“What did you tell her?” I ask casually.
“That you were working through something. That it wasn’t about her.”
“It’s not about her.”
“The hell it isn’t.” Armen’s voice goes up half a register. For him, that’s yelling. “Everything you’ve done for the past week is about her. You can’t look at her. You can’t talk to her. You’re taking your frustration out on every person in this building because you can’t figure out how to be in the same room with her. So don’t sit there and tell me it’s not about her.”
I stare at him and he stares back. This is what it looks like when the two of us fight. There are no raised fists and no shoving. Just two men who know each other well enough to find the exact nerve to press on.
“I read about the city’s money trail, or should I say embezzlement trail. I followed it and found some fucked-up shit.”
“Such as?”
“The shell companies for hiding money were directly connected to the budget cuts. Social services were the first sector to be defunded before the collapse. I could see exactly where the money went and exactly what it was taken from. They barely cared enough to cover their tracks, the bastards.”
“The facility where your mother worked?”
“Yup. That and other places.”
“What else?”
I consider telling him about the connection between the stolen money and the ground we’re sitting on. It’s right there, ready to come out. But something stops me. Not because I don’t trust Armen. I’d trust him with my life and have, multiple times. I’m just not ready to say it yet. Saying it to Armen makes it official, a thing we have to deal with together, the three of us guys. I don’t have a plan for that yet.
“Enough,” I say. “I found enough.”
Armen reads me. He’s good at it. Not the way Vi reads me, which is all instinct and emotion. Armen reads me the way you read a map. Systematically. He knows I’m holding something back, and he’s deciding whether to push.
“Her father was clean, Sting,” I say.
“You know that Vi’s father was clean and you haven’t discussed it with her. You know how important this is to her?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple. You tell her. You say the words. She’s been fighting for this since she got here and you’ve been blocking her, and now, you know she was right and you’re sitting on it. Why?”
“Because there’s more to it than her father being clean.”
“What more?”
“I said enough, Armen.”
“You’re hurting her,” he says, his edge is gone. “Whatever else you found, whatever’s eating you, you’re hurting her. She thinks you read the papers and decided she was wrong. She thinks you chose your position over her. I shouldn’t have to tell you this but here we are.”
He stands, picks up the trade log I was pretending to read, looks at it, and sets it down.
“You’re my brother,” he says. “I’d follow you anywhere and you know that. But you’re wrong about this, not about what you found but about keeping it to yourself. Tell her tonight, tomorrow, I don’t care when. But tell her before you lose something you can’t get back. Tell her before you fuck us all up.”
He leaves and doesn’t close the door this time. Which, knowing Armen, is deliberate. The closed door was for our conversation. The open door is for what I’m supposed to do next.
I sit at the table in the Skylight Room and think about Vi somewhere in this building, thinking I chose my worldview over her.
Armen’s right. He’s usually right. It’s the second most annoying thing about him.
42
STING
I leavethe Skylight Room with Armen’s words still in my head.
