Brooke

My parents rent a party room at the Highline Country Club for my birthday dinner the Saturday after my actual birthday. Seventeen years old. It seems like a lifetime since my sweet-sixteen party, even though it’s been just a year. Luckily, nobody’s paying much attention to me. Nobody notices my fake smiles, or how much concealer went into covering the bruise on my cheek from when the trucker attacked me. Everybody believed my lie about losing track of time and missing class.

Is he dead? Somebody would’ve found him by now. Or maybe he dragged himself back to his truck. It feels weird to hope that he’s dead.

Most of all, nobody notices how I can’t quite look my father in the eye.

You’re a high school kid. Unless you know someone named Jimmy Brass or Johnson or Keeper, you can’t help. His words stay with me even when I’m smiling and answering questions about how it feels to be seventeen.

It feels like I’ve aged a hundred years, but that has nothing to do with three hundred sixty-five days passing. It has everything to do with what Stone told me.

My family doesn’t have much money. We’ve been holding things together for a long time, sewing in the bottoms of designer bags to hold them together, paying for lavish parties like this while we live on plain chicken and rice. Which means we’re trading on something else—our name. Our connections. It’s almost a kind of lore, the stories about my father.

There was one story about him, my mother tells it every Christmas, about how a pregnant woman had come to his motel on a dark night. How the front desk had turned her away because they were full, but my father saw her. He gave her a room in the employee section, because it was too rainy to go anywhere else. She gave birth that night.

“The Innkeeper,” my mother says, fond and definitely proud. “Except unlike the one in the story, this one has a heart.”

My father grimaces and shakes his head. I thought it was because he was embarrassed that she brags about him. But what if it’s because he’s trying to hide the name? The Innkeeper is a distinctive name. How many guys would have nicknames like that? And would people call him Keeper for short?

It was a whole thing at our Christmas parties, Mom telling the story. Dad as the innkeeper. And Uncle Bill as a shepherd; our family a whole Nativity set.

That kind of detail, it makes it hard to forget.

Hard to pretend I don’t know.

Maybe it’s a coincidence.

I toy with my steak, but it tastes like sawdust.

Our ride was three days ago, but after what Stone told me, I’ve barely slept. When I close my eyes, I’m awash with images of defenseless boys, trapped in the dark. Of Stone as a kid, with that same thick black hair, those same piercing green eyes, making them believe in fairy tales about rivets.

I dream about Stone beating that trucker who dared to touch me. Or Madsen, that guy he killed the night we met, bloody and half alive in the back of the van.

Except now it’s my father. My father’s groans. My father’s garbled pleas for mercy.

The Innkeeper. Keeper.

God, I want those names to be a coincidence.

Except it’s not just my mom. Everyone knows the story about my dad. It’s something they call him when they’re drunk on eggnog and brandy. Pour me another one, Innkeeper. Do they ever shorten that to Keeper?

My father fits the other parts of the story, too—Stone’s looking for somebody who owns a lot of real estate. My father doesn’t own a lot, but as a developer, he certainly has access to a lot of real estate, someone who knows which places are abandoned. Someone with connections in both law enforcement and city hall.

Not just one man. Five. Ten. Twenty? Stone had said. Is it so far-fetched that my father could be one of them?

Mom gazes at me from across the table. She sits up a little straighter, which tells me she wants me to fix my posture. There are probably a hundred things about me she wants to fix.

I sit up nice and straight and glance at Chelsea. She gives me a sympathetic smile. She knows the drill of these birthday parties. She pulls out her phone and texts me. I sneak my phone under the table. A flower and a smiley.

I return her sweet smile. I text back a heart.

* * *

In the days and weeks that follow my birthday ride, I replay everything Stone said about Keeper. Somebody who’d found the abandoned houses. Somebody looking the other way.

…the only reason I made it out of the basement alive was the knowledge that I would make them suffer.

My dad would never knowingly let young boys be hurt the way Stone was hurt. But would he look the other way?

Stone got those boys out of the basement when he was fifteen, he said. He’s around ten years older than me, so I would’ve been about five. And Madsen, one of the men who preyed on those trapped boys, was at my sweet-sixteen party. Which means my parents knew him. Granted, there were hundreds of people there, but still.

If somebody had gone to my father when he was first starting out and asked to rent a place off the books, no questions asked, would he have agreed?

Sometimes I think maybe yes. But I know in my heart he would never have said yes if he knew children were being hurt. I know that for sure.

But what if he’d thought it was for something less awful? Maybe illegal card games, a mistress, sports betting, things like that. Dad loves to bet on college football with his buddies.

What if he didn’t know?

That wouldn’t matter to Stone, though. Why should it? Children are hurt every day by people looking the other way. People not noticing, not caring. When you’re a boy in a basement, looking away is its own kind of crime. He made it clear that he wants them all to pay.

I can never let Stone find out.

Not that I’ll ever see him again. There was something final about that trip to the basement. He wanted to ward me off. Like the Mr. Yuck sticker on the bottles and jugs of detergents under the sink. A sign that I should probably listen to.

Poison. Stay away.

The worst part of it is that, after he told me about Keeper, he could tell something was wrong. He could tell I pulled away, and I know what he thought. That I’d decided he was too damaged after all.

Too much a monster.

I hate that he’d think that. But what can I do? Explain to him that it was really a suspicion that he’s talking about my father? Tell him how the shock of it nearly made me throw up?

“Tell me about the Innkeeper,” I finally blurt out to my mother.

She pauses with her teacup in midair, her other hand holding her phone where she scrolls through the newspaper’s society page website. “What?”

“For Christmas. The story you tell every Christmas.”

She looks at me oddly, a little worried. That worry has been there ever since the last time Stone took me, like one of these days I’ll finally splinter into a million pieces. Sometimes it feels like that would be a relief.

“Oh, that.” She gives me a small smile. “You’ve heard it enough times to tell it yourself. That’s always been your father. A good man. Good to the bone.”

Hope rises inside me, because a good man couldn’t do what Stone said. He couldn’t be involved in any of that. “But how did you know? When you met him, how did you know?”

“I didn’t, really. I mostly liked the way he looked. The way he smiled at me. The knowing part only came later. He rode a motorcycle; did you know that?”

That startles me out of my worry, because I have never heard Mom talk like this. “Really?”

“He was dashing.” She laughs. “And sexy.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Eww.”

“Well, your grandfather was furious. He thought your daddy wasn’t good enough. He didn’t have much money. Neither did we, but we had our name and standing.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“The heart loves who it loves, and my heart loved your daddy. But he worked so hard. Impossibly hard.” There’s a small line between her eyes; she puts cream on it every night because she thinks it makes her look old. It deepens now, and she doesn’t seem old, only troubled. “Maybe too hard. He wanted me to have everything he thought I should have.”

“And Grandpa came around?”

She shakes her head, but it’s more like agreement. “He didn’t have a choice. The old factory would have gone under if your father hadn’t bailed him out.”

I gasp, knowing how proud my grandfather is. We aren’t close, but I see him once a year. He’s a stern man. Cold but loving, somehow. “He did that?”

“Most men would have lorded it over him, the way my father had been so rude to him and then was brought low. But not your father. He is always kind, even when he doesn’t have to be.”

The doubt feels lighter now, like it’s floating away. It can’t be my daddy who’s connected to crime and pain. There’s a whole city out there. It must be someone else.

Anyway, Stone said Keeper, not Innkeeper. Those are two completely different words. It’s a coincidence—it has to be.

I got worked up over nothing. Mom’s always saying I do that. “I’m glad you told me.”

“You probably know that the charities and foundations I’m on…some of them do good work, but most of them are just for show. Opportunities for society women to get together. Your daddy doesn’t mind me doing them, but he donates as much as he can to charity. And unlike the story I tell at Christmas, no one knows about that.”