Page 53 of Rogue’s Mark

She scrunches her brow. “What are you talking about?” she asks impatiently.

"Vi. I can't tell you it's him. I looked, and I can't. I don't know him the way you know him. But somebody wanted us to have this, and they wanted you specifically to be the one to see it." I keep my voice low and even, the way you talk to someone standing on a ledge, because that's pretty much what this is. "Whatever's in there, only you can say. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."

“What? How?” She clicks her tongue as if I’m messing with her, which she has every right to. The woman’s been looking for her dad for so long, now it feels like every lead is just a tease.

Regardless, her hands close around the envelope. They're steady because she won't let them be anything else. That's pure Vi, but the rest of her has gone somewhere far away. She looks down at it. At the blank front, the unsealed flap. At the thing she stopped letting herself hope for so long ago that hoping again might just kill her.

She opens it, slides the photograph out, and looks at it. For one long second, nothing happens at all.

Then it does.

I watch it cross her face, the disbelief first, then the thing underneath the disbelief, the thing she's been holding down with both hands since the word is fell out of Fischer's mouth and broke her open in that room. Her lips part. The color goes out of her cheeks and then floods back all at once. Her eyes fill but don't spill, like even now, even here, some stubborn piece of her refuses to let go in front of me.

She presses one hand flat against her mouth.

And she keeps looking at the photo like if she blinks, the man in the chair might decide to disappear.

31

VI

There's a photograph in my hands and my father is in it.

That's all.

I can’t think, I can’t feel, and I sure can’t fucking breathe.

I also can't make it mean anything no matter how many times I try. My father is dead. I buried that. I built a life on top of where I buried it, the way you pour a foundation over the ground you’re done digging. And now, there's a photograph in my hands and the ground is moving under my flimsy little foundation, and I don’t know what the fuck to do.

It's him.

It is him?

Yeah, it’s him.

I can't say how I know it's him. Not yet, not in a way I can point to. The recognition comes faster than that, and dumber than that, like when you know something in your bones before your brain does. It’s the way you'd know your own father's walk in the dark, or pick him out of a crowd from behind by nothing but the set of his shoulders or his voice.

And there he is. Thinner than I remember. Grayer. But it’s fucking him. It’s my father in a chair against a blank wall, staring down the barrel of the camera like he's daring it to blink first.

Dad’s alive.

He’s older than the last time I saw him, no big surprise there. That's the part that reaches in and twists my heart. Not that he's alive, since I can't even really comprehend that yet. It's the small, cruel math underneath it. Dad got older. Time kept passing all the while I was trying to figure out what happened to him. And I wasn't there for one single day of it.

And of all the insane things swirling in my brain right now, I think about the Saturday market on Clement Street. The one that got smaller every week until it was just the kettle corn guy. Dad used to walk me through it when I was small, back when it was loud and crowded and alive, and he knew every vendor by name. He was the one who later, as mayor, stood up in front of the city and said this is happening, we are losing our home one stall at a time, it’s time to do something.

Of course, nobody did. They scrubbed him out instead. And here he is in a chair against a blank wall, looking like a man who is still, even now, trying, because that's the only way he ever knew how to exist.

Something is trying to come up out of me, and I shove it back down so hard my teeth grind.

Not here.

Rogue's still crouched in front of me, watching and careful, the way you watch something that might explode and take your fingers with it. He hasn't said anything since he gave me the envelope, and I love him a little for that, for not filling the empty air.

I can also feel the weight of the three guys like a pressure change before a storm. Rogue’s right here, and Armen and Sting are probably somewhere close by, because of course Rogue would've told them, of course this is already a thing the men know about.

And here's the stupid, prideful truth I'd never say out loud: I will not come apart in front of them. Nope. Not gonna do it. A few short months ago, I was a Runt who didn’t know how I’d survive. I have spent every day since learning how to keep my face shut in this place, and I am not going to hand them the sight of me dissolving over a piece of glossy paper.

So I do the thing the Rot taught me. I go still.