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Max nods, keeping his eyes on his coffee. “Afterward, I started looking into him. Then I started looking into other men like him. Most of the time I didn’t do anything with what I found because I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do with it.”

“Until you found me.”

“That wasn’t what I was looking for.” He finally raises his head. “I came across some of your searches while you were digging into your first guy. At first, I thought you might be connected to him, so I kept watching. It didn’t take long to figure out you were trying to expose him.”

I remember the first message Zee ever sent me. He included enough information about me to scare the shit out of me, then followed it with a list of everything I was doing wrong and exactly how easy I was making it for someone else to find me. For almost two years after Joey died, I went to the meetings and listened. I heard the names, heard what these men had done, and went home angry because none of it ever seemed to change. Then I heard about the first man I couldn’t just walk away from.

“You could trace me.”

“Anyone good enough could have. That was the problem.” Max rubs his thumb along the side of his mug. “I kept thinking about all the things I missed with my sister and how useless I felt after she was gone. Then I was sitting there watching you go after someone just like him while leaving a fucking trail behind you.”

“So you helped me.”

“I showed you how not to get caught. You did the rest.”

For three years, Zee has never asked me for money or wanted credit for anything we’ve done. He found information when I needed it, told me when I was being reckless and occasionally refused to help until I agreed to stop doing something particularly stupid. I always wondered why some anonymous stranger cared enough to keep coming back, but eventually I stopped asking.

I look at Max across the coffee table. “You never told me she was your sister.”

“No. I don’t talk about her much.”

There’s enough in the way he says it that I don’t ask for anything else. He knows what happened to Joey because I chose to tell him, and I’m not going to turn what he just gave me into permission to dig through the rest. I pick up my coffee again, giving both of us somewhere else to look for a minute.

I take a drink of coffee and work through everything else. “Once you realized I was going to keep doing this, helping online wasn’t enough anymore.”

“You were already looking for your next target. I could protect you online, but that didn’t stop you from following people or putting yourself in situations where no one knew where you were. Meeting you gave me a way to check on you without telling you who I was.”

“And inviting me to the studio made sure you kept seeing me.”

“That was the reason in the beginning. After we became friends, I didn’t need an excuse anymore.”

Now I’m wondering how many conversations he sat through twice.

“I’ve complained to Max about something and then messaged Zee later and told you the same damn story, haven’t I?”

“Several times. Usually the second version was shorter, so I never complained.”

I laugh, then regret it when my side pulls. I press my hand against the healing incision until it eases. Max watches me but doesn’t get up, which is one reason I like being around him. He can tell the difference between me being uncomfortable and me actually needing help.

“You still should’ve told me once we became friends.”

“I probably should have. By then, keeping Zee separate had become normal, and there was no reason to connect my real identity to what we were doing. The longer it went on, the harder it became to tell you without also explaining why I’d waited so long.”

Max wasn’t pretending to be someone else with me. Zee was the person who helped with the research and protected what I was doing online. Max was my best friend. Apparently, I was just too oblivious to notice they were the same man.

Thinking about Zee and Max as the same person brings me back to something else I noticed while we were looking for Alina. Ronan went from barely tolerating Zee having access to anything involving his family to working with him without questioning every piece of information he handed over.

“Ronan figured you out, didn’t he?”

Max smiles. “Before the gala.”

“Of course he fucking did.”

“He’d been trying for a while. Working together gave him enough to finally connect me to Zee, and the first thing he did was send me a list of the mistakes that led him there.”

I shake my head. “That sounds like Ronan.”

“He was very pleased with himself.”