Both kiss my temple as they make their way back to the guest room.
I seriously don’t know what the hell to do with those two.
Parents, amiright?
Dad redeems himself slightly by making his famous steaks, and the rest of the evening reminds me how grateful I am—usually—to have them as my fathers. I suppose I could complain about having the “fun” dads, but I kinda like that ours was the house that everyone came to, where all the sleepovers were held, where cousins came to confess to our fathers before telling their own parents what they’d done.
But I still can’t get over the fact that they bugged our place. Extensively. Sure, they’ve always been protective, but that has always been couched under the umbrella of wealth. When poor folks work more than one job and still can’t put enough food on the table, rich folks get targeted.
Somehow, though, when they explained that to us as kids, they never seemed to think the problem was the poor people, but rather the poverty created when the wealthy get greedy. Our family’s estate is worth more money than we can spend in three generations, according to Baba, and like hell are we going to pull the ladder up behind us.
But bring an uncle with you if you’re going into the city.
For my entire life, that made sense. Now, however, I’mbeginning to wonder if my fathers have been trying to disguise astrophysics in the guise of a simple equation. Maybe two plus two doesn’t equal four. Maybe it equals the sum of the universe.
There was a time in my late teens, when I was well into my master’s program, when I became so overwhelmed that I considered quitting. Too ashamed to admit it to my dads, I went to my Aunt Hedy, and she helped me realize the overwhelm was really self-judgment. I didn’t understand the course assignments at the level I usually did, and I couldn’t brute force it like I had my pre-reqs.
She helped me understand the power of sticking with it, of pulling a subject apart and putting it back together again. She showed me that when learning something involves great difficulty, the act of learning it anyway gives that person a spine.
Grit, she said.
If I hadn’t learned that lesson, then maybe I wouldn’t be so eager to chase the knowledge that seems just out of reach. If Sy had never encouraged me to check out my dads, I might not have seen the inconsistencies in the stories they’d always told us.
I’m reminded of the time Aunt Parker showed me how to take a picture with a real camera. I was fascinated by the way twisting the lens altered the field of view. You could make the entire frame blurry or sharp, or switch up between a foreground focus and a background focus. Maya still has a picture I took of her when we were twelve. I managed to get her perfectly in focus while fuzzing out the background to a palette of soothing colors.
In reality, it’d been the dead of winter, and I thought the dead trees in the background were yucky. If I adjusted what I knew to be true of our fathers, what kinds of unpleasantness would I find in their backgrounds? I think back to the drawer full of sex toys in Dad’s office. I thoroughly examined every nook and cranny of that office, save for that drawer. Whatwould I have found if I hadn’t been so put off by the discovery?
Eighteen surveillance devices in our penthouse.
There’s also the problem of Silas. He pointed out that I have a blind spot, but he gave me no actual information. I could push him for more, but it took months of extending invitations to him before he felt comfortable enough to spend time with us, and several months more to join us with any regularity. He’s too important to us, and I don’t want to scare him off.
Besides, the person I really want to talk to is Truett. He’s the only one who’s been willing to tell me the truth, even if it is humiliating to hear. Would he be willing to help me sharpen my field of vision?
Or will he reject me all over again?
One thing’s for sure: he knows something about my dads that I don’t. I feel exceptionally foolish about the way everything went down, but there’s a thrumming in my chest that tells me I need to see him again. To demand answers.
To not give up until he helps me bring this picture into focus.
18
TRUETT
That was…something.
I just spent the morning walking around the square in Wimberley, Texas, getting my entire worldview gently rogered by a woman with freckles and a double-digit ass while shopping for plants.
I now own a massive pothos and a digital key to a black-ops site about five miles south of the Wimberley shopping district.
Everything I thought I knew about Anders and Omar Bash—specifically that their vigilantism is some combination of unchecked wealth and a nearly pathological sense of justice—is technically accurate but also just the tip of a very bloody iceberg.
Anders and Omar aren’t just thrill-seeking weirdos with a hero complex. They were once part of the Guardians: a covert, gay-as-hell justice squad made up of basically the entire Bash family plus a few retired special-ops types who got tired of watching the powerful hurt the innocent and then walk away scot-free.
Their philosophy? Money might buy you a superyacht, your very own member of Congress, and a get-out-of-jail-free card—but that didn’t mean jack shit to the Guardians.
Due to overlapping goals and a few key retirements, the Guardians eventually got folded into the Wimberley operation under Hedy’s direction. As for Wimberley… Hedy was cagey with the details, so I still don’t know what to call it. A black-ops justice collective? A hyper-funded Robin Hood startup? A murder co-op with biotech and a dental plan?
Whatever it is, it’s funded by Elijah Energy and Seth Wakefield, a man so rich he makes that dickhead Bez0s look like a guy who’s doing MLM from his garage. To be clear, Wakefield isn’t some altruistic Batman-type. He pays Hedy and her team to steal bleeding-edge tech from very bad people and then looks the other way when the team taps into their weapons-grade morality.
