by Loretta Lost
“This old woman had a bit too much champagne,” she says sheepishly. “Oh, Cole, you have no idea what a fright you gave me, faking your death like that. And that stubborn husband of mine refused to tell me that you were okay! Damn these lawyers and their attorney-client privilege. That man sure can keep a secret.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I say with a weak smile. “I’m hoping my parents had some secrets they shared with Mr. Bishop before they died.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Bishop says, as a shadowy look touches her face. “Well, he’s right this way, in his home office. He spends more time in there with every passing year, I swear. It seems like he’s never going to retire! I hope you find the answers you’re looking for, Cole. In the meantime, what would you like to eat? I am just about to cook dinner.”
“Anything is fine, Mrs. Bishop.”
“Pasta? Soup? I fear my cooking isn’t as great as it used to be. We can always order in.”
“Surprise me,” I tell the old woman fondly. “I’ll eat anything. I worked up an appetite today, reviewing some files for Miranda. I missed a lot at the office while I was dead. It looks like Levi is still having trouble over in Pakistan.”
“Oh, are you still working? Stop that, my boy. Levi is a resourceful young man, and he will be fine. I raised him to have a thick skin!” Mrs. Bishop pats my arm kindly. “Just retire and live the good life with your young lady. Not everyone gets a way out of the rat race. You should take it.”
“Maybe,” I say hesitantly. “I just don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not working.”
“Understandable. Hard work is good for the soul.”
I send her a sad smile as I knock on Mr. Bishop’s office door.
He gestures for me to come in through the glass sections in the wooden panel, so I turn the handle and enter. “Hello, Mr. Bishop.”
“Cole, Cole, come in and have a seat!”
His office smells faintly of tobacco. I can tell he takes the occasional puff of a cigar in here, and it makes me smile. My father occasionally had a cigar, when I was younger—if I even remember that correctly. The room is decorated with leather and mahogany, the epitome of a masculine office.
I think about what I want to ask him. The engagement ring is still burning a hole in my pocket, and I could really use the fatherly advice. But the smell of tobacco and the memories of my father temporarily override my indecisions and reservations over Scarlett.
Besides, maybe if I can just get this conversation out of the way quickly, we can get back to talking about what really matters. My old friend and lawyer can just tell me I’m crazy, and we can move on.
I can finally move on.
Clearing my throat, I begin quietly. “Mr. Bishop, I think you know why I’m here. The things Benjamin said at the party—”
“Yes, yes,” he says, reaching for his wire-framed glasses to give them a polish. He sighs deeply. “I always imagined that you’d come to me, someday, asking these questions.”
His tone of voice sends a shiver through my spine. He’s not going to dismiss my concerns, is he? He has something to tell me. Oh, god. How bad is it?
“I must admit I hoped you would never ask,” he admits, adjusting his glasses on his nose. He stares at me briefly before beginning to organize papers on his desk. “I really, really hoped that.”
“Mr. Bishop,” I say slowly. “Do you know…”
“Yes, yes. Of course. But it won’t be easy for me to tell you the truth, young man.”
“So,” I say slowly. “The fire—my parents—it wasn’t an accident?”
“No, my boy. They were killed.”
I suck in a breath. It hits me right in the center of my sternum, harder than a bullet. I would know. It knocks the wind out of me, as countless emotions and horrible ideas begin jumbling together in my brain. I force myself to breathe so that I can speak. “Who did it? Why?” My words are strained. I try to speak more clearly. “Why, Mr. Bishop? Who the fuck would…” My voice breaks. “What did my parents ever do to deserve that?”
Mr. Bishop shakes his head. “They did something stupid, Cole. Very stupid. And they did it to the wrong person.”
“What do you mean?” I demand hoarsely. I find myself leaning forward, and my whole body is so tensed up that my injuries are beginning to ache. I feel like all my bullet holes are fresh, and my lungs are scraped raw again. Everything hurts. I feel like Mr. Bishop is talking very slowly, and I want to grab his frail body and squeeze him to make the words come out faster. I swallow to repress this violence.
He hesitates. “It was the right thing to do—what they did. But they knew it meant signing their death warrant, and they were brave enough to try anyway.”
Dread is coursing through my veins, and causing the hairs to stand up on my skin. Everything I’ve known has been a lie.
Benjamin said my whole family was wiped out systematically. I can’t imagine what happened to them—to my aunts, and uncles, and grandparents. My whole family. Why was I left alive? Am I still in danger?
“Please,” I say to him quietly. “Tell me everything. Tell me why they were killed.”
Mr. Bishop picks up a slender black pen and strums it against a pile of papers as he stares at me. Finally, he rises to his feet. “Cole, I have something for you. Some information. Some photographs. But before I show them to you, I need you to promise me that that you will never act on this information.”
My eyebrows tighten so much that I think my forehead will remain permanently creased. My vision doubles with rage as I stare at the old man. And I’m not even sure what I’m angry about yet.
Think about Scarlett, I tell myself inwardly, to try to calm down. I reach into my pocket for the ring box. The past doesn’t matter. The future is all that matters. We’ve both been through hell. But it will all be over soon, no matter what Mr. Bishop tells me. But how would Benjamin know?
I swallow back a lump of fear.
“What can I do now?” I demand. “It happened decades ago. It’s ancient history. Just show me whatever it is, please. Tell me what you know—you owe me that, after lying to me for all these years.”
“Promise me first,” Mr. Bishop says. “You will take zero action based on this information.”
My hands twitch. I nod slowly. I breathe. “Okay.”
Mr. Bishop moves over to the wall of his office. He reaches out to grasp a book, but his fingers hesitate. “Cole, I don’t want to startle you. These are terrible secrets that should never be spoken. These are terrible things that should have never happened. Please understand, that I only wanted to protect you. I only wanted…”
Trailing off, he pauses briefly to remove his glasses and clean them. “I’m sorry, my boy. I must apologize in advance for everything you’re about to learn. But I was just an onlooker—I could not have prevented anything if I tried. I would have been killed, too.”
I try to remain calm, but my blood is boiling. There is a thin film of sweat coating my shoulders. Mr. Bishop has never been this cryptic.
When he takes hold of the book and pulls it down, the wall makes an odd mechanical sound, and the entire bookcase slides open.
“Are you kidding me?” I say in amazement.
Mr. Bishop sighs. “I thought it would never come to this.”
I am already standing up to examine the secret vault. It’s a little ridiculous, a little ominous, but mostly very cool. I’ve been in this house a thousand times, and I’ve never been able to tell there was a secret room hidden back there. The architect in me temporarily takes over, impressed by the construction of this old house. And then I remember what we’ve been discussing. I swallow, turning back to the old man.
“I’m so sorry, my boy,” he says sadly. “I hoped these secrets would stay buried for as long as you lived. But I was wrong. I should have told you a lot sooner, and maybe it would have kept you safe.”
“Told me what?” I ask, gazing into the hidden room.
“The truth about who you are,
” he answers.
“Who the fuck am I?” I demand, feeling myself snap. I feel crazy. I feel totally driven mad. “Am I Harry Potter? Because I would have loved to go to Hogwarts instead of MIT, if you’d told me this sooner.”
“Huh?” Mr. Bishop asks in confusion. “No, you see, it has to do with your genetics...”
A burst of insane laughter escapes my throat. “Oh, okay! Got it. I must be Jason Bourne! Am I Jason Bourne?”
“I don’t understand any of these references, Cole. But you are someone special—and someone extremely unfortunate.” He places a feeble hand on my shoulder, and I flinch at the touch.
My old friend, a man I’ve trusted implicitly my whole life, now feels like an enemy. It takes a considerable effort not to grab his hand and twist it, to break the bones in the way his son taught me so long ago.
“Give me a minute to gather myself,” Mr. Bishop says, stepping forward, “and I will explain.”
Chapter Five
Zachary Small, 2016
Farmland. So much farmland.
We’ve carved the whole world up into ugly, flat, geometric shapes.
It’s such a big world, and there are so many small people down there, living their lives in their little farmhouses. Are they happy? Are they content with their little pockets of land, their little squares? Are they comfortable spending most of their tiny lives stuffed into those tiny squares? Toiling on the land, growing things, but never able to grow enough things so that they can actually eat? Never able to pay for their little houses and their little pockets of land, never able to truly provide a good life for their families.
They are all in debt. None of them actually own all that land, or their cars, or their lives. They are struggling to keep their heads above water.
But we’re free. Right?
It’s a wasteland. America is a wasteland.
We just do a good job of hiding it. We do a good job of accepting it.
It’s been hours. Hours of staring out the window of this private jet at the uninspiring topography of the heartland. After you’ve gone to war and fought for a country, you always come home and look at it a little differently. For me, the experience was disillusioning.
I keep seeing suffering, everywhere I go. Hearing about violence and poverty every time I turn on the television. People unable to afford basic medical care. Cops killing people for no reason. I can’t help asking myself, over and over again:
Is this what I fought for?
I try not to think about it. Mostly, I focus on Sophie. I remember her, and I feel calm. I feel warm inside, like she’s the one good thing in this godforsaken country. But I’ve been feeling unsettled for the past little while. My discomfort is only growing.
Last I heard from her, Sophie had finished meeting her biological brother for the first time at a winery in Michigan. And she ruined his wedding.
I texted her my condolences, and offered some advice from my own dealings with difficult family members, but she never responded. I saw the “…” pop up on the screen, as if she was about to respond, but then there was only silence. I stared at my phone for an hour before this plane took off, hoping so hard that she would respond. Desperate for some kind of confirmation that she still gives a damn.
But there was nothing.
She probably decided to tell her troubles to him instead.
The plane hits a rough patch of turbulence, and it gives me a funny feeling, like someone has closed a fist around my intestines and tried to yank them out. I have always hated flying, and I grip the armrests tightly. Closing my eyes, I breathe deeply for a few minutes.
When we hit another patch of choppy storm clouds, the plane jerks and shudders like a jeep driving over desert rocks. I think about Afghanistan. I think about everything I’ve lost. All the people I’ve lost. My fucking leg.
Lightning bolts dance around the plane, and I inhale sharply with a sudden realization.
If Sophie could interpret the wisdom of earthquakes, then maybe I can translate turbulence.
I can sense it in the churning of my stomach, that something is wrong. I feel exactly the way I did before the day I lost my leg. Only worse. I think I stand to lose a lot more than my leg. It’s hard to understand why I am so upset all of a sudden, but the emotions flood my body with fear and alarm. I grip the armrests of the airplane seat so tightly I could crush them.
I don’t know how to communicate this feeling. I don’t know what it all means.
“It’s all over,” I say quietly to the sleeping girl next to me. “It’s all over.”
She responds with a snore.
“Luciana, are you listening to me?” I say sharply, trying to get her attention. “Sophie is gone. I know it. She’s gone.”
“Yeah? Huh?”
“I know her. She’s lying to both of us. I know how she gets so wrapped up in her work, in her life. She won’t even try to remain close to us. She doesn’t keep in touch with anyone, you know. She has no friends. Have you ever seen her read a book? You could call her name fifty times, loudly, scream it into her face. She won’t even notice.”
“Maybe because that wasn’t her real name,” Luciana says with a yawn.
“No. She just can’t focus on other things—other people. She hyper-focuses on her current priorities and loses all concept of everything and everyone else. She loses her grip on reality.”
“So? What are you saying?”
“Cole is the book,” I explain sadly. “She’ll forget about us.”
“Oh, I see. You’re having a personal crisis and I’m supposed to be comforting. Alright, let me try to wake up,” she says, rubbing her eyes.
“It’s not a personal crisis. I’m just trying to inform you that we’ve lost her.”
Luciana makes a face. “Come on. Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m not. Sophie has a one-track mind—and we are no longer on her radar.”
“Yeah, she is pretty eccentric. But she’s also a… virtuoso. A virtual virtuoso. Hey, that’s really clever!” Luciana grins, brushing a giant clump of tangled hair away from her face. “I should write it down.”
“It’s not that clever,” I tell her glumly.
“You’re just jealous because I’m basically a poet,” Luciana says, with her chin in the air proudly. “Anyway, I’m happy I got to work with Sophie for a few years. It was a blast. But she’s going to settle down where she belongs, now. With whom she belongs. She’s happy.”
“No!” I exclaim. “I mean, she is happier than she has been. But that’s only because she’s being honest about who she is. She’s hacking again. She’s not so repressed, like she was when she lived with me. The whole time, we were just living a lie.”
“Good point,” Luciana says, stretching languidly.
“But that’s not my fault,” I tell her. “It’s all because of you. You are the one who made her stay away from the Internet. You’re the one who made her so miserable.”
“Hey, hey. Don’t blame your failed relationship on me.”
“I’m only speaking the truth, Luciana. Sophie never had a chance to find out what it could be like to actually be with me and also be free. I’m just a reminder of being in prison to her. Of course she wants nothing to do with me.”
“I’m sorry,” she responds. “But Sophie never even wanted a relationship. Don’t forget, I’m also the reason she got together with you in the first place. I set you up, and gave her some bullshit work reason that she needed to live with you—for security.” Luciana rolls her eyes. “You were a cover. But, also—I just thought it wasn’t healthy for her to be alone. I could tell there was something kind of tortured about her.”
“Yeah. More than we realized,” I mumble. I briefly wonder to myself whether it would be best to leave things the way they are. But something is nagging at the back of my mind, like a hook piercing through my brain matter and dragging me back to all the pain I don’t want to think about. “We built something real, Lucy,” I tell the woman softly. “She
’s my best friend. We live together, for god’s sake. What am I supposed to do? How can I just go home to that empty apartment?”
Luciana shakes her head slowly. “Zack, people break up sometimes. It happens. It hurts like hell, but you’ll get past it with time. I’m sorry, but you’ll move on. You’ll find someone new.”
“No,” I say, incredulous. “No, no, no. Come on, Lucy, be serious. Who could compare to Sophie Shields? She’s brilliant, insane, and totally fucking… wonderful. The funny thing is, I didn’t even know how wonderful she was before all of this. I loved her, and I wanted to marry her—but now? I am completely, head over heels in love and in admiration of her. To know her like this, to know her past, and everything she’s been through.” I pause, shaking my head. “I would have treated her differently if I’d known. I would have been more sensitive. I would have been better.”
I look at Luciana squarely, with resolution in my face.
“I can still be better.”
She puts her hands in her hair. “Oh my god, Zack. You need to let it go.”
“If I do, I’ll regret it forever.”
“And that’s normal,” Luciana says loudly, with exasperation. “Everyone has regrets they need to live with. Do you know how many people ever get second chances?”
“I have to try,” I tell her. “Right now—it’s not too late. There’s still a window. Right now, she’s still my Sophie, my girlfriend. But if I wait too long—she’ll become someone else.”
Luciana sighs and returns to lying down across the seats opposite from me. “I’m going back to sleep.”
“No,” I tell her suddenly. “Let’s go to Michigan. Redirect the plane to Michigan.”
“What?” She opens one eye. “Zack, what happened to you while I was sleeping? Did you get hit by a lightning bolt and have some kind of epiphany?”
“I don’t know. It’s just been building and building up in me. I can’t accept this. I can’t just let her walk away, Lucy. She’s one in a million.”
“Fine. Then go after her.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Luciana says with a yawn. “If you’re really this fired up about the situation, maybe you’re right. Maybe you deserve a second chance. Maybe it is wrong of her to just ditch you for her millionaire architect boyfriend. Especially since he faked his death and put her through hell. Lead with that.”