“Good,” Danny said, looping his arm around Josh’s shoulders.“So if you trust me, you need to tell me the truth, okay?”
“I always do,” Josh said, and now the tears started to slip from between his squeezed-shut eyelids, and he wished for Liam, who would tell him not to cry.
“Good,” Danny said again.“So, my boy, my son, the child of my heart, the precious human who kept me sane, who made me want to clean the fuck up and get sober and keep being a parent and who dragged me back to a life I love beyond measure, you need to tell me, on a scale of one to one hundred, how viciously angry at me are you?”
Josh gasped, feeling as though he’d been struck.“I’m not—”
Danny shook his head and kissed Josh’s temple.“Sure you are.I left.I know what it’s like to have damage, son.My father was killed when I was four years old during a shooting at a convenience store, and my real mother died of cancer when I was nine.I wasfuriouswith them for a lot of years, and they were not nearly as culpable as I was for leaving you.”
“You had to….”Josh whispered, shocked by Danny’s revelations, things Josh had not known.
“I did,” Danny agreed.“I had to leave.But you are not obligated to forgive me for it.”
And that stung.“Of course I do.”
“Oh bullshit,” Danny said sadly.“Goddammit, Josh, this drive you have to be the king shit of grifters, to be the mastermind, to make this crew yours and damn your own health for doing it—”
“Kadjic isthreateningourfamily—”
“Then let me die fighting him!”Danny shouted, surprising Josh enough to pull out from under his arm.
In his entire life he’d never heard Danny yell.
“Danny,” he whispered, more surprised than frightened.
But Danny was wiping his own tears with hands that shook.Josh thought that for once Danny looked like a man in his early forties, instead of ageless like Peter Pan.Josh could see the gray hairs that threaded through the rich brown and the fine lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth.Not a lot.But enough.Josh’s Uncle Danny hadn’t lived an easy life, no matter how light he made of the things that had hurt him.
A lifetime of telling people you’d been a helpless falling-down drunk for a number of years didn’t lessen by one iota the strain of living through those years in real time, although they could make the present easier in the telling.
“Your drive,” Danny said bitterly.“Your amazing, prodigious drive.Josh, I get it.I left, and you felt like whatever parenting I’d given you, you had to take it over yourself.And all I’d had to give you back then had been the game.You could pick a pocket at four.You could run a con at seven.You once brought us the diamond collar of a spoiled schnauzer when you were eight years old.You’d even assessed the karats.And we were so proud of you, son—but we would have been as proud of you if you’d been playing chess.Dancing.”He emitted a broken laugh.“God, are we proud of the way you dance.Acting.Howverysmart you are.And… and I think the thing I’m proudest of is how you’ve gathered these people together—these separate, different people—and you haven’t merely secured their loyalty and love toyou, but your loyalty and love toeach other.”
“But Danny,” Josh whispered, “youdid that.”
Danny laughed bitterly.“No, son.I arrived to help your father, remember?And you took me to pizza.And pizza led me to Stirling, Molly, Chuck, and Hunter.And that led us to a dozen people in that hallway who will cry tears of joy right now, because you are okay.”
“Both of us,” Josh said, feeling like he had to be clear.“That was both of us.”Danny had brought Carl, Tienne, and Liam.Chuck had brought Lucius as a lover and Michael as a friend.Felix had brought Tor, who brought Marco.
Danny gave a faint smile.“You’re trying to do math with a family the size of a hurricane, son.Don’t bother.What matters is we are all swept away together.And they all love you.And for that I am proud.But you can’t let my pride get in the way of what you feel.”
Josh let out a sigh and tried to fight it, but now that Danny had said the words, it was all so very clear.
His eyes hadn’t stopped leaking, but now his voice broke, and he shook from his hands to his heart.“How could you?”he mewled, falling apart at all the seams, destroyed from the inside out by the thing thathaddriven him, from his earliest memories to his adulthood.The thing he couldn’t admit, because he knew it wasn’t fair.
But fairness didn’t matter now.
“I loved you so much,” he rasped.“All I wanted was to be you.And youleft me!”That last came out as a howl, one buried in his chest since he was ten years old, and he wanted to rage about the room and throw things.He wanted to—oh God, he wanted tohitthis man who had only done his best by Josh, and Josh had never suffered.
But he had.The hurt… the hurt….
“You left me!”
All he had the strength for was to sob, and like he had for Josh’s entire life, whether by his bedside or three thousand miles away, Danny held him.Took his pain and anger and turned it into love so Josh could sob and rage and sob some more.
HE WOKEup on a soft bed in a small, quaint bedroom with Moroccan tapestries on the walls and floor and satin drapes in blue and gold across the windows, with white silk flowing underneath.
There were shelves and shelves of books surrounding the room, making it smaller but, Josh thought sadly, also making it like the Tardis.A magic place that was bigger inside than it was out.
Danny’s apartment.It must have been.
