Page 8 of My Girl to Take

Probable match. Not evidentiary. No accreditation record for the individual. No further avenue.

Closed.

I sit on the floor of the study with the folders in my lap for a long time. Eleven years on my mother. Fourteen months on his son, and then a photograph he wasn’t supposed to be in.

***

I know the name in the caption, obviously. Everyone does.

I also know it in a different way. Corbin Industries came across my desk eighteen months ago as a possible co-investor, and I read forty pages on the family before we passed on it.

What I don’t know is whether the man at the edge of the frame is a thirty-five-year-old version of a boy I knew when I was seven. A photograph taken at an angle, from behind glass.

I look at it for four days.

Then I find out that Jaxon Corbin keeps a shop in Culver City where his car lives between races. I put on the outfit I wear to tell people things they don’t want to hear, and I drive there on a Saturday with a nine-page folder on the passenger seat.

There’s a man leaning against a workbench with a headset around his neck, and he isn’t what I expected. He goes very still when I say the name.

“I’m looking for Logan Edwards.”

He takes the headset off. Doesn’t hurry about it.

“Don’t know him.”

“I think you do.” My hands stay where he can see them, which I don’t decide to do so much as notice afterward. “I don’t have a photograph of him. I have a photograph of you, and a man behind your left shoulder in Estoril six years ago that a computer thinks is him with sixty-one percent confidence. That’s what I’ve got.”

Something moves behind his eyes and is gone. “Who are you?”

“Kiera Durham. My mother married his father.”

“Then you know his father threw him out.”

“I was eight and standing in the hall.” I hold his eyes. “I’m not here for money. I don’t want anything from him. I’m not going to tell anyone where he is, including my mother, especially my mother.”

“People turn up,” he says. “Every few years, somebody turns up. His stepmother’s had two goes at it.”

Of course she has.

“I’m aware of what she is,” I say. “I can’t prove I’m not like her. All I can give you is a name and a phone number. You can put both in the trash, and then in a few months, a man who’s spent seventeen years being angry at his father will find out he missed the end of it by a month.”

His jaw works.

“He’ll be angry,” he says, and it isn’t a warning so much as a question.

“Then he’ll be angry,” I say. “But he’ll know. That’s the part I care about.”

I leave my number on the back of a parts invoice. He doesn’t say he’ll call.

Nine days later, my stepfather’s phone rings.

***

He arrives on a Thursday, and I’m ready for all of it except the actual size of him in the doorway.

I have had eleven days to prepare. I have prepared. I told myself that the boy who walked out of this house when I was eight owes me precisely nothing, that he will not remember me, that the last thing he saw of my family was my mother dismantling his. Whatever he decides to feel about me is his business and not a thing I get a vote in.

Then I open the door, and he’s standing there in a suit with the jacket still buttoned, black hair, blue eyes that come to mine and stay. My whole body forgets its instructions.