Page 64 of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
“For the record, the look on your face right now?” He brushed a thumb across her cheek. “That’s why I don’t talk about it with strangers.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her eyes were too big and too wet and he hated that he’d made her weepy. “I’m so sorry I asked.”
Her hand was on his chest and Ethan held it against his pounding heart. “I’m not.”
“But—”
“You’re not a stranger.” He gave her hand a squeeze and felt her sway in the small space, lean against him in the dark.
“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. I’m—”
“Don’t be. When we met, I was coming off eight months of surgeries and four months of rehab. I’d stopped eating. I couldn’t shave or comb my hair. I’d lost my job, and my friends had stopped taking my calls. It got so bad that, one night, I finally opened that bottle of scotch. I got so drunk I... Never mind.” He pushed off the wall. They needed to keep walking.
“You got so drunk you...” She sounded so worried that he had to tell her—
“In my job we used to travel. Constantly.My team used to give me a hard time about all the books I read, so one day I started writing this novel about a guy named Evan Knight. It was nothing. Just a way to kill time on a red-eye. It wasn’t even finished, and it probably wasn’t very good, but what it lacked in quality I made up for in drunkenness, so I started querying literary agents, chicken pecking with my left hand. I honestly thought I’d dreamed it until I started getting the rejections. Then I got one that wasn’t a rejection and—” He gave a tired sigh. “That wasDead of Knight. I guess you know the rest.”
“Wow.” She sounded stunned. “I didn’t know it was possible to hate you even more.”
He would have been crushed if she hadn’t been smiling.
“So, yeah. That’s how I ended up at that party. And that’s why it’s okay if you didn’t recognize me. To be honest, looking back, I don’t even recognize myself.”
Ethan started walking, pushing aside cobwebs and pointing out rotten boards. They were lost inside the narrow space and he could feel Maggie—her gaze and her hand and her questions swirling like the dust and thick enough to choke on.
“Do you miss it? The Secret Service?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“That’s... specific,” she teased. “Really eloquent. Very—”
“I’m nothimanymore.” It wasn’t a snap. It was a confession. That’s what people never understood—that the reason Ethan didn’t talk about his old life wasn’t because he was private. It was because his old life didn’t even feel like his. “I would miss it if I were still that guy, but that was someone else’s life. I don’t... I can’t... Yesterday was the first time I’ve even touched a gun in years.” Ethan shook his head, but didn’t look back. He never looked back.
“What?” She gasped. “Ethan? Slow down. Ethan.” She gripped his shirt again, stopping him. “What happened?”
Maggie was a world-class writer. Of course she knew there was more to the story. But that didn’t mean he had to tell her. He could always lie. Evade. Flirt. With anyone else, he would have. But with Maggie...
“I did the surgeries and the rehab,but...” He held his right hand in the beam of the light and—at the end of the corridor—the shadow shook. Becausehis handshook. Because his hand wouldalwaysshake—always for the rest of his life. “See that? That tremor?”
“Not really.”
“It’s there. Trust me.” He gripped his hand so tightly his fingernails left half-moon indentions on his palms. Scars that only he could see. “It’s always there.”
They were silent for a long time, lost inside the dancing dust and swirling secrets, so he wasn’t expecting the question—
“Do you have kids?”
His laugh was sharp and too loud in the stillness. “What?” He started walking again.
“Don’t laugh. It’s just... you were so good with the baby, I wondered...”
“No. No kids. But I do have four brothers and four sisters-in-law—who send me annoying texts when they find out I’m skipping Christmas, by the way.” He gave her a look and heard her laugh. “And nieces and nephews. So many nieces and nephews.”
“How many?”
“Seven. No, twelve. Maybe eighteen? I don’t know. They keep popping them out.”
“You sound very attentive. Involved.”
