Sixteen years old and his cock hard in the barman’s mouth, caught between the realization thatthiswas the missing piece and flat terror thatthiswas another cock in the equation. His dad,who boasted about what a lady’s man his son was and joked—or “joked”—about dynasties, would never understand.
“Then I got—” Joe hesitated on theengagedand took a drink of beer to cover his stumble. He looked over the table at Cal, who was straightforwardly into cars and guys, and wondered if he’d understand Kristen, if he’d get that Joe had really thought he could make it work if he liked herand pretended that he hadn’t fucked some guy in a club. Probably not. Joe wasn’t even sure he ever thought so himself, not really. “I had my picture taken at a few nightclubs, ended up in a couple of gossip magazines. A few weeks later, I started to get some weird emails.”
“Threats?” Cal asked.
“Not then,” Joe said. “Odd. Angry. They weren’t threats, though. They just accused me of lying.”
Over and over again. There was no way to read personality into a computer font, but the uncompromising, all-caps repetition of LIAR, sporadically misspelled, still conjured rage and angry, jabbed keystrokes.
“About what?”
“I didn’t know,” Joe said. He’d thought it was a lot of things, from a threat to out him to an angry ex-employee, but he hadn’t known. “Not at first. Then they emailed me thatwe both knew the truth about my mother, and that if I kept lying, they’dmakeme stop. To be honest I thought it was this vlogger who was obsessed with an actress friend of mine. He’d ambushed me outside of a bar when I was with her and tried to antagonize me into something… newsworthy. One of the things he asked was if my mother would be proud, and I said she would. It was the only thing he didthat got a reaction, so at first I figured he wanted to see how good of a goad he was.”
“But it wasn’t.”
Joe shook his head. “No. It was like that broke some sort of dam, and they started to send emails and letters. Then they started to mail stuff to our offices in LA. That’s why Edward is involved. Once it escalates into real life, it’s a lot harder to keep it off people’s radar.”
“They’resome nut, though,” Cal pointed out. He took a swig of his soda and then gestured with the bottle. “Maybe they think your mum’s, like, the Virgin Mary or something. People make weird connections sometimes. They think they’re real, but that doesn’t always mean they are. You don’t—”
“I didn’t take it at face value,” Joe said impatiently. He wondered if the people with their company-saving plans,laid out in action points and diagrams, felt this irritated at being questioned. Probably. Maybe it was a wonder he didn’t have more death threats. “I made inquiries. I talked to people who’d known her before I was born. No one knew anything. Her and Dad had been living half the year in England. She was from here, and then one year, Dad came home with me and told everyone she died. Suddenly and tragically.No details, no records.”
“So, what?” Cal asked. “Do you think something… bad happened?”
“I don’t know. I think my father lied about what happened to my mother. I don’t know why he did it, or when he started, but he did,” Joe said. He took a drink of beer and decided not to add the last level to his blueprint, in case it collapsed under its own weight.
I think she might not be dead at all.
That sounded too stupid to risk saying out loud, like a child’s fantasy in a grown man’s mouth. The thing was, Joe still couldn’t shake the conviction it was true.
His mother should have been buried in that graveyard today, with her parents. It was one of the few details his dad, drunk and maudlin, had ever given him. But the only names etched on the stone had been his grandparents.
