“The kids? You mean Mr. Button’s children?” she asked.
He nodded, his face dropping a little at the mention of them. “You have the same intelligence and determination as all of them,” he said.
She thought that was very kind of him to say. Honestly, it was kind of Henry generally to have not turned her away. She imagined that her very presence here was risking quite a lot for him already.
She’d meant it, though, that she did not plan on turning anyone in. She would receive no joy in doing that.
“So you’ve come here to say hi, have you?” he asked.
“Yes, and to see how you’re actually doing.”
“I’m well,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation.
“Just well?” she questioned.
“Very well,” he repeated. “I’m living the life I always hoped to live in my retirement. I spend my time outside most days urban foraging and, on occasion, indulging my ma by watching a romance drama with her. It’s a good life.” He paused and looked at her as if he were trying to pierce her thoughts. “What of you, Evelyn?” he asked.
“Me?”
“You surely didn’t come all this way for that alone.”
She took a breath and then slowly nodded. “You’re right,” she said, drumming her fingers on the table as she worked up the courage to just ask. “I wanted to know what really happened,” she said.
Henry’s face gave nothing away. “What do you mean?” he asked, though his lack of reaction told her that he had been anticipating this.
“I… I want to know why you took the fall for them. I know it wasn’t you that killed Mr. Button. I know there is probably some intricate machine behind all of the weird crap that has happened in these past few years, but I want to know the truth in its entirety once and for all. I’m tired of being kept in the dark. I want to know how you’re still alive, how you pulled all of this off. I know I’m asking for a lot here, and I know you have no reason to trust me, but I promise I won’t tell anyone. You can even search me for recording devices. I have no desire to turn you or anyone else in,” she said.
Henry looked at her thoughtfully for a long while before he finally spoke.
“I believe what you say, Miss Gray,” he said. “Not because I believe you, per se, but because I have a sophisticated network of RF detectors installed that would have sounded off if you did have a recording device on your person. I also have no worries about you telling anyone because there are people, powerful people, who would prevent you from doing that. So in that case, Miss Gray, I am happy to tell you what really happened.”
Evie wondered who these people were. Probably the same network of powerful people who protected the heirs in the first place.
“Thank you, Henry. I really appreciate it,” she said.
Henry looked down and threaded his fingers together. “It is a long story. I’ll try my best to tell you everything.” He looked at her and then, with only the slightest bit of hesitation, started speaking in a low voice. “Well, I might as well start from the beginning, when I first got the job over sixteen years ago…”
For the next two hours, Henry recounted as much as he could of the events that led to that night. He started from the beginning, right in the Garden of Eden, where five children—seven if you counted Evie and her brother—had their childhoods stolen from right under them. Eden being the main office—the meta and somewhat cringe nickname Mr. Button gave his workspace. Henry told her how he watched as these children were forced to become experiments, and how he was complicit in all of their pain, and tried his hardest over the years to love and protect them as much as he could, trying to help them grow in a place with not much light. But there was only so much you could do in those conditions. Not every rose can rise up through concrete foundations. He told her how these five traumatized children became brilliant and how with that brilliance, the immense pressure on them never waned. Pressure that was fostered and encouraged by Mr. Button all the time.
And Henry watched this pressure ravage them in different ways. Fola, the perfectionist; Romeo, the ghost; Perdita, the mediator; Bilal, the self-punisher; andOctavius. Henry said his name with a certain sadness. Octavius, the broken.
He spoke about the night Adam died in fine detail, filling in the blanks she had desperately wanted to hear for all these years. And then he told her what he knew of Adelina’s death—though, he admitted, he was not privy to those details in the same way.
He then told her a secret that very few people knew: Mr. Button was dying of cancer and had asked one of his children to help him end his life. That child had refused, and had called on the help of his other siblings to fight back against the request of their dying, abusive father. None of the children wanted him to die, but what happened next was a matter of fate.
Henry was not in the room when any of this occurred. The only reason he knew about it was the same reason he knew much of what happened around the Button Manor.
And then Henry told her another secret, one only he and the now-deceased billionaire knew.
There were cameras everywhere.
It was no secret that Mr. Button was a paranoid man, scared that his enemies would be spying on him, trying to steal all of his genius inventions. He was so paranoid that he made it a point to declare to anyone that would listen that he did not believe in the use of CCTV.
But therewerecameras, just ones no one knew about. Not even his security. Cameras only Mr. Button and Henry knew about.
They were all over the Manor, all over Eden, and all over Olympus, where Mr. Button had died. No one knew about these cameras, because the cameras were hidden in the taxidermized heads of the dead animals he had strung all over, always watching their every move in the house. Mr. Button did this to keep watch over his children; he wanted to make sure they were not slacking, and that he was aware of any and all liabilities in this experiment of his.
It was Henry’s best-kept secret. The footage was saved on a weekly basis and checked by Henry, and then kept in an external hard drive that only the two of them had access to.
