Page 126 of The Session

“Mark Greenley. Mind if I sit down?”

“Sure, but we’re not open yet. Best I can do is give you a bottle of water,” she offered.

“That would be great,” Mark said.

She gave him a second look, then reached into a refrigerator and pulled out a plastic bottle.

“Mark Greenley?” she asked.

“Kevin Lightman was my half brother,” Mark answered.

“Oh shit, thank God. I thought I was going crazy or seeing a ghost. I didn’t even know he had a brother.”

“That would make two of us. Or rather, I didn’t know that I had a brother. But yeah. It’s been a recent development,” Mark told her.

Lisbeth put her elbows on the counter, rested her chin in her hands, and leaned in, studying Mark for a moment.

“I don’t want to weird you out. It’s just . . . You just look so much like him,” she murmured.

“I keep hearing that. Were y’all close?”

“You could say that. He would come here all the time. Help me close up. Sweet guy,” she said.

“People tell me that too.”

“So what can I do for you, Mark?”

He wasn’t sure how close she and Kevin had been. Although a few years older than Kevin, not by much, she was very attractive and had a warm personality. Mark didn’t know how to segue into asking if she was his half brother’s drug dealer.

“I know you just met me, and this is gonna sound kind of weird, but I never got to meet Kevin. I heard about how he died, and I had some questions. I kind of feel like I’m not exactly getting a lot of answers.”

“Because they reported it as a drowning while people are whispering that it was a drug overdose,” Lisbeth said.

“Yeah, basically that.”

“Which version do you prefer?”

“The truth,” Mark said.

“People don’t come all the way out here for the truth,” she said wearily. “They come here for whatever comforting lie suits them best.”

“Well, which lie do you prefer?” Mark asked.

“That he drowned. Obviously,” Lisbeth said.

“And do you believe it?”

“I want it to make sense, but it doesn’t.”

“Why is that?”

“He wasn’t going to drown kayaking a hundred feet from his house. That’s just absurd. But then that means I have to accept the overdose story. The problem is he wasn’t using, and he certainly wasn’t going to be using fentanyl.”

“A lot of people keep that to themselves,” Mark said.

She shook her head. “I was his sponsor.”

“And his bartender,” Mark added, thinking of Kevin’s fridge.