Liz sunk into a chair at the kitchen table, and Samson came over to lay at her feet. They both watched Dorian as he paced the small room.
“Can you just stop moving so much?” she asked, pressing her fingers into her temples. “You’re making my head hurt worse than it already does.”
Dorian stopped, but she could see the unspent energy zipping beneath his skin. “I’m sorry. This is hard. I feel awful.”
“Imagine how I feel.” She let out an exasperated puff of air. He’s just trying to help. Finally, someone’s trying to help, she reminded herself, then immediately felt guilty for discounting her friends.
He pulled out the chair beside her and sat down close, grabbing each of her hands as he spoke. “I can’t even begin to imagine how you feel, and for that I’m truly sorry. I’m sorry for all of this. I never…” He hung his head and laughed sadly. “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. It never even occurred to me that might be possible.”
“I know,” Liz said, and she did. She could see the war within Dorian. He wasn’t a bad guy. He felt just as confused and helpless as she did. The biggest difference was he could have walked away, but he’d chosen to stick around—to help.
She did her best to keep her voice soft, pliant. “Can we start from the beginning? Please. I’m desperate to know how this all started.”
He nodded and sat back in the chair, letting go of her hands as he did. She missed their warmth, but didn’t have time to unpack that feeling. Not when the truth loomed so close. Finally. At last.
“I’ll start with how I first met Warwick.” He took a deep breath before getting into it. “He contacted me through this freelance job board for detectives. It’s called the PInternet—like the PI Internet, right? And like I told you before, I sometimes take side gigs to supplement my income. I like being a reporter, but I hate writing fluff society pieces. I want to write hard-hitting journalism, the stuff that sweeps a nation, wins awards.”
Liz crossed her arms and waited. She didn’t want to be rude or make him change his mind about confiding in her, but she needed to know about her own secret past with Warwick, not Dorian’s career ambitions. If they had met under different circumstances, maybe…
He caught her eye and cleared his throat again. “But that’s not what’s important…” Another deep breath. “So, umm, Warwick contacted me and asked if I was up for a gig, but he wouldn’t tell me much over email. Insisted we do everything on the phone. So we arranged a call and he told me that he needed help finding his missing daughter who he suspected was living in Anchorage, which is why he had picked me even though he lived somewhere else.”
“Janie,” Liz whispered.
“Yeah, Janie. Which, by the way, is your real name. Janie Warwick.”
She shook her head, rejecting the name that had never truly belonged to her. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“None of this feels right, but I didn’t know until he showed up on my doorstep unannounced. He flew over two thousand miles to tell me I was taking too much time and that he’d double my pay if I could get him the answers that week. So I—”
“Started stalking me.”
His skin seemed to redden under the heat of her gaze. “Yeah, sorry about that. You have to understand, that much money, it made a huge difference for me. I knew the guy was annoying and demanding, but I didn’t know he was dangerous. Not yet.”
“What happened next? What changed?”
“I followed you home, and there was that party going on. I fed you that line about Vanessa and a political scandal because I knew you would believe it. While you searched her office, I took some hair from your brush. It was a lucky break that you’re a red head and your stepsisters are both blonde.” He smiled over at her apologetically. She hated that he’d violated her in this way. Hated that something as innocuous as a few hairs could throw her entire life off course.
“Once I had the DNA sample,” Dorian continued. “I left, thinking I’d never see you again, that you’d be reunited with your true father and have this big happy reunion, but…”
“But what?” She leaned forward, as if drawing closer would help the words to reach her faster.
“It was already late that night, so I decided I would call Warwick in the morning to tell him about what I’d found. By then I’d already dropped the hair sample outside the lab. They have this Dropbox thing like at an old movie rental place. It’s kind of cool. Anyway…” Another apologetic glance. Dorian seemed to think if he threw in these light asides, it would make the hard truths easier to handle. In truth, they just ratcheted Liz’s anxiety to a higher and higher level.
Dorian’s eyes widened as he continued. “Before I could call, Warwick showed up at my door again, just screaming, turning blue from how much he was screaming at me. He lost it, and I’m not even sure he knew all the things coming out of his mouth, but one thing stuck with me.”
Liz leaned forward again. Ready. Waiting.
He spoke the next words slowly, each one fully enunciated as if it alone held all the answers. “He said he’d never get justice at this rate.”
Liz let that sink in.
When Dorian realized she didn’t plan to say anything to this, he continued. “And I thought about that, thought if it was justice he was after, why did he hire a PI when he could have gone to the cops? The short answer: because it wasn’t justice he wanted. It was revenge.”
She shook her head—believing, not believing. “On my dad.”
“On the man who raised you, yes. On Ben Benjamin or whatever his name really is. Listen, I don’t know why Ben kidnapped you and hid you all these years, but whoever he is, he’s not a worse guy than Warwick. Knowing what I know now, seeing Warwick lose his mind on more than one occasion, and you telling me that you’ve led a good life, up until the last couple weeks anyway…”
Dorian’s words came out fast now, dancing dizzying circles around Liz’s head. He said much that she missed, but the words that stayed with her most were:
“All that makes me think that Ben took you to help you, maybe even to save you.”