Page 62 of Rogue’s Mark

"Nothing was done to me. Those six weeks were the plan," he says. "The day I decided to disappear, I stopped writing anything down. Every hour I'd been putting into the case went into building the way out instead. A man who's about to vanish doesn't keep a diary of it."

Six weeks of silence from a man who documented everything. It was never a mystery. It was the escape, happening out of sight.

He holds my eyes. "I let them believe I broke. That the pressure won and I ran or worse. I let the whole city believe it. Because a dead, discredited man they've stopped watching can keep working like I did. On the other hand, a man still fighting in the open is just a target with a clock on him."

"Okay," I manage. My voice comes out wrong. "Okay. I understand that part."

I do understand it. That's the terrible thing. It's smart. It's so him.

"But," I say, and stop, because my throat has closed, and I have to force the rest of it out around the pain lodged here. "But you let me think you were dead."

He doesn't look away. I'll give him that. He takes it right in the face.

"Yes," he says.

"For years."

"Yes."

"Dad." The word breaks. "I buried you. Not in the ground, because there was nothing to bury, but I buried you anyway. I made myself stop waiting for the phone to ring. I taught myself how to live with a hole where you used to be. Do you have any idea what that—" I stop. Start again. "I lost everything after you were gone. Everything. And the whole time you were—" I can't even finish it. I gesture at the room, the cot, the hot plate, the years of him alive and breathing and choosing, every single day, not to tell me.

"I know," he says quietly.

"Then why."

And this is the part I've been bracing for since the second I sat down, the answer I both need and don't think I can survive.

"Because they would have used you," he says. "Vi. Listen to me. The day they found out I was alive would be the day they came looking for the fastest way to make me stop. And the fastest way to make a man like me stop is not to threaten him. It's to threaten his daughter." His hands tighten on the table. "A grieving girl with a dead father is no use to anyone. There's nothing to pull. But a girl whose father is alive and hiding? That girl is a hostage waiting to happen. That girl is leverage. And the only way, the only goddamn way I could keep you out of their hands was to make sure you didn't know there was anything to give up."

He let me grieve him to keep me safe. He weaponized my own broken heart, turned my grief into a wall he hid behind. It’s both the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me and the most loving, the exact same act at the exact same time.

I am out of my chair before I know I've moved.

Well, not exactly. My body has come up off the seat halfway, and every muscle is screaming at me to get up, to get out, to walk out of this room and this building and not stop walking because the fury in me might eat me alive.

But I don't go anywhere.

I grip the edges of my chair and I lower myself back down, slow and shaking, because I have waited years for the chance to sit in this room, and I am not going to throw it away just because the truth hurts.

That's it, right there. Not the searching, not the fighting, but this. Sitting in a chair across from my father, who at the moment I both love and hate, and choosing to stick around and hear the rest of what he has to say.

"I'm angry," I tell him in a shaking voice. "I need you to know that. I'm not going to pretend I'm not. You can’t explain your way out of what those years did to me."

"I'm not trying to," he says.

"Okay.”

"I'd do it again," he says, and the gentleness in it guts me. "Every day of it. To keep you breathing, I'd do all of it again. That's not me asking you to forgive it. It's just the truth."

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Behind them, the tears I've been fighting finally win.

But I stay in the chair.

I stay.

39

VI