Page 3 of My Girl to Take

“I don’t know anyone in Los Angeles.” Which is true, in the way a lot of things are true. “I haven’t known anyone there since I was eighteen.”

There’s a pause on the line, and it’s the pause that gets me. Jax doesn’t do those either.

“She says your father’s sick.”

The jacket stays where it is, half off the hook.

Seventeen years, and the man still has the ability to make me stop. I stand there in an office with my name on the door—the name I chose, the one that isn’t his—and let a sentence from six thousand miles away take the floor out from under me.

“How sick,” I say.

“The kind where somebody gets on a plane to find a man who doesn’t exist.”

There’s a version of this where I hang up. I’ve had that version drafted since I was eighteen: he made his choice, I made mine, and the accounting closed a long time ago. I’ve rehearsed it in the shower. I’ve rehearsed it at three in the morning more times than I’ll admit to anyone, including Jax, who knows anyway.

What I haven’t rehearsed is the other thing. The one that arrives underneath it, quiet and unwelcome, in a voice that sounds like I’m nine years old.

If you don’t go, that’s the end of it.

“Logan,” Jax says. “You still there?”

“How long have you known?”

“Six hours.” A beat. “I’d have sat on it longer if I thought that’d help. It wouldn’t.”

I look at the window. My reflection looks back—a thirty-five-year-old man in a suit and tie who built a life out of ashes. Blake Capital manages more money than my father’s firm ever has. I have people who report to people who report to me. None of it does a single thing for me right now.

“I’ll go and look at him,” I say. “That’s all. I look, I say what needs saying, and I come back.”

“Sure,” Jax says, in the tone of a man betting against it.

“Don’t.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Paper shifts on his end. “One thing. Don’t get a hotel.”

“Why not?”

“Because hotels have staff, and staff have phones, and by Tuesday half of LA knows Garth Edwards’s son is in town. If you want to be here without being here, there’s a building I stayed in when I needed somewhere nobody was looking.” He gives me a street I don’t know. “Ask for Wilder. He won’t ask you anything.”

***

The building is exactly where he said it would be but still easy to miss.

No sign. No name over the door, no announcement of what it is or isn’t. Five stories of brick on a quiet block, windows clean, the glass at the entrance throwing warm light onto the pavement. It looks like a place that has deliberately decided not to be interesting.

I stand on the sidewalk with a bag in hand, no return ticket in my pocket, and I think about the fact that I could buy this block. That there’s a house in the hills with my name on a lease inside of two hours if I make one call. That men in my position do not sleep in buildings like this.

Then I think about a phone in a valet’s pocket and my stepmother’s name on a caller ID, and I go in.

The lobby is small and swept. Mailboxes, a laundry room, an office door standing open. The man behind it doesn’t look up when I come in, which I appreciate more than I expect to.

“Blake,” I say.

He looks up then. He’s younger than I thought and built like someone who's done real work with his hands. There’s something in the way he takes me in—the suit, the shoes, the watch—that isn’t impressed and isn’t judging either. Just filing things away.

“Fourth floor,” he says. “End of the hall.”

He puts a key on the edge of the desk. One key, no fob, no paperwork, no card machine. I wait for the rest of it. The rest of it doesn’t come.