Run Away - Harlan Coben Page 0,66
back, looked left, looked right, looked back at him. “You think I got a lot going on right now?”
He almost told her. Sadie looked at him with wisdom and sympathy, and she clearly welcomed it, would probably even enjoy, if that was the word, listening with a learned ear and offering, at the very least, moral support.
But he didn’t.
It wasn’t about his own privacy. It was about the line. Simon was her financial advisor. He could exchange niceties about his family. But not something like this. His issues were his issues, not his client’s.
“Something with one of your children,” Sadie said.
“What makes you say that?”
“When you lose a child…” Sadie said. She stopped, shrugged. “One of the side effects is this kind of sixth sense. Plus, I mean, what else would it be? Okay, so which kid?”
Easier to just say it: “My oldest.”
“Paige. I won’t pry.”
“You’re not prying.”
“May I give you a little advice, Simon?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, that’s what you do, right? Give advice. You come here and you give me financial advice. Because you’re an expert in money. My expertise is…anyway, I always knew Barry was gay. It was strange. Identical twins. Raised in the same house. Barry used to sit right where you are. That was his seat. Greg sat next to him. But from as young as I can remember, they were different. It gets everyone mad when I say that Barry from Day One was, I don’t know, more flamboyant. That doesn’t mean you’re gay, people tell me. But I know my truth. My boys were identical—and different. If you knew them both, even as little children, and had to guess which was gay—go ahead, say I’m stereotyping—you’d know. Barry was into fashion and theater. Greg was into baseball and cars. I mean, I was practically raising clichés.”
She tried to smile at that. Simon folded his hands and put them on the kitchen table. He had heard some of this before, but this wasn’t a place Sadie went to very often.
And that was when it began to dawn on him.
The twins, genetics.
The story of Barry and Greg had fascinated him the first time he’d heard it because he’d wondered how identical twins, who had the exact same DNA and were raised in the same home, ended up with different sexual preferences.
“When Barry got sick,” Sadie continued, “we didn’t see what it was doing to Greg. We ignored him. We had to deal with all the immediate horror. Meanwhile Greg is seeing his identical twin wither away. There’s no reason to go into the details. But Greg never recovered from Barry’s illness. He was scared, so he just…ran away. I didn’t see that in time.”
Greg was the only beneficiary of his mother’s estate, so Simon still kept somewhat in touch with him. Greg was now thrice divorced and currently engaged to a twenty-eight-year-old dancer he’d met in Reno.
“I lost him. Because I didn’t pay attention. But also…”
She stopped.
“Also what?”
“Because I couldn’t save Barry. That was really it, Simon. For all the problems, all Greg’s fears of maybe being gay too, all that, if I could have saved Barry, Greg would have been okay.” She tilted her head. “Can you still save Paige?”
“I don’t know.”
“But there’s a chance?”
“Yeah, there is.”
Genetics. Paige had been studying genetics.
“Then go save her, Simon.”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
There were no signs for Truth Haven, which was hardly a surprise.
“Take a left,” Dee Dee said, “by that old mailbox.”
Old was an understatement. The mailbox looked as if passing teenagers had started whacking it daily with a baseball bat during the Carter administration.
Dee Dee looked at his face.
“What?”
“Something else I read,” Ash said.
“What?”
“Are you forced to have sex with them?”
“With…?”
“You know what I mean. Your truth or your visitor or whatever the leaders call themselves?”
She said nothing.
“I read that they force you.”
Her voice was soft. “The Truth can’t be forced.”
“Sounds like a yes.”
“Genesis 19:32,” she said.
“What?”
“Do you remember the story of Lot in the Bible?”
“Seriously?”
“Do you remember the story or not?”
This sounded to him like a deflection, but he answered, “Vaguely.”
“So in Genesis chapter 19, God allows Lot and his wife and their two daughters to escape the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
He nodded. “But Lot’s wife turns around when she’s not supposed to.”
“Right, and God turns her into a pillar of salt. Which is, well, seriously messed up. But that’s not my point. It’s Lot’s daughters.”
“What about them?”
“When they get to Zoar, Lot’s daughters complain there are no men. So they come up with a plan. Do you remember