Page 151 of Boardroom Mask

I’m not sure where the hours go. I wander around the city, dipping in and out of parks and bars, numb, wasted, wild, lost. I go home and see the blank cleanliness of my apartment. The maid must have come back and finished her job after I interrupted her.

I turn around and walk right back out again.

The sun sets, then rises, then sets again. Just like that, a day has passed. Day 1 of this new chapter of my life. The wandering continues. I look up at some point in the half-dark and see where my feet have taken me.

I’m not fully surprised to find out the answer. I’m at the Astoria site where my mother was buried. It’s nothing more than a vacant lot on an unremarkable corner, fenced off with chain-link fences and orange construction netting.

Beyond the fence, there’s nothing. A gaping hole lined with mud.

This is where they found her.

I duck under the tape and step onto the lot. I walk to the center, near the edge of the dig, and look down at the rectangle of disturbed earth where my mother’s bones lay for eighteen years.

There used to be a record store here. That’s what she told me once, when I was seven or eight and we were looking at old photos. She pointed to a faded Polaroid of a storefront with a red awning and said,That’s where I met your father.I tripped while I was dancing and I fell into his arms. Can you believe that?

She chose this spot. She made my father promise to bring her here, to the place where it all started.

I sit down in the dirt. The shame is total. Not for anything I did to Lukas, though. That hatred was built on a lie, and I’ll deal with it eventually, maybe, somehow.

The shame is for Jillian.

How could I have said those things to her? I told her she disgusted me. I called her a bad mother. I looked at a woman who survived something unspeakable at nineteen, who carried a child she didn’t choose, who loved that child enough to give her a better life than she could provide, and I called itabandonment.

Now, I understand that my mother left her child to protect him.

Jillian did thesame fucking thing.

I press my palms into the cold dirt and do my best to breathe, but this graveyard-scented mud doesn’t do anything to fill my lungs. I feel miserable. This pit is starting to look like a good place to throw myself and stay forever.

How can I fix this? That’s all I can think about, and I have nothing close to a good answer.

I have to fix it. I know that much. There’s no version of my life going forward that doesn’t include trying. I don’t care if it takes weeks or months or years, or if she slams every door and window in my face. I don’t care if she moves to another city, another country, another fucking continent. I will find her, I will get on my knees, and I will tell her that I was wrong. I was cruel, small, and scared, and I lashed out at the one person who didn’t deserve it because she was the closest thing within reach.

She trusted me with the worst parts of herself. I used them to hurt her. That’s exactly the man I swore I’d never become.

I have to be better.

I have to earn her back.

How, though?

How?

How?!

Footsteps ring out from behind me. I know who they belong to.

“For eighteen fucking years, you let me believe you were a killer,” I say without looking up from the empty pit.

My father stops a few feet behind me. I hear him exhale through his nose. “Yes.”

Silence. Whipping wind. Car engines. Pigeon coos.

“I’ve hated you for so long,” I whisper, still not tearing my eyes away from the blackness at the bottom. “It’s the only thing that made sense. And now, you’re telling me it was all… nothing.”

“No, not nothing.” He sits next to me. “Your mother is gone, son. She’s been gone for eighteen years. But I’m still here. And whether you want me or not, whether you hate me or not, I am your father. I’m not going anywhere.”

I let those words sit for a while.I’m not going anywhere.I’m not surprised. Lukas is like a mountain. An immovable object and an irresistible force all in one.