“Yes.”
I let my fork clatter against the plate before I lean back and catch Jesse’s eyes. “Am I going to have to guess this whole thing? I mean, we can do that, but then we’re going to be here all night and Gabriel will be sad because he’ll have to sleep alone.”
“That’s your issue? Gabriel will be sad?”
“All of my issues revolve around Gabriel,” I admit. “There’s not a single thing in my life that doesn’t. Are you going to eat your pie? I was too giddy to eat dinner.”
“Giddy? You were giddy when you found out I was involved?” he asks, looking hurt.
I realize that Gabriel would have frowned upon that too and grimace a little. Emotions are honestly too complex. “Jesse, continue the story before I have to torture it out of you.”
“Why not just wait until this is on record?”
“Because they won’t let me interview you. We’re too close, which disgusts me.”
“That’s true. They’ll call in another department or send me off somewhere.”
“So you’d met Zach in the past.”
“Yes.”
“Were you friends with Lacey at the time?”
“I was not.”
“Did your interaction with Zach cause you and Lacey to be friends?”
“You could say that.”
“You’ve never talked about her, but you’re willing to go to prison for her, telling me it’s the kind of relationship where you’d do shit for each other no matter the cost… that kind of bond is usually either something that happens when you’re younger so it has time to grow or caused by some kind of trauma that left you in that state. Alright, since you’re refusing to spill,let me try my hand at it. You were fifteen when you were thrown out of your house.”
He looks startled. “How’d you hear about that? There’s no record of it.”
“You have some… quirks.”
Jesse’s eyebrow lifts. “Excuse me, what?”
“You calculate the cost and manage your money extremely well in everything you do. You’re conscious of how much you spend.”
“Doesn’t anyone who isn’t you and rich do that?”
“You tend to appreciate food in a way that most don’t.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You never throw away uneaten food, and you look down on others if they do. You keep a stash of food near you. You exhibit signs of someone who has gone without food for a time. There was a foster child I stayed with for a while who would hoard food. Every day the foster mom would question where all the food went, and when the kid found a placement, they found him trying to take all of the food he’d stashed with him.”
“You think because I’m not wasteful that I was starved as a child?”
“Were you?” I ask. “Why not tell me the truth? What do you have to lose at this point? And if you don’t, I’m just going to dig into your life and find it myself.”
“Fine. I was thrown out of my house at fifteen because my very religious mother caught me and a girl half naked in my bed when she was supposed to be out. The real kicker was whenherfamily came to mine screaming that I’d knocked her up. We hadn’t even had sex, but my parents wouldn’t listen to me. My father wasn’t… my father was never a good guy. He talked with his fists more than his words… and… I’m not even sure if it was this incident that did it. It was more like it was an excuse to finally get rid of me. I wasn’t the best kid. The more hedemanded shit from me, the more I did the opposite. Not too long before this whole thing, he’d shipped me off to some camp that was supposed to fix my attitude, and instead, I got caught kissing my male camp advisor who was like twenty-one. It was just a buildup of shit, and the pregnancy was the last straw.
“When it was revealed that I wasn’t the father, I tried going back home and immediately regretted it. So I lived out on the streets for a while because I had no fucking idea how to live.”
“And then what happened?”
“It got really bad. Like… I was doing shit I’m not proud of. I was… I was really toxic to myself because I hated myself. I hated myself because I was raised to believe that I was nothing. I was just… I wasn’t doing well… when this guy found me. I… had been sleeping with rich men or women or whoever the fuck would sleep with me. And because they were hiding it from their spouses, they’d shower me with things. It was like an unspoken agreement that I’d have something against them and in exchange they’d give me money or things I could pawn. Then this guy… he saved me right when I had nothing left. But he really wasn’t interested in sex. He was just… I don’t know. It’s a long story.”
