Marlowe
His question sat between us like something physical, and I understood, standing there in the wreckage of every careful lie I'd built, that whatever I said next was going to decide everything.
"You want the whole thing," I said. "Not just the parts that make it sound reasonable."
"I want the truth. All of it. However long it takes."
So I gave it to him.
I told him about the jacket first, somehow — not the beginning chronologically, but the beginning that mattered, the place the whole story actually started. My father's leather cut, initials stitched gold on the cuff, dropped into a burn barrel by a woman who called it just leather and not a shrine. I told him about standing there watching it burn, about the particular flat stillness I'd trained into my own face over ten years s
