Page 137 of The Session

Mark realized this was their first conversation about his mother. He could sense the pain in Max’s voice. “I spoke to a friend of Kevin’s. She said he hadn’t been using drugs.”

“Really?” Lightman asked as he returned a throw.

“Yeah. She couldn’t make sense of it either,” Mark told him.

“But they found drugs in his system. We covered it up. Maybe we shouldn’t have,” Lightman said.

“It could have been accidental,” Mark suggested.

“Accidental? How?”

Mark knew it wasn’t, but he needed to tell him something.

“I went on an emergency call where a former addict forgot they kept their pills in the aspirin bottle. They took three instead of one. Almost killed her,” he explained.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Lightman said.

Mark decided not to go against Marnie’s advice but to take a slightly different approach—he knew his acting skills were terrible, but his ability to outright lie was even worse.

“I think everyone was too quick to explain it away. They didn’t stop to ask questions. Like when I talked to Nathan on Eleuthera, he forgot that he’d spoken to Kevin a few days before he died. I guess it was the shock. Or maybe the guilt . . .” Mark watched his father’s reaction.

“Guilt?” Lightman asked.

“Maybe he thought Kevin was depressed and he should have told you. Maybe he felt guilty because he thought he should have seen signs.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t tell me,” Lightman said. “Nathan’s been acting weird lately.”

“I don’t really know him,” Mark replied.

Lightman tossed the ball overhand to Mark. “What do you think of him?”

“Nathan? I’m bad at reading people,” Mark admitted.

“Me too. I bet I’m a bit of a mystery to you,” Lightman said.

“You could say that.”

“Back to Nathan. I really would like your take. I’m curious for an outsider’s point of view.”

Mark tried to control the urge to tell his father everything—but he feared if he did, Lightman would convince himself of a harmless alternative explanation and shut everything down. No, he had to work his pattern. Lightman’s pattern was stories. Not just telling them, but taking them apart and seeing what’s inside.

“Byron, my stepfather, was a really good guy. He always looked out for me. Until he didn’t. I realized that as much as I wanted him to be my dad, I was just my mother’s son to him. A stepson. It killed me to realize that when it came between me and his real family, I would always lose. Some people are like that. They say they’re your friends, but you never really know,” Mark explained.

“If that’s how you feel about Byron, I can’t imagine what you think about me,” Lightman said.

“We have a long road ahead of us. But you and I are here right now, tossing the ball around. He’s not. So there’s that.”

“And Nathan?” Lightman asked.

“I don’t know him. But he reminds me a bit of my stepfather, for what that’s worth.”

Lightman tossed the ball back to Mark. “Marnie doesn’t trust him. She’s tired of me telling her it’s in her head,” he said. “She likes you, though. That’s good.”

“She’s been nice to me,” Mark confirmed.

“That doesn’t surprise me. She and your mother were good friends.”

“Ah,” Mark murmured.