keys in my grip, biting into my fist.
“I was going to tell you,” he said. “That I knew who you were. But you confessed it first, and I didn’t know what to do. I went about it all wrong, I can see that now. You saw the articles in my luggage, didn’t you. And you freaked. I get it.” Like he was forgiving me, instead of the other way around, when he’d been stalking me for years.
I shifted in tiny steps, so as not to make him spook. “I don’t care,” I said, even though that wasn’t true. But all I knew right then was the thing I’d always known, that singular focus: survival.
Sean Coleman was dead. Elyse was dead. And this man, he was big enough to do it.
“You should care,” he said. “There are so many holes in that story, it’s ridiculous. And nobody else seems to notice. The 911 calls don’t add up. The sleepwalking doesn’t add up. The shoes.”
He was unhinged—ten years, building up. Ten years, about to boil over.
I put my hand out, to stop him, to slow him down. I’d heard it all from Emma Lyons. “You’re seeing what you want to see, Nathan.” Trying to reason him back with me. To see the marvel of it all: that there was a literal hole in the earth here—this spot that I’d been found inside. It was miraculous, and he wanted it to be something else. “No one else backs up these claims.”
His eyes darkened as if he didn’t like the conclusion. Then the side of his mouth quirked. “Well, that’s not true at all,” he said.
I had shifted another step closer to the way I’d come, but now I froze. The desire for the truth. For my own past, for who I was—“What?” The word so quiet, I might not have spoken it at all.
“The media brushed it off, but you know who didn’t?” He paused, making me wait. “Your mother.”
I stepped back like he’d moved closer, which he hadn’t. “You knew my mother?”
“Not in so many words. But I wrote to her, told her what I knew, told her the evidence I had. She thought I was my father, the only other person who would know the truth, right? I didn’t need him to confirm it when your mother reacted the way she did.” I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know. But he took a step closer, and there was no escaping it now. “She thought I was Sean, and she asked me how much it would take to keep me silent, make it all go away. And then she gave it.”
“You? You were blackmailing us?” Those letters that had been returned to sender—he’d been threatening my mother, warning her.
“Blackmail?” he spat. “Is that what you call it? She’s a liar. That money did not belong to her. To either of you.”
Everything shifted, my understanding of the past; my understanding of just how far he’d go. This was the truth, then: that Nathan Coleman had been blackmailing my mother. That our money had disappeared, not to her addiction but to him. He had taken it from us—everything she’d made from our story. She’d had to sell everything to make him stop.
“You don’t know what it was like to be so close to a story, to see you on the other side of it, getting everything. That should’ve been ours, too. If my father would seize a fucking opportunity, do one of those talk shows, something, anything. If he would just tell his story, it wouldn’t have come to that. But at the ten-year anniversary, after all that new press? Your mother sure did pay up.” He licked his lips. “Are you sure you don’t remember?”
He was so close, and I couldn’t see how to get by him, get to safety, get through this moment. My skin itched, and I scratched at my neck. I couldn’t breathe, like the walls were closing in. “My shoulder, my arm, they were hurt. The injuries, they were left untreated for days.” Proof of what had happened. Proof that I’d survived something.
His eyes followed my hand at my neck, then drifted to my arm. “Did you ever wonder what someone might do to cover up something else?”
I shook my head. Heard Emma’s words echoing, what that doctor had said: The injury was weird. And Bennett’s comment—that the pain must’ve been terrible.
Nathan could see it in me, the doubt setting in, though I tried to fight it. “They take