is clinging to me, sucking in nutrients that I alone can give, but what else is in my blood? What have I inherited from Ted?
“I’m not asking how you did this,” I say. “I’m asking, how could you do this?”
“What? I can’t hear you when you’re covering your face like that.”
I take a shaky breath, let my damp hands slip into my lap, and meet Ted’s eyes. “I don’t think you’re a good man,” I say. “I don’t think you’ve been good for me at all.”
My words are drowsy and slow, but his head rears back as if I’ve hissed at him. As if I’m a wild animal he doesn’t know how to tame.
“I never hurt you,” he says. That old, exhausted script. “I never laid a hand.”
The room is stifling. The air too thick to breathe. But I nod. Try to take in oxygen anyway, through lungs that already burn.
“You’re right,” I agree. “You never pushed me or hit me or left me with bruises. But there are other kinds of wounds. And they hurt just as bad as the ones you can see.”
I see the moment he swallows, his throat bobbing up and down. He seems surprised. And as I watch his eyes, how they glaze over a bit, it’s as if I can see straight through to the wheels turning in his head. He’s lost in thought. Realizing, maybe, that the abuse he suffered from his father is not the only kind of abuse there is. That maybe, in his way, he’s spent my whole life inflicting another.
“But,” he finally says, “you know—you know I love you. Right?”
My tears well up again. My lips separate. This is the first time he’s ever said that to me.
I should be glad. Euphoric. I should be thinking of the way he used to praise me during interviews, like I was the piece of work he was proudest of. I should be remembering the witch from Forest Near, how I suspect he loved that game because it gave him an excuse to hold me. But mostly, I’m just sad. That it’s taken him thirty-two years to tell me something so basic. That inquiring whether I know it to be true is a legitimate question to ask.
He scratches the side of his neck, the skin there scaly and red. And I hate that there’s a part of me that wants to reach out, take his hand, tell him he’s only harming himself more by touching the thing that hurts.
“I know you love me in your way,” I say. My voice is weary and buckling. “But somebody kidnapped me. How could you not want to know who it was?”
“Haven’t you been listening? That’s my whole point. I want you to get to the bottom of those memories. See the man behind the mask. And actually, I’ve been thinking…” He glances at his typewriter. “You really don’t remember anything about what he looked like?”
“He was covered from head to toe.”
“Right. But he must have spoken. Or moved a certain way. Something you recognized. Did you know that ninety-nine percent of kidnapping victims know their abductor?”
I grip the sides of the chair. “I do know that,” I say. “And I think it was Brennan, Ted.”
“What? No. Stop it with that.”
“He was in Foster the exact day that Astrid was kidnapped. He was staying with us around that time, too. He wrote about child abductions in one of his books. He—”
“It was not Brennan,” he bellows.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because Brennan is weak! And whoever did this—he’s not weak.”
Ted fumbles with some papers on his desk, shuffles a pile to another spot, and picks up Astrid’s book, which has been hiding underneath. He opens to a dog-eared page. Skims his finger along it. Taps the book when he finds what he’s searching for.
“This man was strong,” he says. “Clearly. And Brennan is not.”
“How would you even know? You’ve never fought Brennan.”
He scoffs. “Let’s forget about that for a minute.” He flips back a couple pages. His eyes shift from side to side as he reads. “It seems Astrid took care of you in the basement. Do you remember that at all?”
I shrug one shoulder. “Some things.”
“Like what?”
“The thing she did with her freckle. The marble game.”
“Ah, yes, the marble game. What was that exactly? She’s vague about it.”
I lean back farther in my chair. I am so tired. This room is so hot.
“We slid the marbles across the room. Picked one out that we tried