Page 67 of The Drifter

She set her coffee down.

"Is this about Byron?” I asked.

The name went across the room like a dropped glass. I watched her go still with it.

Because I knew about Byron. Of course, I knew about Byron. She'd told me herself, a while back, sitting on this same sofa with a bottle of wine gone half-warm between us—that the father the Danes had buried, the ghost at the center of all that money and all those brothers, had turned up alive. That he hadn't been dead at all.

She'd told me because it had knocked the earth out from under her marriage for a while, and she'd needed somebody who wasn't a Dane to say it to. I was the somebody, the way I'm always the somebody. I'd held it. I'd never once repeated it.

"You know I know," I said. "You told me yourself."

"I told you he was alive." Her voice had gone careful again, and this time she didn't fight it, because we were past the part where she could. "That's what I told you. That's all I told you."

"And there's more."

"There's more."

"Is he the reason?” I watched her face. "Whatever's got all of you this week. Him?”

And then Isabel Harper Dane did a thing I had not seen her do in all the years I've loved her. She stopped managing me.

"You're right," she said. "I do know things. And I'm not going to be able to tell you all of them today. I need you to hear the reason, because the reason is not the one you think." She leaned in. "It's not that I don't trust you. My God, Sasha. You're the most trustworthy person I have ever known in my life. It's that some of what I know is the kind of thing that's dangerous to carry. Not old-secret dangerous. Now dangerous. This-week dangerous. And you've been carrying the heavy things for years already, and nobody ever asked you if you wanted to. I’ve known that, and I’ve let it happen, because it was convenient, and because you were so good about it."

The room went quiet.

There it was. Out loud. The exact shape of the thing I'd been swallowing for years, said back to me by the one person who'd been on the other side of it. It landed so square that I couldn't breathe for a second.

"You knew?” I asked.

"I knew."

"You knew, and you let me⁠—"

"I let you. Yeah." She didn't flinch from it. "I told myself you didn't mind. I told myself it was just Sasha being Sasha, so good at the desk, so steady, handles everything. And it was easier to believe that than to look at what I was actually asking of you. Which was that you scrub things. Cover things. Lie to people with badges and never once ask me why." Her eyes were wet now, and she let them be. "I put that on you and I never said thank you like I meant it, because if I'd said it like I meant it, I'd have had to admit what it was."

I had spent a long time waiting to be angry about this. Now that it was here, laid out between us, I couldn't find the anger anywhere.

What I found instead was worse. It was grief, and it was old, and it had two names on it.

"My mother did it, too," I said.

Izzy went still.

"For decades. She scrubbed and she covered and she used the back stairs and she never let them see her. She was so good about it, and nobody ever asked her if she minded either. And I stood there and watched her do it my whole childhood and I swore—" my voice broke and I let it break, "—I swore I was going to be the one who got out from behind the counter. And instead, I moved twenty feet down it and I'm still scrubbing folios in the dark, except now I do it in heels and I own a condo, and I called it a promotion."

Izzy came down the sofa and got hold of my hands.

"Sasha."

"I'm not crying."

"You can cry. God, you can cry. I have never once seen you do it and I have known you⁠—"

"I don't."

"I know you don't." She held on. "That's what I'm saying. You don't. In all these years. And I never asked myself why the strongest woman I know can't let one single thing spill in front of another person. I think I know why now, and it's breaking my heart, because I think somebody taught you that being seen needing something is how you lose the room."

I looked at her.