m willing to carry. ”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” There was no anger left in her voice, just exhaustion, and something underneath the exhaustion that might have been the beginning of trust, fragile and unearned and offered anyway.
“Because I think you’ve spent four years deciding you know better than everyone else what’s good for me.
Your father did that too, didn’t he? Decided what other people needed to know and what they didn’t, because he’d already decided he knew best.”
It landed exactly as hard as she meant it to. I didn’t argue with it, because arguing with it would have proven her right in the worst possible way.
“Take me to Queens,” she said instead. “If there’s a lead, I want to see it myself. No more theories you’re running without me.”