I have to remind myself that my intentions are pure. I just want what’s best for LC.
Casey Maitland:I didn’t need anything. I was just looking
I watch Alex’s type bubbles appear, vanish. Appear again.
Alex Harrison:What’s your ETA for leaving?
Casey Maitland:Can you really say ETA for leaving when that technically means estimated time of arrival for leaving?
Alex Harrison:fine, what’s your ETL?
Casey Maitland:I was about to head out
Alex Harrison:Meet in the lobby?
Casey Maitland:see u down there.
He’s leaning against the far wall, his legs crossed and his hands in his pockets, waiting for me like he’s got nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there. His eyes track me as I make my way toward him. Looking like a goddamn Calvin Klein model in his slacks and loafers and crisply pressed button-down—an outfit that seems boring on everyone else but somehow groundbreaking on Alex Harrison.
Three feet away, I stop. There’s a flash of something dark and curious in his eyes, and with a jolt, what he said to me yesterdaycomes rushing back:You’ll look just as pretty tomorrow as you did the day we met.
Alex swallows. “Saanvi said the footage was good enough to air.”
“Was she by chance being held at gunpoint when she said it?”
Alex laughs and falls silent for a few seconds, scratching at his chin, eyes glazed. I almost say something else just to fill the silence, but then he releases a long, weary sigh and nods to himself, as if succumbing to some internal debate.
“I’m a bastard. You know, like, the illegitimate kind.”
Well.
I was simply not expecting that. “Right. I mean… Uh, what?”
Alex’s lips kick up into the beginnings of a smile, but it never fully forms. “My dad was married to someone else when he got my mom pregnant with me. Stillismarried to that same someone else, for that matter.”
“Oh.” I pretend (probably very badly) that I didn’t read Robert and Linda’s marriage announcement in a scannedNew Haven Registerthat I found online last night. There was a picture, too. Robert was around the same age that Alex is now when he got married.
“My mother,” Alex goes on, “was a waitress and a freelance writer. She grew up in Queens, as a first-generation Korean American of two immigrant parents. I know next to nothing about how she and my dad met, or what their relationship was like.”
My eyelashes flutter, batting up a storm while I process.
Mostly, I’m processing that Alex said his motherwas.Just like I say that my motherwas.
“For a while, we lived in Seoul. Just her and me. She died when I was eleven, and that’s when my dad moved me back here, to a boarding school in Connecticut,” Alex goes on, his voice clinical, like he’s reciting a speech he’s been practicing. “We’ve never been close, but that’s his fault, not mine. He gives me lots of money that I never once asked for, and absolutely nothing else. Not time. Not answers.” He blinks. “Just money.”
I have so many questions. First of all, how much money are we talking here? Asking for a friend. What does Alex remember about Seoul, from the first time he lived there with his mother? What’s it like to have memories of her that aren’t hazy, six-year-old snatches? Are those memories part of the reason he went back to Seoul when he graduated from Harvard? What was boarding school like?
But the first question that bubbles up on my tongue is “Does your dad have other children?”
Alex shakes his head. “His wife wasn’t able to get pregnant, and as far as I know they never looked into adoption. I’m his only child.”
I feel like a window that’s been frosted over for weeks is finally melting, the flaky ice dripping away to leave behind a clear pane. Alex Harrison is on the other side of it, with a chipped heart and a handful of memories that I might be able to match.
“You were owed an explanation,” he says.
“I was?”
He nods, then lifts himself off the wall. Capturing my attention with razor-sharp focus he adds, “But only you, Casey. Please.”
