(Nathaniel)
I didn't go home after the park. I couldn't sit in that house with what I was carrying.
I drove instead, nowhere, the long way around the city, and I let the thing she'd told me work all the way through. My son. Five years old. Alive the whole time I sat in that mansion believing a story a woman had built for me out of pictures and patience.
I'd prided myself once on knowing things. On reading a room, a man, a deal. I'd called it clear sight. And a woman with a phone had run me for five years, fed me a lie a week, and I'd swallowed every one because swallowing them cost me less than the truth would have.
That was the part I kept circling. Not what Emilia did. What I did.
She'd shown me a photograph, Amelia and Liam, some doctored closeness, and I'd looked at it and let it
