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King didn’t argue with me. He handed the keys over, and within ten minutes, we were sitting in a dive bar in a part of Seattle I wasn’t familiar with but that certainly didn’t cater to the tourist business. I ordered us a couple of beers and joined King in one of the few booths available in the place.
When King didn’t say anything, I said, “So you left me in there to do some kind of recon on your nephew?”
“Yeah, I suppose I did.” King took a long pull on his beer and then added, “He’s not Christopher anymore. Hasn’t been in a long time.”
“You said he went to nursing school, right?”
King nodded. “One of the best. Duke. It had an accelerated BSN program. He stayed here for his undergrad, then went to Duke and got his BSN in just sixteen months. The plan was for him to do the nurse practitioner program through Duke via distance learning, which meant he’d only have to spend a week in North Carolina every semester, and the rest he’d do from home.”
“What changed?” I asked.
King shrugged. “None of us can fucking figure it out. He’s just not… our Christopher.” King took another drink. “He had all these plans, Rush. He knew what he wanted from the time he was a kid, and he was doing it. Nursing, Duke, all of it. But something had been different about him for a while. He stopped interacting with the family as much, especially after he left Seattle. But when he got back a few months ago, he was… a stranger.”
I couldn’t help but agree that the title was a fitting one.
“How so?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t come to family functions, wouldn’t even talk to Micah or Con. They called, they stopped by his house which he’d bought on his own without even telling anyone. And he never enrolled in the nurse practitioner program. He works remotely for an insurance company processing claims. He has all his groceries delivered, he never invites anyone to stay if they come for a visit. Hell, he’s remodeling the place and hasn’t asked for help. And those books…”
“The romances?” I clarified.
King nodded. “He loved those books. He’s probably got thousands more on his Kindle. The ones we took over are the ones he read when he was real young… He’d get them from thrift shops for pennies on the dollar using coins he found lying around the house or on the street. Even though he could have gotten them on his Kindle once he was older, he still hung on to those paperbacks.”
“They meant something to him,” I observed.
“Yeah,” King murmured. “Con and Micah had been storing them while Christopher was gone, but when they brought them over here along with Christopher’s other stuff, he told them to throw them away. Gio and I took them instead because we both knew how much he loved those books.”
“Tough love,” I murmured as I remembered that had been King’s plan when we’d taken the books over. “That turned out to not be so tough.”
King didn’t respond, and I hadn’t expected him to. My friend was a cold-blooded, chillingly dangerous man when it came to dealing with murderers, rapists, and sex traffickers, but around his family, he was totally different. He was the man who’d pleaded with Christopher to talk to him tonight.
“I shouldn’t have blindsided you like that, Rush,” King said with a sigh. “But when I saw a little bit of the old Christopher, I just thought…”
“I saw it too, King,” I said. “The old and the new. Your Christopher is still in there.” I was reluctant to say any more since I felt like what had transpired between myself and his nephew was private and needed to stay between us.
“This is going to kill Gio,” King whispered.
“Christopher and Gio don’t talk?” I asked. “They’ve been best friends for years, haven’t they?”
“They talk… but it’s not real. It’s Gio talking through the walls Christopher had put up, so the only things that get through are the simple, polite crap. ‘How are you? Can you believe all this rain? Fettucine is good.’”
Fettucine was Gio and King’s mastiff. If the conversations between the two friends had come down to discussing the dog’s antics, then yeah, something was really fucked-up between them.
“Did all of this start after that night in the club?” I asked.
King nodded. “But it was still the old Christopher then. He was just… just quieter if that makes sense.”
I dipped my head because it made perfect sense. The reality was that they wouldn’t have been in that club if Gio hadn’t gone looking for King. I had no doubt Gio blamed himself as did King. It also wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to know that Christopher carried just as much guilt.
“We tried to get Christopher to talk to a professional about it, especially after what happened to him when he was a kid, but he kept saying he was fine.”
I shook my head. There was no way the young man could be fine after not one, but two violent assaults that had barely been stopped in time. Just because he’d escaped being penetrated hadn’t meant he didn’t carry the scars of those attacks day in and day out.
“He was legally an adult,” I responded. “There was nothing else you could have done.”
King’s eyes shifted briefly to mine.
I nodded and said, “Yeah, I know, it’s a bullshit line that doesn’t make anyone feel better.”
