"I know how that feels," I whisper.
"So let's not make it an agreement, or terms of a deal. It's you trusting me and me trusting you. I'm scared, Jakob, and I know you must be, too. But I…I'm choosing courage anyway." She leans forward and presses her lips to the back of my hand. "Will you do that with me?"
"Why?" I can't help but ask. "Why trust…me?"
"You protected me. Fought for me. Killed for me."
"You wouldn't have needed any of that if it wasn't for me."
"There is zero R-O-I on blame-casting, Jakob."
I let out a breath. "I was born wealthy. Very,verywealthy, from two very old and very important families. I was educated by private tutors—and when I say my education was classical, Imean that I was taught Latin and Greek, fencing, horsemanship, diction and elocution, mathematics…I was raised like a prince of old, Brys. In Prague. My name really is Jakob…Jakob Kasparek. But that person, the Jakob Kasparek who was born in Prague and emigrated to the States…he died a long time ago. Well, he vanished." I sigh. "I'm getting ahead of myself."
I tell her all about my childhood. My nanny, my beautiful, quiet, poised, elegant mother. My stern, arrogant father.
I tell her about coming home to find my parents gone and our housekeeper in an unintelligible panic.
The hospital—my mother's still, thin form caught up in a spiderweb of tubes and lines, my father hunched over her bed, unmoving, for days.
Her death and my reaction to it
My father's violent expression of grief against me.
Following him home, watching him shut the door in my face. The short silence punctuated by the awful finality of a single gunshot.
I tell her about being sent to live with my father's cousin in Harlem with my inheritance that he stole. How he left me on a sidewalk in a terrible section of the city, far, far from anything I knew, which was very little to begin with.
I tell her about being homeless. Walking the streets all day and all night, being beaten up by old homeless men for prime sleeping spots beneath overpasses, digging in dumpsters for scraps.
I tell her about being taken in by Miss Amy. How she fed me, bought me clothes, and gave me a room to sleep in. How at first I thought she was merely kind, wanting to help a lost young man out of the goodness of her heart.
Brys's expression betrays her understanding of what happened before I say anything further. "Oh god, Jakob," she whispers.
I clear my throat, swallow hard. My eyes burn, and my throat is tight. "This is hard to talk about. I…in fact, I've only spoken of this period of my life in any detail one other time-when I told Isabel."
Brys's gaze is thoughtful. "I have a lot of questions about her, but I suppose that's part of the telling."
I shrug. "I suppose so, yes."
She shifts on the seat. Waits in silence, watching me.
There's no getting out of this—and I realize that just maybe…I don't want to get out of it. I don't want to change the subject or shut down the conversation.
Telling Isabel was agonizing, like pulling teeth sans Novocain. Like ripping chunks of my skin off. I'd begun to realize the depths of my depravity, by then, how badly I'd wronged her. I understood that I owed her those truths.
This is different.
As Brys said, my many secrets are rotting inside me, festering and ingrown. They require excision.
Isabel listened to my tale with curiosity, skepticism, anger, and blame—all of it justifiable. Brys, on the other hand, listens with openness and curiosity, as well as compassion. Concern. Care.
I find enough courage to start again. "It wasn't all at once, you must understand. I wasn't just thrown into a room with horny women. It was a lobster in a pot being brought to a boil." I swallow hard. "If you have not experienced true starvation, then you cannot understand the power of hunger. When you have fought off rats for a nibble of stale, moldy bread dug out of a dumpster, you will do quite literally anything to never feel that way again. Just like…" I swallow, shake my head. "Well."
"Heroin," she whispers.
"Yes. But hunger was her first tool." I fix my eyes on Brys to remind myself that I am here, I am now. "Miss Amy brought…afriend…over to visit. This friend was very wealthy and very important. A politician's wife, I believe, but I do not know for sure. I barely spoke English back then, remember—I was a lost, starving Czech orphan." Pause for breath, for courage. "Miss Amy told me that if I wanted to have a bed to sleep in and clean clothes to wear, a roof over my head, and food to eat, I would accommodate her friend, no matter what was asked of me.No matter what—she repeated that several times. If I made her friend happy, she told me, the gravy train would keep on rolling."
"God, that's evil," Brys breathes.
