Winston Sinclair—Room number 736

I spent most of my life trying to hide my secrets. Some of those secrets were bigger than others, but every one of them started with a lie. One simple lie that eventually morphed into either a tragedy or a gem of good fortune. There were secrets threaded throughout my life. Too many to keep track of. Most of my lies made me a lot of money, but a few of them cost me millions.

It started when I was six. My mother got me a canary. I hated that thing, but she insisted I keep it in my room. She said it was good for me to learn how to take care of something besides myself. That damn bird would scatter birdseed and feathers all over, and start chirping at the break of dawn. Every day, for months, I wanted to break the bird’s puffy, yellow neck.

Then one day, I did.

It was 5:30 in the morning on a summer’s day. I should’ve been sleeping in, but it wouldn’t shut up. So, when I couldn’t take the chatter anymore, I whipped open the cage door, grabbed the little motherfucker, and tried to twist off one of its wings. It pecked and squawked at me until I dropped it on the floor. I watched it flop around on the carpet, dragging its broken wing around in some kind of frantic dance.

I broke the other wing next, just to see what it would do.

When I put the bird back down on the carpet, both of its wings dangling off its tiny body like lopsided, feathery pendants, it didn’t dance or squawk. It just looked at me. We stared at each other until I heard my mother walking down the hallway outside my door. I quickly opened the window and threw the bird out, watching it flutter down like a falling leaf until it smacked head-first into a rhododendron branch and landed crooked-necked in the dirt below. When my mother came into the room and saw the open cage and window, I began my first secret. I told her the bird flew out the window while I was cleaning its cage. I cried. I apologized. I lied and told her I was sad. And, forever the schoolteacher, she told me it was a good lesson. When I pretended to beg her for another canary, as expected, she said pets weren’t replaceable. She said I wasn’t responsible enough yet and blamed herself for trusting me when I was still so young.

As I grew, I learned that lies could just as easily get you out of trouble as they could get you into it. When I was a teenager, my mother thought I spent a lot of time at the library, when instead, I was out making mayhem with my friends and spinning lies to cover it up. In college, I lied about my grandfather dying to get out of taking finals. I lied to girls all the time, telling them they were “the one” just so they would fuck me before I said goodbye. I even lied about graduating. I told my mother not to come for my college graduation ceremony because I had strep throat and couldn’t even go myself. She was in Philadelphia and I was in Indiana, at Notre Dame. She never knew I didn’t actually graduate because I didn’t pass enough classes to get my diploma.

But the lies that led to my life’s biggest secret were the ones I told my wife. Heather and I met when I was working at Strahan Partners. I was twenty-two, with a new job at the state’s most respectable lobbying firm, thanks to a handsomely fabricated résumé. Five days a week, I was a runner. I’d deliver documents wherever they needed to go, all over town. They gave me a company car and a promise that I could eventually work my way up if I worked hard enough. Heather was a secretary for one of the state senators. I must’ve convinced her I was something special because after three or four visits to her office, we had our first date. She quit her job soon after we got engaged, and we were married a year later.

I met Marissa at a bar when Adam was four years old. She was very different from my wife. She didn’t want to spend her life shopping and getting her nails done and having tea with some senator’s wife. Marissa just wanted to have fun. A lot of fun. She was my deliverance from reality for four solid years, and she was by far my biggest secret. By the time we met, I’d already made my first million, having worked my way up the ranks at Strahan before jumping over to Murray and Associates. I got Marissa an apartment, and I’d spend a few afternoons a week sharing her bed.

But everything changed when she got pregnant. She refused to get rid of it. She started teasing me about the baby being leverage, telling me she’d have one hell of a bargaining chip the moment our child was born. She was trying to make a joke out of it, but I knew from the start there was nothing funny about it. I knew she was serious.

Two months after Bradley was born, Marissa started asking me to leave Heather. When I told her I’d do no such thing, she threatened to tell Heather about us. She knew there was no pre-nup and Heather would get half of everything if we divorced. To keep Marissa quiet, I gave her more money. But, she started doing foolishly risky things. She’d take Bradley to the park and strike up a conversation with my mother as she sat and watched Adam on the swings. Marissa once showed me a picture of my mother holding a chubby-faced Bradley, as if she already knew he was her grandson. There was even a picture of Adam holding Bradley’s tiny hand as he sat in his stroller at the park. I had to stop it, before I lost my wife and son—and money—for good.

So, I told another lie in order to keep my secret. I told my wife I wanted to move out west and open my own firm. I told her I had connections there and moving Adam away from his grandmother, whom he loved more than anything, was no big deal. She said she trusted me, and a few days later, the moving truck showed up at our front door.

I didn’t tell Marissa we were moving until Heather and Adam were already on the other side of the country. She was angrier than I’d ever seen a person, and I was fresh out of lies. There was nothing I could do or say to make it better. She threatened to drop Bradley at an orphanage. Or over a bridge. She said if she couldn’t have me, she didn’t want him either.

I did the only thing I could think of. I hired a lawyer.

For the next few weeks, I stayed in Philadelphia, “tying up some loose ends” while my wife and son were in Seattle. The lawyer drafted the documents for Marissa to sign, and I gave her a briefcase filled with more cash than I’d ever seen in my life.

She signed away full custodial rights to her own son for two million under-the-table dollars. For her guaranteed silence, she got another quarter million and a one-way ticket to Europe.

And I was left with a baby I didn’t want.

I took him to my mother’s house and told new lies. I said he was the product of a one-night stand, and his mother was emotionally unstable. I said I had full custody of him because she was addicted to drugs. I said Heather and Adam could never find out because I couldn’t bear to lose them. I cried and apologized for my horrible mistake, just like I did the morning I killed that damn canary. I wept in my mother’s arms and begged her to take care of Bradley for me. I tugged and manipulated her heartstrings as if she were a marionette, eventually convincing her Bradley needed her more than Adam did. I promised her we would hire the finest nanny for Adam, and he would be loved just as she had loved him. We cried together, though my mother’s tears were the only real ones to fall. She was mourning Adam as if he had died because she knew she would never see him again.

I never said the words out loud, but I think she always knew I would keep him from her in order to protect my secret. She knew I wouldn’t risk losing everything I had for a baby I barely knew.

And it worked. Mother raised Bradley just as she had raised me. And Adam. He slept in my old bed and got the same damn chocolate pudding in his lunch I did. She’d send me pictures from time to time, always to my office so Heather couldn’t see them. I kept them all in a locked desk drawer. Occasionally I would look at them, always surprised at how much Bradley looked like his half-brother.

I can’t say I loved him, but Bradley was my son, and he deserved a better fate than the one my mother handed him.

I privately grieved when he died. Marissa knocked on my mother’s door one day, showing her a picture of the two of us together she’d taken before Bradley was even born. She said she was Bradley’s mother, and she just wanted to take him out for lunch to celebrate his ninth birthday. My mother invited her in, and then, after only a brief conversation, she let Bradley go with Marissa. They were supposed to go to Ruby Tuesday’s, but instead, they ended up wrapped around a phone pole.

If he were still alive, he’d be seventeen years old.

Every day since, I’ve wondered why my mother let him go. I’ve never forgiven her for it. And I never will.

Even after Bradley died, I refused to let her back into our lives. She didn’t deserve to be a part of my life. Or Adam’s. Not only was my mother holding my biggest secret in her careless hands, but her mistake was beyond pardon. Having her in my life was too risky. It was easier to continue to shut her out.

I didn’t expect Adam to understand. When I took the picture of Bradley to my mother’s room at that godforsaken nursing home and told him the half-truth about his brother, I wasn’t doing it to make him understand. I was doing it because I knew if I didn’t, he’d keep pushing my mother. And the facts she might eventually give him would be far more damaging than any lie I could tell. I told Adam everything about Bradley, except for the truth about why I kept him a secret. I admitted to a one-night stand and told him about the car accident. But, I told him I kept Bradley’s existence from him only to protect his mother. I told him it would destroy her to know she wasn’t the only one. Even now, all these years later. I couldn’t risk losing her. I said he could hate me if he wants to, but he would only be hurting his mother by dredging up the past and telling her about Bradley.

He was angry and confused, calling me an asshole for keeping it from them for all these years. After that smug nurse kicked us out of Pine Manor for arguing, we took our conversation out to the parking lot. There, Adam accused me, yet again, of trying to control his life. He was furious, saying I’m always manipulating everyone to my own favor and asking me why the hell I just can’t stay away from him. When he brought that little girlfriend of his up as an example, I totally lost it. I screamed at him, telling him he was a fool for thinking she was in love with him and not his trust fund. I told him he deserved a better fuck than some minimum-wage loser from the mosquito-ridden backwoods of Louisiana.

He stood there staring at me, his eyes burning with a fire I’ve never seen before. His lips pressed closed, and his hands clenched into fists. I saw it coming, but before he could raise a hand, I dropped the bomb. I told him about my deal with her. I told him she picked my money over him. His mouth didn’t open again, but his eyes kept burning. Even as I climbed into my car and drove away, I could feel his stare scorching through me.

I don’t regret telling him any of it. I only regret I didn’t live long enough to see how it would all play out.

The irony of my car accident was not lost on me. Though the Jag didn’t end up wrapped around a phone pole—and I didn’t die instantly like they did—it’s a biting twist of fate that Bradley, Marissa, and I all left this world because of a crumpled-up hunk of metal. I’m glad, though, that he wasn’t the one to suffer. His death was quick and straightforward; Marissa’s, too, they said.

Mine, though…mine was far from straightforward.

My death was agonizing and infinite. He let it go on far longer than he should’ve, mostly because I think he enjoyed watching me suffer. When they brought me out of sedation and I was conscious enough to see his face, I already knew what he was thinking. I saw the flatness of his expression, the lack of empathy when I cried out in agony. And I knew what it meant. He was reveling in my misery. Taking pleasure in my pain.

He waited for three days—three days—just to see me squirm. When he finally saw fit to put that pillow over my face, my last breath was filled with far more than relief. If my death is not blamed on my own burned-out lungs, it might seem a justifiable murder; death to end suffering. But, it was far more than that. It was deceit and betrayal, the likes of which I’ve never seen. Even in all my years of politics.

I once told him, a long time ago, that life is full of hard choices. I told him he could tackle those choices head-on, like a man, or he could second-guess his every decision and end up being nothing more than a powerless over-thinker.

Tonight, he chose manhood. And, despite the sting of his betrayal, I’m proud of him for it.