I put the rice cooker on and got everything else ready for dinner, cooking it as soon as the marinating was complete. Ideally I’d have left the chicken overnight, but I hadn’t thought of doing it yesterday.
True to his word, Candrin came down as the food was getting ready. He kissed my cheek, thanking me again and then set the table, asking if anyone else would be here for the night. It was only the two of us.
I dished up our food and brought him a plate before sitting across from him.
“This is really good,” Candrin praised, his mouth still full. “Like restaurant quality good.”
“Thanks. It’s one of my favorites.” I took a forkful of mine.
We ate silently until about half our food was gone. “You know, you can tell me what’s bothering you.” I didn’t know a lot about the kind of work he did, but it sounded like it had the potential to be stressful. I was surprised to hear it was a family issue.
“I need to figure out how to stop my so-called brother.” He set his fork down.
“Brother?” I asked, crossing my fingers that I hadn’t overstepped.
“My dad left him everything.”
Which explained his fancy clothes. I had a feeling there was more to his story. Being cut out of a will wasn’t how I imagined that tale.
“Only thing is I don’t believe he is my brother. He just kind of showed up out of nowhere.”
He went on to explain the story of Charles and how the man destroyed Candrin’s entire life without a single regret. And then he got to what today was, what would’ve been his father’s birthday,what had his mood so off… so many emotions crossed his face as he spoke, but I only had one— anger.
With each detail he shared, I got angrier and my beast—shit I could scent him, he was so close to the surface. I needed to keep his sorry ass at bay. The last thing Candrin needed on top of this was me shifting at the kitchen table when he didn’t know I was a bear to begin with.
“You know when they say ‘it’s complicated’ in all the movies? My current situation really is and I have no idea how to get out of it. I can’t just hire a lawyer. They seem to have this pesky habit of billing their clients.”
And even if he’d accept my money, the kind I had floating around wouldn’t come close to the amount needed to fight someone with the funds Charles had.
“Let me help you at least try and figure out where he came from? He has to have a fingerprint on the internet… socials or what have you. Maybe if we’re lucky and the google gods are with us, we’ll be able to get the ammunition we need.” The odds of it being as easy as that were slim, but at least I’d feel as though I was doing something.
“As much as I wished I didn’t need your help, I do.” He placed his hand on mine. “Thank you.”
We cleaned up the kitchen and I took out my laptop. Starting with a basic google search we got quite a few hits and photos. But there was something strange about it. Like it was the same twenty photos on repeat.
We went into his social media and checked out his about pages hoping for a link that could help us dig further. We didn’t find any, but we did discover something interesting and by interesting I meant sketchy.
“All of these accounts are less than a year old?” I noted.
“I hadn’t, I was more looking at how each platform has all of the same content. He’s not a business. Why would he show the same picture of him eating ice cream on every platform?” He scrolled down the page. “And look, only a handful of followers.”
The more we looked, the more we discovered oddities. It was almost as if Charles wasn’t a real person and was a bot from overseas. Only he was real. Candrin had met him.
“I think we need to dive deeper.” I leaned back in the chair. Charles was good.Very good from the looks of things. Even reverse image searches weren’t helping us get any more information. We could keep going like this for a week and I doubted we’d get any further.
“How do you propose we do that? I don’t see hits coming up from those websites that say they can give us more information for only $49.99. This feels like it’s pretty much all there is.” And he wasn’t wrong on that.
“I think I should follow him. See where he goes and who he sees. Maybe then we can start to piece together what’s going on.”
“No. Absolutely not. I won’t let you get in trouble trying to help me.” Candrin was adamant and stubborn.
And so was I. “It’s the only way I can think of to get the information. We can’t let him steal your life from you. We can’t.”
Candrin closed his eyes. “I don’t know what to do?”
And in his shoes, I wouldn’t either.
19
