Page 13 of Margins

“Hell of a time to be living, huh? Get through the Depression, go almost straight into a war. I mean, everything is terrible enough now, but—”

“No, it’s not—that’s not what I was saying,” Elijah interrupts as he fumbles for his phone in search of something. “I mean, yes, it was a hell of a time then and it’s a hell of a time now, but when I talked to my mom about my great grandparents, I took notes about a few things. The years they were born, where they lived and what they did for a living, when my grandpa was born, when they all died.”

“Okay,” Alex drawls, something obvious there, even if he can’t quite see it yet.

Elijah takes a deep breath. “If these messages were written sometime after the war, E couldn’t have been my great grandmother. She died in 1940.”

“Oh. Fuck,” Alex echoes, draining the last of the beer just before Elijah does the same.

“Yeah.”

“So, it sounds like they wrote these shortly after the war ended, like in 1946 or 1947? Maybe a little later than that? How old would your great grandfather have been then?”

“Um, around 33 or 34?”

“Okay, so he definitely could’ve been a hotshot attorney by then, with his own office, and it was years after losing his wife, so it’s also entirely possible that he could’ve fallen in love again,” Alex says.

“But then he fell in love with someone he shouldn’t have. A relationship problematic enough that they were both afraid of being caught.”

Alex nods. “And he mentions going to the warehouses sometime, so maybe this is just a massive class conflict. You said your great grandmother had come from money, but what if this new woman didn’t? She might have worked at a warehouse of some kind, far beneath someone with a prominent legal career.”

Elijah rubs a hand over his forehead before blinking some of his frustration away, and while Alex knows he’s not strictly tired, he looks like he’s wiped out. “That all makes sense.”

“But you—” Alex catches himself, wanting to offer comfort that really isn’t his to give to a friend he’s only barely made, if he’s even done that much. “We can put all this away if you want.”

“I’m sorry, I—” Elijah looks across the table at Alex, his lip caught between his teeth again. “This would make a hell of a column, huh? And you’ve probably got some nice investigative resources at work.”

“This has always been off the record, Elijah. I’m not gonna let anything about that change.”

Elijah presses a fist to his eye, rubbing away something that might not have been there in the first place. “Sorry, I know I’m being weird about this, but I think I got so wrapped up in the idea of this being my family history, and now I don’t know what it is anymore. It might not belong to me at all.”

“Hey, no. I understand. And you already agreed that I’m very weird, so I certainly don’t have much room to talk.”

Alex pushes away from the table then, clearing their bottles and putting the chips away, returning to find Elijah still staring down at the book in his hand when he speaks. “Do you still want to know the rest of their story?”

“I do, yeah,” Alex answers honestly, leaning up against the doorway when Elijah slowly looks up at him. “But remember that it was never about my family at all. I was just intrigued by these two people fighting their way together in the margins of some classic novels. It’s okay if you don’t want it to go any further.”

“I have the missing pieces you need, though. The story won’t make as much sense if you only have half of it.”

“Mmmm, no, maybe not,” Alex agrees. “But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned in the past several months, it’s that half is sometimes all I get to keep.”

“You miss her.”

Alex looks around, his gaze safe anywhere as long as it’s not pointed toward the same seat Cassidy had sat in every night. “I miss my best friend, yeah. And I miss what we were supposed to be. What I thought we were.”

Elijah doesn’t say anything else right away, marking his place with the bar receipt, then closing the book and picking it up with the other one he’d brought with him, as reverent as Alex always has been when he holds his own. When Elijah starts walking toward the front door. Alex follows silently, as unsure as he usually is these days, stepping in front of Elijah to open it for him, Elijah turning around as soon as he’s safely outside.

“I still want to know what happens next,” Elijah admits softly.

“Okay,” Alex tells him, but even as he says it, he thinks maybe tomorrow night would be too soon, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. “Do you maybe want to meet up on Saturday, like for lunch or something, before you have to work?”

A sigh of relief rattles Elijah’s next breath, and Alex doesn’t understand that either. “Yeah, that would be great.”

The text from Elijah comes on Thursday afternoon.

You busy tonight?

Alex calls him and doesn’t bother with a hello. “Thought you had to work.”

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