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“Do you have any idea what it would take for Samuel to break not just a rule, but our father’s primary rule? Plot to overthrow me notwithstanding.”
“What do you mean?” Kassidy asked as if reading Arlie’s mind.
“I just mean that there may be hope for him yet.” Mason scratched his jaw, sandpapery with stubble. “This is the first time I can remember him willingly engaging in subterfuge for his own benefit. Except for that time he pretended to be me in order to get you in the closet the night of our graduation. But I don’t know if that technically counts.”
“You knew about that?” Arlie suddenly felt like someone had dialed the office thermostat up by about twenty degrees.
“Please,” Mason said. “You don’t think every pathetic preppie piece of shit in the school came up afterward to congratulate me for scoring seven minutes with Arlie Banks?”
She hadn’t exactly imagined that scenario.
“Of course,” he continued, “when you didn’t say a word about it to me, I suspected that you knew, too.”
“You suspected correctly,” she confirmed.
“The thing I find interesting,” Mason said, turning to face them, “is that both events have something in common. You.”
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information,” Arlie said.
Strolling back toward the desk, Mason seated himself on the corner. “I probably seem like the least likely person to defend Samuel’s actions from the present vantage, but I would point out that having a father like ours can incline one to—” he paused, as if looking for the right words “—less than optimal behaviors.”
Arlie sensed the unspoken depths in that statement.
“Will you do me a favor?” Mason asked.
“What’s that?”
“Take a week and think about it.” He rose from the desk to stand next to her. “We can hold your resignation until you’ve had more time.”
“I appreciate you being willing to do that,” Arlie said. “But after everything that’s happened, I really think it’s best that I go.”
Mason nodded, looking uncharacteristically melancholy. “I understand.”
“Well.” Arlie retrieved her notebook and added it to the box before hefting it onto her hip. “I think that’s it.”
Kassidy picked up her Burberry trench coat and followed her toward the door. “Good seeing you, Kane.”
“Likewise, Kassidy the brain Nichols.”
“For future reference, I would vastly prefer you not call me that.”
Arlie liked to think she knew her best friend’s face at least half as well as Kassidy knew hers, and what she read there was not exactly displeasure at Mason.
“I look forward to the future occasion where I might prove my ability to honor that request.”
They turned to go.
“Arlie?” Mason called when they had almost reached the door.
She looked back at him. “Yes?”
Familiar mischief banished the gloom from his features. “How did you know?”
“How did I know what?” she asked.
“The closet. How did you know it wasn’t me?”
His question spun her backward in their shared past. A flickering montage of her life’s significant moments spooled by her mind’s eye until she arrived at the night in question. Through the vantage of her eighteen-year-old self, she watched Mason exiting through the backdoor only to reappear minutes later at the mouth of the hallway.
One of Mason’s regular posse had come up to him then, clapping him on the shoulder before pressing a red plastic cup of foamy beer into his hand. Which is when he had lifted his left hand and with the tip of his index finger, attempted to push a pair of nonexistent glasses up his nose.
She must have witnessed this precise gesture at least a thousand times.
Mason—the real Mason—had gotten contacts on his thirteenth birthday. Arlie remembered because he had beckoned her over to look at them, insisting she lean in close enough to see if she could detect their ethereal edges.
Of course, he had tried to kiss her when she was close enough.
The present Mason hung there, awaiting her answer.
“Research,” she said, sending him an enigmatic smile.
