He’ll come for me.
* * *
I brace myself as the metal door screeches against the floor and when Stuart appears, I raise my eyes to the ceiling and thank my dad for his help.
Stuart stalks towards me. ‘Put your head back.’
I choke on the water, my body rejecting the cool sensation. He retrieves his coat from the floor and hangs it back around my shoulders. Then he takes a banana from the side pocket of his combat trousers and peels.
‘Please let my hands go.’ I wince as the words leave my throat.
He unlocks the cuffs and releases one hand so I can slump back in the chair. He offers the banana to me and I want it but my arms are numb. I open my mouth and he nods, snapping pieces and placing them on my tongue. It’s funny, I’ve never noticed how sweet bananas are but now I feel like I can taste every fragment of sugar as my jaw moves slowly, chewing and swallowing like I’ve never had solid food. When I’m done, I’m able to lift my arm for water and I gulp down the rest of the bottle, placing the empty on the table.
Something’s changed. He doesn’t have venom or fight. It’s just Stuart. Soft-eyed, dark-haired, young.
‘My mother left me when I was a child,’ I say. ‘I was five. She took me to school one day and never came to pick me up. She walked out on my dad and me.’
He shuffles on the table’s edge, moving to the side then back where it started. He folds his arms, then moves his hands to his lap. Finally, he brings his hands to either side of his hips and grips the lip of the table.
‘Did she love you?’
‘I think so. She said so.’ I shrug. ‘I ask myself that question a lot. If she loved me, would she really have left? If she loved me, why didn’t she ever come back or try to contact me?’
I don’t know if it’s working. He focuses on an invisible spot on the concrete floor. I wait. Like Gregory would, I leave space for Stuart to fill the silence. Eventually, he does.
‘At least you knew her. I’ll never know where I really came from.’
‘You were adopted?’
‘I was in the system for years.’ His face twists with a look that’s full of disgust. ‘A delinquent, they called me. Then I got foster parents. Time and again, new parents. Apparently, my mother gave me to a family she knew at first. I think they thought one day, she’d take me back. I don’t know.’ He exhales, still fixed on the same spot of concrete. ‘She never did. She killed herself.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He lets out a short puff that rocks his body, then lifts his head to look at me. His browns are wide. Beautiful. ‘I’m not even from Zimbabwe.’ He laughs again, though the sound is drenched in sadness.
‘Where are you from?’
He looks to the window now as if he’s wondering whether he wants to talk at all. ‘She had money. She was middle-class. The family who had me at first, they say she killed herself because she was forced to give me up. They say she was too young and I would have brought shame on her and her parents.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I say it again because I don’t know what else to say. Those two words have so little meaning.
He makes a noise somewhere between anger and pain, and rubs his hands over his face. ‘See, the kicker is, my mother had a younger brother. He’s alive.’ He walks to the window and turns to face me, dropping his back against the wall and lifting one foot flat against the surface behind him. ‘She gave me up but they never did anything to hurt him. They never made him want to kill himself. They went on with their lives. Playing happy families.’ His square jaw tightens and the look on his face, those familiar eyes, makes my stomach sink. ‘By the time I turned eighteen, I’d spent so many years hiding in my room, messing with computers, I was a tech whiz. I could hack anything, create software that no other kid of eighteen could create. I used that. I tracked down her family.’
I hold my breath now and I think I’m more terrified than I’ve been in the entirety of the last fifteen hours. ‘I traced them all, my grandmother, my grandfather and my uncle.’ He moves away from the wall and stands over me. ‘My search brought me to England.’
A million disordered thoughts crash through my mind.
‘My uncle is a billionaire. A tech billionaire. Imagine the coincidence. I watched him for weeks, never knowing whether to approach him, not knowing if I had the courage and if I did, how I’d do it.’
My eyes sting and this time, I don’t think I’m strong enough to cool the fire.
‘I putBlack Diamondson the market.’ He laughs again and rubs a hand across his chin. Then he paces next to me. ‘I thought, I thought if I made something of myself, that he’d be interested in me. But deep down, I knew, I knew they’d gotten rid of me once, they wouldn’t want me now.’
‘Stuart, who is your uncle?’
He stops but it’s so clear. Those brown irises, magnetic, alluring. His dark, square features. His height.
‘You know it’s him,’ he whispers.
