“Yeah, of course he fucking did,” Morgan muttered under his breath. It felt good to have someone he could let his anger chew on without feeling awkward or guilty about it. “Asshole couldn’t even wait until I was gone to make his move.”
AT SOMEpoint the restaurant had been a Dairy Queen. The signs had been taken down and the red paint had faded to terracotta, but you could still tell. It still served hot dogs too, wet and shiny under stripes of mustard and ketchup. Morgan had eaten worse places, but….
“So if it was a date,” Morgan asked. “What would be different?”
Boyd wiped his mouth on a napkin and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have gotten a chili dog.” He sat back, the half a dog left on the plate in front of him, and raised his eyebrows over his glasses at Morgan. “What did you want to talk about?”
What Boyd would have said if Morganhadasked him on a date. Morgan licked salt and ketchup off his lips and ignored the urge to ask. It wasn’t important. Even if the answer would have been yes, it wouldn’t change anything. He might want to believe it would, but eventually the no would have crawled in. If not because Boyd had gotten sick of Morgan—the way everyone did—then because he found out about the deal with Shay.
“What’s she like?” he asked instead. He’d already picked out more than Boyd realized on the drive through town—who he liked, who he didn’t, what businesses were still here fifteen years later, and the ones that people still missed. It was easy because Boyd trusted him. Or, Morgan thought with the tang of something bitter, he trusted Sammy. Maybe Sammy had deserved that trust. “His mother. Donna Callaway. I’m going to have to meet her, and I don’t know…. It’s weird. What am I supposed to say?”
Boyd sat back in the booth and looked uncomfortable.
“I don’t know,” he said after a second. “Didn’t Shay—”
“He told me she was broke, so I wouldn’t get any money out of her,” Morgan said. He plucked a french fry off his plate and dragged it through the ketchup. “If you need his permission to talk about her, don’t worry about—”
“It’s not that. I really don’t know,” Boyd said. He pushed his plate away from him as though the topic had taken his appetite. “When we were kids—”
“You and Shay?”
Guilt flickered across Boyd’s face, and he folded his lower lip between his teeth as he nodded. “Me and Sammy,” he corrected Morgan. “Shay was older. We used to follow him around, beg him to let us work on that muscle car of his, but he never paid us much attention. Back then, though, Mrs. Calloway was just Sammy’s mom. I mean, she was nice, we weren’t scared of her, but I never really thought of her as being a person. She worked a lot—two jobs, and it was shift work—so she was never home much. One year Sammy went to Yellowstone with me and my dad, and she made us a cake to take with us. It was awful, but you ate it anyhow.”
Morgan caught that, but he didn’t bother with a correction this time. “And after?”
“After Sammy disappeared, I was scared of her,” Boyd admitted and immediately looked sorry. “I mean, I was just a kid too, and… Mrs. Calloway had problems. She wasn’t well, and she said things she didn’t mean. She’s a lot better now, most of the time. Anniversaries throw her for a loop, the calls from cops who say they’ve found something, when—”
“When Mac tells her that her son might be alive, but he’s a thief and a hustler?”
Boyd didn’t agree out loud, but the rueful face he made was close enough. He took a drink of his water and frowned, straight brows knit together as he tried to explain.
“She might be happy. Or mad that we didn’t tell her right away,” he said. “I don’t know if she’ll be… together enough… to cope with it. I just, I don’t know how she’ll react. Not to you.”
“Will she think I’m him?” Morgan asked. His freedom was based on one answer to that question, but….
“Probably. She’s always believed he’d come home,” Boyd said. “At least until the DNA comes back, or you find something to prove who you are… and aren’t.”
Con artists didn’t have bad tempers, so Morgan never ran anything more complicated than a hustle over a pool or card game. He’d met enough—lived with enough—to know the best lie was a redirected truth.
“I lied to Mac,” he said abruptly. Boyd, at least, had enough good sense not to look surprised. “My mom’s not dead. My dad either. Not as far as I know, anyhow.”
It was hard to read Boyd’s expression, but he started to tap his fingers on the table. He always did that when he wasn’t sure what else to do, as though his body couldn’t cope when his brain was in neutral.
“Why—”
Morgan clenched his jaw. He’d brought it up, and now he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t have to, not all of it. If he gave too many details, he’d have no wriggle room afterward.
“I don’t remember them, really,” he said. Not well, anyhow. There were blurry snapshots of frustration and teary prayers as they held him down, of locked doors and his desperate, confused rage as he battered against them. Someone’s arm in a cast, and maybe he’d done it, maybe that was why they sent him away in the end. “I suppose I should, ’cause I was eight or nine, but I don’t. Just that one day this man came and got me in his car, and he told me they didn’t want me anymore, and him and his wife would be my new family.”
His next memories were of the cheap plastic seats in the pickup, hot against his bare thighs, cheap cheese sandwiches, more locked doors, and the sort of active, aggressive prayer that came with slaps and shoves.
“Jesus.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” It was, and wasn’t, a lie. Morgan remembered his own anger as the most disruptive thing in the neat, disapproving house, the vague assumption that if he was bad enough, they’d send him home. “They sent me on to another family that wanted a kid, and when they realized they didn’t want this kid, they sent me on again. By the time I hit the foster-care system, I was already five homes down.”
“Why didn’t you tell Mac?”
Morgan’s harsh crack of a laugh that caught him off guard. It had been years ago, and he should be over it by now. He’d gotten a few beatings, been sweated over by some wet-lipped bastards who never quite worked up the courage to go further than a hard cock pressed against his back, but he’d never been broken.
