KC looked down and rubbed her fingertip over her thumbnail.
She wouldn’t. That was what her body language meant.
There was nothing new about KC refusing to share, but the disappointment that Yardley would never truly know this woman rolled through her in a bigger, blacker wave than she’d anticipated.
She had already turned her face away to master herself when KC spoke.
“My dad was never around. Not really. He was a quality control inspector for a company with a bunch of vegetable canneries. His territory ran from Virginia all the way up to Wisconsin. When he was home, he didn’t say much. About anything.”
Yardley had never met KC’s father. She knew he lived in the Florida Panhandle in a modest retirement duplex. He rented out one side for income. At the holidays, he sent KC a card with a fifty-dollar bill taped inside, but he never called, and KC didn’t call him.
She wondered if the things she and KC couldn’t tell each other had hurt them more than the lies.
“My mom died of an amniotic embolism when I was born,” KC said. “I told you that, and it was true. But they weren’t married, even. They’d met in a bar. Her mom fought with my dad for my custody for a couple of years, I guess. I have a vague memory of her. But then my dad moved in withhismom, and having her around plus his salary meant my mom’s mom lost out. Or maybe she just lost interest. I’m not sure. She never reached out again, and I always felt like I couldn’t ask.”
Yardley had listened to a lot of stories from colleagues in thisfield that started like KC’s. Stories that told about how a person became self-sufficient and observant. Often they were stories of neglect.
Once, when she and KC cleaned out the garage together, Yardley had found an envelope of miscellaneous snapshots. There was a picture of KC in jean shorts and a Power Rangers T-shirt, just old enough that her permanent teeth had come in and looked enormous, her hair bright as a new penny, sitting on the concrete steps with a pair of sunglasses on. Another showed KC’s grandmother in a recliner in the living room, the oxygen tank for her COPD parked on the green shag next to her.
There were no pictures of KC’s father. No friends or relatives.
Yardley had never seen those snapshots again. Probably if she hadn’t been the one to find them, she never would’ve seen them at all.
“My grandma was a nice woman, and I think she did okay for a long time. But when I was in sixth grade, I started finding the door to the house unlocked, or no food in the cupboards, or the stove left on. I’d get called down to the office because there had been a paper sent home that parents were supposed to fill out and return that never got done. Bills were coming in the mail with my grandma’s name in red through the plastic window. When I was in eighth grade, she hit a kid on a bike with her car. Broke his leg. She lost her license. We were supposed to be using the city bus, but it didn’t go everywhere we needed it to. My dad was… more gone.”
“You became the grown-up.”
“I figured it out.” The way KC said this did not invite pity. “I started driving because I was good enough at it that a kid driving attracted less attention than an older woman making too manymistakes. By the time I got a license, I’d gotten as interested in driving as I was in other kinds of machines. Tech. Finances, even. I can drive anything. I figured out how to get what I needed.”
Everything she needed, she had supplied for herself. That was what KC wanted Yardley to understand—that she was someone who’d drawn on her own resources to figure out a way that she could meet all of her needs and the needs of her grandmother.
Never mind that she never should have had to do that.
Yardley held her body still, hoping to get more from KC by suppressing her reactions to what was, objectively, a much smaller, sadder story about KC’s experiences of home and family than Yardley had ever been told.
“It was because of the counterterrorism investigation into our EPA project that Dr. Brown found me.” KC’s speech was precise now. This, too, was a sensitive subject, but also, Yardley guessed, a difficult one. “He did his job and secured me as an asset. He offered me a way to take care of everyone at a time when I didn’t know how I was going to keep doing it, which had the bonus of being an attractive alternative to federal prison. Helped me find a nice assisted-living apartment for my grandma. All through my last few years of college, he was the one who’d call to see how my exams went. If I needed anything. He was there.”
He was there.It wasn’t the same thing asHe loved me. It wasn’tI adored him, orHe made me feel safe, orHis mentorship meant the world to me.
He was there.
Yardley didn’t love that KC’s primary person, for so long, had been an officer of the CIA, or that he’d been introduced into KC’s life when she was so young.
She also didn’t love that Dr. Brown hadn’t been in the Situation Room, deflecting the heat from KC, who was his direct report.
As soon as Yardley had stashed KC back at Langley, she’d chased down Atlas and asked them directly about Dr. Brown’s whereabouts. The only thing they’d been able to tell her was that the counterterrorism director was in the field and could not be contacted at the moment. Yardley had been able to hear that what Atlas meant was the agency was keeping tabs on Dr. Brown, but they weren’t about to share information with her.
That could mean almost anything.
She studied KC’s tight body language in her jump seat. She could tell that KC was trying to keep her expression extra neutral.
Yardley didn’t blame her. They were exes, brand-new exes, and Yardley was asking her personal questions after the fact. But she needed to know.
“Tell me,” she said, and the words came out more desperate than she’d meant for them to.Tell me every single thing you never told me.That’s what it sounded like she was asking.Tell me everything I deserved to know, everything that could have built bridges between us where our secrets made chasms.
Her poor, stupid heart.
KC raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m doing.”
