“What will you do here?”
“I’m going to bed, that’s what.” I try to move slow enough that I don’t dump Stef onto the floor, but she clings to me as I stand.
“Bed? Jack, it’s not even nine o’clock. Come on.”
But I’m done. Done with people who want things from me. Done with making hard decisions.
“No. I already let David go. I did the right thing and left my job when they told me to leave, even though what happened wasn’t my fault. I’m standing by while you try to patch things up with a man you’ve been fighting with for over a year.”
She pinches her lips. I should probably apologize for that last part, but I’m so tired and frustrated, I don’t even know what’s right anymore.
“Why do you still call him David?”
“What?” I’m still standing, and I don’t want to sit next to her again, but I can’t make myself leave the room.
“Damian Marshall. Why do you still call him David?”
I can’t get it right in my head. I don’t know Damian. None of it makes sense.
“Because that’s what he said his name was. That’s the name of the man I knew. That I spent time with. That I—” It was too soon to paint fairy tales of a life together after he left the lodge, but David was a man I would have liked to see again. Damian? Damian is the kind of person who isn’t even supposed to know people like me exist. He’s not supposed to be real.
Stef says, “It’s okay to be angry with him and still miss him. Trust me. I’m very familiar with that emotion.”
But it’s not okay. What happened was unforgivable.
“He lied,” I say.
She shrugs. “Maybe you weren’t the only one he was lying to. I’ve told myself a lot of things this year. Reasons why I was right to move Robbie up here and try and do it all on my own.”
“If you needed more help, I—”
But Stef holds up a hand. “I was hurt. Graham wasn’t there, and I needed him and didn’t know how else to tell him. Before Robbie was born, before Graham was traveling so much, we promised we’d be there for each other. And things didn’t work out that way. I told myself the only solution was divorce. That I didn’t love him anymore, even though I’ve missed him every day since we’ve been here. Sometimes we lie to protect ourselves. Maybe Damian needed to be David for a while.”
“I thought he was an asshat,” I say. “And why would he want to be David? He literally has everything anyone could want. Who would want to be nobody?”
She scrolls through her phone to show me the picture of him trying not to get crushed in the crowd at the marina. “If you had a choice between pretending to be someone else so you could kiss a hot guy on a fishing boat and this, which would you pick?”
David’s head is down, his shoulders slumped. Even under the shadow of his ball cap I can see the unhappy set of his mouth. It reminds me of the day he stepped off the plane. He’d walked like he was doing his best to be invisible. It hadn’t looked like much of a life.
“Am I the hot guy in this equation?”
Stef blows me a kiss. “You’re my brother, and I’ve already spent way too much time thinking about your sexual habits in the last twenty-four hours, so I’m only willing to go so far down this conversational detour. But yes, you’re the hot guy I was thinking of.”
I sit back down. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling here.”
“And that’s okay. If you decide later we’re going back to full-blown asshattery, forget I said any of this. I want you to be happy.” She turns on the TV. “Let’s watch a movie. Your choice.”
She scrolls through Netflix. I don’t recognize anything. But she stops at something calledShadow Leagueand throws me a meaningful glance.
There he is. Well... sort of. It’s David but not. Maybe that’s the difference between David and Damian. His face looks like him, but at the same time, the shape is different. His smile as he grips his gun is artificial. His neck is oddly angled.
But his eyes are the same. The dip under his nose. It’s David in a Damian costume, then dressed up to be someone else entirely.
“Not that,” I say, and Stef doesn’t push it. Maybe she’s ready to forgive Graham, but Damian and I have a long way to go.
