Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,44

this new path.

She shrugged. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

He didn’t speak right away, but took the time to set his coffee cup down if the fate of the world required precision, as his mind raced.

Godiva merely waited.

He looked up, his head a little tilted, then said, “All the way across the US I kept reordering the questions I wanted to ask once I found you. Outside of the first question, they kept changing—because I didn’t know what the answer to Number One would be. Though I imagined hundreds of possible answers. Just, not the one you gave me.”

“Which is? Though I think I probably know.”

“What we’re on the way to find out, why you never wrote back to Alejo.”

“But I did write,” she stated.

“I said it wrong. Why your letters, and his, crossed. No, they didn’t cross, because that would mean they landed.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding seriously, but with no return of her initial anger. “No, I get what you mean. What did you think?”

That could be a leading question, but he shook that thought away. She had never been the kind to insinuate something. She’d always come right out with it.

So he said, “I completely understood not wanting to communicate with me ever again. But I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t answer Alejo’s letters.”

“Totally fair,” she said.

He paused as the food was set down before them. When they were alone again, he continued. “I know it’s ridiculous to talk about the mother-son bond as if it’s the same for everyone. I knew that growing up.”

Here, her eyes flicked between his. “You never told me anything about your childhood, other than admitting we’d had the same kind of dad.”

“For my mother, the world revolved around my older brother. She never saw that he was a bully and a thug. Like my father. He signed up as soon as World War I started, thinking the war was one giant carnie shooting gallery. When a bomb took him out in France, the life went out of her. I did my damndest to please her, but she wasted away. By then Dad was in jail. I left home the day after her funeral.”

He sighed. “But everything Alejo told me about the two of you during his childhood convinced me that you two were tight. That you cared deeply. Well, the fact that you kept moving when he got bullied, or when someone slandered or threatened the two of you—the care you took in renting that post office box in the first place—convinced me that you were pacing a hole in the street wanting to hear from him.”

“I was,” she whispered. “I was. I went out every single night to search, until I got the first post card. And then when they stopped, I waited a year, saving every penny. And when no more came, I headed west toward the last place he’d been, San Francisco.”

“So . . . what happened when you got out west?” he asked. “Not about the letters. You told me you never got any. How about we set aside the questions about why until we reach the Midwest. But . . . your life?”

She sat back. “Where to start?”

“Well, how about this: can you drive? Do you want to drive? I can do all the driving if necessary, but I remember your enthusiasm about luxury cars in the old days.”

“I can drive. I learned on a stick,” she said. “Well, everybody did, back then. But I, ah, don’t actually have a driver’s license.”

He’d been about to get up from his chair, and paused, surprised. “You don’t?”

She sidled him a guilty look that was so adorable it took everything he had not to grab her up and hug her right there. Instead, as she moved toward the door, he opened it like a gentleman.

They walked out, wind whipping fretfully at them as thunder growled toward the north, though to the south—the direction they were driving in—the sky was completely clear.

She said, “I never had a birth certificate, and after I left Hidalgo, I didn’t keep the same name longer than two or three years at a time, for various reasons.”

She flickered a troubled glance his way, and he knew instinctively that at least one reason had been a fear that he would swoop in and take away their son. After all, when had she been able to trust the men in her life?

But all he said was, “Alejo’s told me about some of the troubles you had.”

“The single mother stigma