“You didn’t tell the social worker any of this?” Mac asked.
Morgan pierced the egg and let yolk run out over the plate, around the hash browns and bacon. “Why would I?” he asked. “What were they going to do? Take me back to the family before that one? Track it back to whoever gave me away in the first place? At least in foster care, no one pretended to love me, and I got to stay in a city instead of being sent back to some… place like this.”
The plate in front of Mac stayed untouched. He braced his elbows on the table and laced his fingers together in front of his mouth.
“Why tell me now?” he asked. “Did something change your mind? Do you think you are Sammy now?”
Morgan’s appetite faltered and soured with the question. The past couldn’t hurt him anymore, but apparently the present could at least put him off his food. He swallowed the mouthful of bacon and potato and wiped his lips on a napkin. Nothing he’d said so far had been a lie. He’d just let Mac come to his own conclusions.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to be. I mean, how the fuck didn’t you find me? It was like pass the parcel. I was sent to school and to the dentist. People saw me. Fifteen years, and maybe I didn’t have to go through any of it if someone had just found me? So if I’m Sammy, why did no one come to get me? Because nobody did.”
The crack in his voice—anger and pain wedged into his throat—caught Morgan off guard. He stopped, cleared his throat, and rubbed his hand roughly over his mouth as though he could get rid of the hurt along with the words. The taste of egg coated the inside of his mouth and threatened to choke him.
It was stupid. He wasn’t Sammy, so why the hell did it suddenly feel so raw?
“You’re right,” Mac said. “People let you down.”
Morgan snorted and took a drink of juice to wash the bad taste out of his mouth. He picked up his fork and pushed a bit of bacon around the plate. Even if he wasn’t hungry right now, who knew when he’d get his next cooked breakfast.
“You mean Sammy?”
“I mean you,” Mac said. He wiped his hands on a dishcloth and got up to grab a notebook from the desk shoved into the corner of the room. There was a picture of Sammy on there, pinned to the wall like an accusation, and a handful of photos and clippings. It didn’t look new. “Can you tell me anything about these people? Anything I can use to track them down?”
“There was a church. We all went to the same church. It had a bible with its name in it. Fire on the Mountain, something like that,” Morgan said without meaning to. That wasn’t part of the lie he’d practiced. Maybe all police interrogations should take place over bacon. He pushed the plate away from him and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “And I remember the first dad, the one who told me he was my family now.”
Mac scribbled that down, flicked a page, and looked up at Morgan. “Can you describe him?”
There was a picture of Deacon Hill on the internet. Actually there were a lot, but most of them were blurred or taken in profile or from behind as he stalked away. He didn’t have any social media accounts, and he didn’t seem like a selfie kind of man. So there was one good photo of him, reproduced and resized on dozens of websites. The more rigorous sites attributed it to the teacher records in the Cutter’s Gap school, grabbed at some point by someone. He looked more like a California surfer than a West Virginia teacher, all blond curls and the sort of face that wasn’t exactly handsome, but when he smiled, people didn’t care.
He looked like the sort of guy people liked. Even Morgan, who’d never met him, felt the brief urge to smile back at the photo like they were old friends. Not that it meant anything. Some of the biggest assholes Morgan had to live with as a kid—the rubbers, the ones who were free not just with their fists, but their boots—went out into the world with a big, shit-eating grin on their faces.
So Morgan could describe what Deacon Hill looked like, close enough. Anything he got wrong would be put down to time and trauma. A kid who didn’t really know what was going on.
“He was tall,” Morgan said. Some of the pictures of him as he walked away made that clear. “Um, he smiled a lot. Even when he was….”
Halfway in love with you.
If he did this, that would be over. Right now Morgan could slink out of town with that half love and a promise that he would always be Boyd’s favorite bad idea. It wasn’tenough, but it was something. The minute he lied about it, let Boyd think he was Sammy and that they’d caught who did it? That would be over.
It shouldn’t matter. Either way, Morgan would be gone. But it did.
“Off the record,” Morgan said.
Mac stared at him for a second, pen poised over the page. After a moment he clicked the pen nib in and set it down.
“That’s for journalists,” he said. “Hypothetically.”
Morgan laughed roughly. He knew that. This town had ground the edge off him in a couple of days. He grabbed a bit of bacon off his plate and shredded it between his fingers.
“Hypothetically, who do you want this guy to look like?”
Mac sat back in in the white-painted chair. He hooked his arm over the back of it and pulled a sour face. “So you’re lying.”
“If I were, hypothetically, would you have a problem with it?” Morgan asked. “Or would you be glad to have an excuse to pull someone in—someone in particular—and shake them down?”
“That’s not how I work,” Mac said bluntly. “And if you mean do I know who did it, but I just can’t prove it? No. I don’t. Not enough to send someone to jail on a lie.”
His temper slipped, and he slapped the flat of his hand on the table hard enough to rattle the plates.
