Look, yes, we’d left him in the mine. Yes, we hadn’t seen him make it out. But if there was one thing I knew about Max Langer—if there was one thingI’dbeentaughtby someone who knew him even better than I did—it was that that man didn’t doanythingwithout an ulterior motive. Even die.
But fuck, that private jet sure would have been nice. The offshore accounts, too. Because without those, my boy and I were right back where we’d started.
Unable to touch.
“We’ll find your boy,” was all Erica had said before she left, though not before encountering my father in the doorway and exchanging a long glance. I had no idea what it meant, but given everything else, it fell near the bottom of my list of things to investigate.
And that brought me to my father, who, for a change, had said nothing at all. He’d just sat quietly beside my bed, clutching a disposable cup of terrible coffee, studying my face as if I were some stranger he vaguely remembered from long, long ago.
Instead, during the day, he’dread. Out loud. The way he used to before bedtime, every night, without fail, despite having a million other things he could have been doing. But this time around, instead of fairy tales, he read from my favorite novel,Les Misérables—in English, of course—and fromhisfavorite novel,War and Peace, a book he’d been recommending I read for years, though I’d never gotten around to it because, come on. And after a while, he’d given up. But now, his rich voice rolling over the words, both familiar and unfamiliar, was warmer and thicker than any blanket they could drape over me, especially when I would awaken to the sound of someone screaming and realize it was me. And realize I could still breathe. And realize my boy’s hand had not gone limp in mine all over again. It simply wasn’t there at all.
But my father’s was.
In the greatest confusion, there is still an open channel to the soul.
Each evening, as the hospital lights dimmed, he would close the book and just look at me. And every evening, I expected the interrogation—the one I’d spent the past few weeks dodging, evenbeforethe mine—to start, but it never did. And the minute I realized he wasnevergoing to demand that I speak was the minute I decided I would.
I told him a lot about some things and a little about everything. About Erica, about Ivy, about Max, but most of all, abouthim. And ultimately, of the escape.Ourescape.
And he listened, silently, a range of emotions flickering—shock, anger, relief—but he never interrupted. He never invalidated or objected or presumed I felt or thought anything different than what I told him I did. For the first time, perhaps, he was seeing his daughter as a person. Just as he now—ironically and too late—saw his son. And just as he saw?—
Well, I wasn’t pushing my luck. My dad was different, at any rate.
“You nearly died in that mine, Loulou,” he finally stated, voice raw and overcome. “Trying to savehim.” A slave, was what he was thinking but didn’t say.
“Yes,” I said. “I did, Daddy. Because he saved me first. More than once and in more than one way. And what’s more, with the evidence in that flash drive, he savedyou.”
My father’s eyes were as glassy and far away as the distant mountains, and he said nothing more, just looked down at the cup in his hand, then back up, away from the drop of liquid that had suddenly appeared on its top. One that definitely wasn’t coffee and one that prompted me to propose something that left evenmeaghast.
“Find him.”
He looked up in surprise.
“Maybe you can’t find Ethan yet,” I said. “But you can findhim.”
I said nothing about what might happen after that. I knew it might not be what I hoped for. I knew I might regret it altogether. I knew my father could change his mind, or change itback. But I also knew we had to try.
And that’s exactly what he began trying to do, the next day, right after driving me home from the hospital. But the bureaucracy would tell him nothing, and with my boy’s microchip gone—and apparently no new chip inserted—the slave database was useless.
It took another full week, just before Christmas and my final exams, which for his sake I was determined to pass, though my concentration was shot and the idea of going back to psychology or English oro-chem—after all that—seemed frankly absurd.
Not to mention that I was starting to wonder when I would have to face the fact that he might, in fact, be dead after all.
At any rate, that’s when Ivy’s nursing school contact in a different hospital across town had tipped us off that he was there, with his treatment being paid for by—of all things—the government.
But it was already too late. Immediately upon learning the news, according to Ivy, Maeve had rushed there tofinallysee him with her own eyes. But she’d gotten all of five minutes with him before he’d been moved again—to my despondence, into the same detention center Maeve had been freed from. On orders of the government. Indefinitely. With no explanation. Even Labrecque couldn’t offer us an explanation because she didn’tknowthe explanation.
Well, shit. There was no question about involving my father, now. Whatever he planned to do with his slave when he got him back, it couldn’t be worse than beingthere.
Daddy, once he learnedthat, had thrown himself into the task of getting him returned to him as zealously as he’d once worked to getridof him. Of course, with Max Langer out of the picture, he was also now back to not having a job, so he didn’t exactly lack time. Mostly ignoring the other slaves—though I doubted they were complaining—he had sat slouched in his study for hours upon hours, unshowered, unshaven, guzzling coffee, having to be reminded to eat, dialing number after number, making demands over the phone as aggressively as I remembered him working during his early days in the corporate world, when creating the largest buffer possible between his family and poverty had been his one and only ambition. When he had motivation. When he had agoal.
My father, when he wanted to be, was good with goals.
And that’s when Agent Wheatley had called.
He was back on the job, apologetic, and invited Daddy and me to come to the detention center the following day, where he’d explain everything.
“Explain everything?!” my father had thundered. “Thereisno justifiable explanation for why you’ve wrongfully detained my slave for over two weeks and?—”
