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“Come with me,” he says.
Then he stands up and steers me down a dark hallway, past the restrooms and the electrical closet, to the kitchen.
Charlie pulls me into the kitchen, the door swinging closed behind us.
“Do you know how many cops have come in here tonight? They’re not asking me anything yet, but they’re coming in so I can see them. So I’ll know they’re here. They’re all over the place.”
“I don’t think they’re cops,” I say. “I think they’re U.S. marshals.”
“Do you think this is funny?” he says.
“None of it,” I say.
Then I meet his eyes.
“You had to tell him we were here, Charlie,” I say. “He’s your father. She’s your niece. You’ve both been looking for her since the day he took her away. You couldn’t keep that to yourself, even if you wanted to.”
Charlie pushes open the emergency door, which leads to a back staircase and the alley below.
“You need to leave,” he says.
“I can’t do that,” I say.
“Why not?”
I shrug. “I have nowhere else to go.”
It’s true. In a way I’m uncomfortable acknowledging to myself—let alone to him—Charlie is the only shot I have left to make this okay again.
Maybe he senses that because he pauses, and I see him falter in his resolve. He lets the emergency door close.
“I need to talk to your father,” I say. “And I’m asking my husband’s friend to help make that happen.”
“I’m not his friend.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “I had my friend Jules find Ethan’s will for me.” Ethan, using that name. “His real will. And he put you in it. He put you in it as a guardian for Bailey, along with me. He wanted her to have you if anything ever happened to him. He wanted her to have me and he wanted her to have you.”
He nods slowly, taking this in, and for a second I think he is going to start crying. His eyes water, his hands move to his forehead, pulling on his eyebrows, as if trying to stop the tears. These tears of relief that there is a window open to his seeing his niece again—and tears of utter sadness that seeing her for the last decade has been an impossibility.
“And what about my father?” he says.
“I don’t think he wants her to have anything to do with Nicholas,” I say. “But the fact that Ethan put you in there lets me know that my husband trusted you, even if you seem pretty conflicted about that.”
He shakes his head, like he can’t believe this is his reality. It’s a feeling I can relate to.
“This is an old battle,” he says. “And Ethan isn’t innocent. You think he is. But you don’t know the whole story.”
“I know I don’t.”
“So what do you think? That you’re going to talk to my father and broker some peace between him and Ethan? It doesn’t matter, nothing you say matters. Ethan betrayed my father. He destroyed his life and ended my mother’s life in the process. And if there’s nothing I can do to mend this, then there’s nothing you can do either.”
Charlie is struggling. I see it. I see him struggling with what to tell me about his father, what to tell me about Owen. If he offers up too little, I won’t walk away from him. Maybe I won’t walk away if he says too much either. And he wants me to walk away. He thinks it’s better for everybody if I do. But I am playing past that. Because I know there is only one way to make things better now.
“How long have you been married to him?” he says. “To Ethan?”
“Why does that matter?”
“He’s not who you think he is.”
