CHAPTER 46
EMILY
I peeked in on Phin. He sat in front of a huge screen filled with alphabet soup, if the alphabet included all the characters in the corners of the keyboard.
Going back to the kitchen in silence, I wondered what Carter was doing in my house. There had been no way of talking him out of going back to my place.
It was never going to be over. Vince was tenacious and bored. If he had any romantic prospects, he wasn’t following up. I didn’t believe no woman could match me. I believed I was his muscle memory. I was his automatic fixation when he felt bad or good or bored or needy. Or maybe he obsessed over me in the in-between times.
I didn’t know. I’d never know.
Could I leave? Could I just walk away? Slip into anonymity? I’d thought about it so many times and in so many ways. Everything from going back to Chicago to live near my parents to driving until I stopped in the Middle of Somewhere, USA.
My imagination never got far. Dancing for a living was a privilege given to very few, and I loved it. I was honored to do what I wanted, to live the dream of so many. Darlene was a huge part of that success, and she lived in Hollywood because that was where her business was.
My dream was coming at a price. As long as I was in Los Angeles, I was going to be a target, and as long as I was a target, I would never be free. Would never be able to have a relationship and, by extension, a husband and children.
I tried not to think about that. I usually drowned out that sorrow in dance or music. I could go to a party with Darlene or work until my feet turned to leather.
“Hey.” Phin poked his head in the kitchen doorway. I was cradling a cup of tea like a handful of shiny coins.
“Hey.”
He bopped in, opened the fridge, and spent way too long deciding to take out a carton of milk. He just stood there with the milk as the fridge door closed. He was an open book. Didn’t have a sneaky bone in his body. I knew exactly what he was thinking.
“I know I’m not your dad, but I’m a snitch. You should use a glass.”
He flopped to the cabinet as if his limbs were loosely attached. He had freckles and angular features. I could see a touch of Carter in him and another, less robust person. He poured the milk into a short glass, letting a splash land on the counter when he tipped the carton back up.
Without cleaning up or putting the carton away, he slugged the milk, ending with an ahh.
“Liquid gold.” He poured another cup and put the carton away.
“What are you doing up there?” I handed him the kitchen rag. He looked at it, then back at me. I pointed to the splash of milk on the counter.
“I have a family tree project I need to get an A on.” He took the rag.
“Ah. Sounds like fun.”
He wiped the counter without cleaning up all the milk. I couldn’t have done such a bad job of it if I tried.
“It’s not when your father and your grandmother are telling you a bullshit story about your mother.”
I took the rag and wiped up the spill properly. Was he allowed to say bullshit? Seemed unlikely.
“I doubt that.”
“Yeah, well, the name they gave me isn’t on any of the birth certificate records at city hall.”
“Maybe she wasn’t born in LA.”
“Dad said she was.”
“Are you supposed to be looking in the public record or taking your father’s word for it?” I ran my fingers along the edges of the wet cloth.
He shrugged and went for the door. He seemed so dejected. As if he’d hit a roadblock, asked for help, and no one came to his aid.
Before he turned the corner, I spoke up. “You should look at your own birth certificate.”
“Good idea,” he called back, not slowing down a bit. Carter texted me just as I was folding up the dishrag.
—How are you doing?—
Did I want to bring up the conversation with Phin? No. I couldn’t. His mother’s family history wasn’t my business.
—Your son just drank half a gallon of milk. Pick up more on the way home—
—Wow. This relationship devolved really quickly—
I laughed.
—I better think quick—
( . . . )
—I can’t wait to see the contents of that La Perla bag on the floor—
—Appropriately sexy—
—Great—
—I’ll pick up milk—
—How is my house?—
—Intact. We’re going to make it safe again. Promise—
Something thumped upstairs. I pocketed the phone and went up.
“Phin? You all right?”
“Yeah.”
The stairwell was lined with photos. I stopped at Carter’s police academy portrait. What a sexy bastard. The rest were the same three people I’d seen on the mantel: Phin, Dad, Grandma. Was Mom ever in the picture?
“I’m coming up to check on you.”
“End of the hall.”
I passed Carter’s room and tried not to linger. I wanted to see if his pillow smelled of gunpowder, check his closet for ephemera and memories. Was that a little fifth of July coming out of the room? I stopped and took a deep breath.
“Hey,” Phin said from down the hall.
“What happened?” I tore myself away from the plaid bedspread and rich russet woods. “I heard a thump.”
“Fell off the ball.” He indicated his room, where a huge blue yoga ball sat in front of a desk with a large-screen computer. “It happens. I’m a little clumsy.”
On the screen, a set of windows was open, and inside one of the windows, text scrolled and scrolled. It didn’t look like a family tree. He saw me looking and shifted in front of it.
“Whatcha doing?” I stepped forward to see the screen. I had no interest in exposing misbehavior. I was just curious.
“Running a script. It’s nothing.”
“Wow.” I peered over his shoulder. “That looks really cool.”
He brightened, then shrugged dismissively. “Just a little something.”
“What’s it do?”
He was so expressive with his face and body I could almost read volumes from the shape of his mouth and the way he waved his hands. His body and face contorted to say, I shouldn’t tell you, but I really want to.
“Is it anything to do with the present on the thumb drive? I loved that.”
He brightened again. This kid was jumping out of his skin.
“I’ll tell you, but just tell me you know what a white hat is?”
“A white hat? It’s a white hat.”
“No. A white hat is a hacker who hacks for good and never steals or anything.”
“Okay. And you’re a white hat?”
“Totally.” He tapped his head as if touching an imaginary white hat and let me pass into the room. It was covered in Legos, books, shoe boxes full of pieces of things, a soldering iron I hoped was off.
“Where’s the bed?”
He rolled an office chair to me.
“No screens in the bedroom. So this is like, whatever, my work space. Okay so, I developed this to do my project and, remember, white hat.” He touched his forehead again, absently as if it were automatic.
He rolled the ball back to the desk and sat on it, bouncing while I sat in the chair. The characters rolled fast inside the little window.
“What’s all this?”
“This is the script running, so this is how it works. I went to the LA County Registrar and found out what their email naming convention is: first initial last name @LACR. Easy. Then I found out what department has access to birth records and then found out who’s in that department. From there I can rebuild email addresses and put them with names. So then I have this other script . . .” He opened another window. “It checks social media for those people’s birthdays, addresses past and present, pet names, hobbies—”
“Whoa.”
“White hat.” Head touch. “So then I developed this script that takes all that and creates possible passwords, then I just run an easy-peasy brute-force attack, which, oh look! Bang.”
Before I could object or ask him if his dad knew what he was doing, he was on the search page for employees of the LA County Registrar, tapping keys lightning fast.
“So then it’s just putting in the password, doing a search for my name, and here we are, my birth certificate, which is the only thing I’m here to see, white hat, since Dad says he can’t find it.”
The screen showed a scanned birth certificate with the seal of the state of California, county of Los Angeles.
“Huh,” Phin said. “That’s . . . weird.”
I looked closely with him. “What?”
“That’s not Dad.”
He pointed to a section on the certificate.
FATHER: George Owen Whitman.
The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it.
“You should really talk to your father.”
Phin moved his finger across the screen.
MOTHER: Genevieve Tremaine Kincaid.
“Wait. Her last name is right, but . . .” He ran his finger over the baby’s name. “Could someone have my same name and birthday?”
“Obviously. I think—”
I thought a lot of things. Genevieve Tremaine Kincaid had a first and middle name too specific to be ignored.
Phin bounced up and went to his closet. The sliding door was already open, revealing the disaster inside. He jumped for a box on the top shelf.
“There’s an SSN associated with the birth certificate, so if I could just see mine.” He managed to grab the hanging corner of a folder, and the whole top shelf tumbled down. Undaunted, he picked up the box and opened it, letting the top fall. He took out a little wallet and picked out his Social Security card. He put it between his teeth while he got back on the big blue yoga ball.
His body language said he was very sure he was only checking the obvious before moving on.
“Huh,” he said, then whipped around to me. “Sometimes with ADHD I don’t pay attention to details and I miss things, so can you check this?” He tapped the screen where the associated SSN was and handed me the card.
I checked. They were the same.
“You really should talk to your dad about this.”
“Sure.”
New window.
Google.
Genevieve Tremaine Kincaid.
Nothing much. But he scrolled down, and results with Kincaid below it appeared.
The screen flooded with images of a beautiful woman who, now that I could see them side by side, looked as much like Phin as Carter did. Same coloring. Same nose. Same almond-shaped eyes. Her full, real last name must have been known and not known at the same time. You’d find it if you looked it up, but eleven years later, who was looking?
Phin clicked on one picture of her where she was smiling, sweet and approachable. Above the picture was a bold headline with the word murdered in it.
“If this is my mother . . .”
“You should talk to your father.”
I think he heard me the third time, but I couldn’t be sure. He didn’t make a move when the stairs creaked.
Carter, still in his coat, carrying a milk carton–shaped shopping bag, turned from the stairs into the hall. From the end, he could see the computer screen.
I waved. When he saw what his son was looking at, he dropped the bag.
“Phin?” I said softly.
I was barely finished with the last syllable when Carter leaped into the room, stepping on Legos and open notebooks, crushing a shoe box, reaching behind a chair and snapping the switch on the power strip.
The room went dark.
“Go to bed.”
“I haven’t finished my project.”
“A D isn’t going to kill you. Go to bed.”
“Who is Genevieve Kincaid? Is she my mother?”
“Go to bed!”
“I want to know!”
“I want a minute of peace and I want you to clean this room, but we don’t always get what we want. Now go to bed!”
Phin stormed into the hall, grabbed one of the doorknobs while still moving forward, opened the door with the force of the torque, spun, and—
“Don’t you slam that—”
—slammed the door so hard the walls shook.
Carter went to the hall, paused in front of his son’s door. I wanted to tell him not to go in, but this was bigger than I was, bigger than whatever Carter and I had developed in the short time we’d known each other. He passed the door, picked up the milk, and went downstairs.
I wanted to go home. Whatever was going on, this family needed space. I felt like an intruder in something deeply pivotal and personal.
I hustled down the stairs and found Carter in the kitchen, opening the carton of milk.
“I can stay at Darlene’s.”
“Yeah. I don’t think so.” He slugged right from the container and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. I sat on the edge of the nook.
“I can stay in a hotel?”
He put the milk away and stuck his head in the refrigerator.
“I’m not trying to speak ill of the dead or anything, but his mother was a fucking pain in my ass.” He came up with plastic packages, kicked the door shut, and dumped cold cuts on the nook. “From the time we were kids.”
Plates. Knives. Napkins. Little cutting board. All on the nook. He stood at the end of it. Had she been a childhood sweetheart? Had they married, shared a name, lived happily until she cheated on him with George Owen Whitman?
I stayed silent. He was deep in thought as he put two pieces of bread on each of two plates.
“She dropped her clothes all over the house. She always left the front closet door open. Always. When Dad got on her about it, she blamed me, and I had to get up and close it.” He held a yellow jar. “Mustard?”
“Yes.”
He spread Dijon on each stack of bread.
“I was home in the house alone from the time I was seven because she had to go to auditions and she had to be on set. That was why Dad left. Mom was more interested in Genny’s career than anything in this family.” He cracked open a package of turkey. “My sister was smart, but it messed with her head. I was screwed up, but she was worse. Way worse.” He let a slice of meat hover over the second sandwich.
“Turkey’s fine.”
He dropped it onto the bread, piling it deli-style. I hadn’t put together what was going on, but it wasn’t water under the bridge for him. Whatever had happened had blocked up the river and drowned the valley. I didn’t want to sate a curiosity; I wanted to know what he needed from me.
“You’re judging me,” he said.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Lettuce and tomato?”
“Whatever you’re having is fine.”
He sliced the tomato. “My sister and her ex were slaughtered like animals. She made me crazy, but she didn’t deserve it. Nobody deserves that. Her son”—he jerked the knife upward, where Phin was sulking in his room—“saw the whole thing.”
I put my hand over my mouth when it clicked into place.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
“He was four and a half. He doesn’t remember it. Sometimes with ADHD, memories don’t stick, but no one knows if he forgot because his brain’s made of Teflon or because the experience was traumatic. I don’t want to find out. I never wanted him to see the crime-scene photos, but they’re all over the internet. I never wanted him to know who his mother was because he’d find them and remember. We took Genevieve’s money and fought the press to keep his name buried. I got into security so I could be more flexible and take care of him. We bought this house under a new name and made up stories he could tell himself until he had distant memories of a pretty lady.” He sliced the two sandwiches into rectangular halves. “She was beautiful, my sister. Really beautiful.”
“I didn’t know.” I took his hand. He was shaking. “I would have stopped him, but looking for his birth certificate . . . it didn’t seem like a big deal.”
“It’s not your job to protect him.” He pushed a plate to me and sat across the nook. “It’s mine. Was mine. Now he knows I lied.” He looked me in the eyes as if he expected to find an answer there. “How am I supposed to protect him now?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know how to keep a cat safe. I couldn’t tell him what to do or offer a word of advice, but he needed me. I was here, and he needed me.
I went to his side of the nook, put my knee on the bench, and took his face in my hands. This strong, stable man looked about ready to break. My heart twisted. I shouldn’t have been in the house when this went down, but there I was, and maybe it was for the best.
“Can you talk to him?” I asked.
“No.”
“Really?”
He coiled his fingers around my wrists and pulled them off his face.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
I started to object, but he kissed my wrists, then my lips. He wrapped his arms around me, and we held each other until another thump came from upstairs.