Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,76

intrusion. Clean hard surfaces, every item in place, accounted for. So comforting and so lifeless. Not a single mess or splinter, every rough edge sanded down, smooth as the limbs of a marionette.

Very much opposite to the chaos engendered in him at the thought of Veronica. This person he was bound to, human and flawed, blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh. He recalled her hands on his shoulders, the tinge of chardonnay on her breath. She’d gazed at him with maternal adoration. And recoiled from him in disgust when he told her what he’d been trained to be.

Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction—it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving.

What if that was the point?

To expend ourselves in the care of people who mattered?

Without that, what was there to preserve?

He felt a rush of grief that he’d taken this long—the better part of four decades—not even to learn this but to consider it. Once again he pictured Veronica crouched over that marble newborn in the cemetery. He was so much like that inanimate likeness rendered in stone, carved into a facsimile of a human being. What had Veronica told him in Bel Air? To survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to. He’d certainly expended himself in the service of others, for Andre and those he helped, but now all those missions lay revealed to him for what they were—proxies for actual intimacy, surrogates for real connections that could pierce through his defenses and touch him at the tender core.

Joey mouthing, Thank you, as he drove away from her.

Veronica’s hazel eyes glazed with emotion and champagne.

Peter swimming in the rumpled pinstripe shirt of his dead father: Once you’re real, it’s scarier.

Evan felt that heat moving through him once again and blinked a few times to regain his focus. He noticed he was clenching his jaw and relaxed it, bringing himself back to this couch, this living room.

Pinocchio was following Jiminy Cricket now, pursuing his conscience up a craggy hillside and leaping into the black, black sea.

Peter was watching Evan. “What are you thinking about?”

Evan cleared his throat, which he was surprised to find needed clearing. “How much wiser you are than me.”

“When you were my age?”

“Maybe now, too,” Evan said.

Peter beamed.

Evan tried to find what to say next, but this wasn’t his language. His head felt murky, words just out of grasp. He picked a starting point. “Your shirt’s big.”

Peter looked down, picked at it. “It was my dad’s.”

“Do you remember him well?”

“Not really.” That raspy nine-year-old voice still upbeat, contemplative. “I remember the scruffles on his cheeks when he kissed me. And some kind of whaddayacallit he wore. Like, to smell good?”

“Aftershave?”

“Whatever. Some guy at the mall had it once when he walked by, and I remembered.” His charcoal eyes looked impossibly large, and Evan sensed an opening into something bigger. Peter tugged at a button. “But…”

Evan’s mouth was dry. He stayed hushed, his muscles tight with anticipation. He waited. Waited some more.

“But how do you know someone you never knew?” Peter said.

The question left Evan breathless. An image flashed into his mind, the moment when Veronica’s wide cheeks and dark, shimmering eyes had first come clear beneath the brim of that black summer hat, how he’d known that it was her without knowing her at all. Something twisted free inside him, an unknotting into a new space.

He’d been drawn down here for Peter. But for himself, too. His head was pounding, his senses fired.

“I don’t know,” Evan said. “But your dad knew you. And maybe … maybe that went into your cells. I think you know him in there. Deep.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I know what kind of kid you are. Open and confident and…” Evan searched for the word in the murk. “Secure.” The conversation was moving fast and required terrific focus, like skiing a black diamond where any second he could catch an edge and it would all go horribly wrong. “And a lot of that is from your mom. But I’m pretty sure it’s from