” I said. He released my hand and gave me a warm smile.
A quiet fell, undercut by the muted rush of the water heater. “Where’d you grow up?” I asked, feeling as if I was taking a hammer to the smooth glass of the silence. It sounded more abrupt than I’d intended. “I mean, you’re not from the South, are you?”
A slight smile creased his mouth. “Depends. Are you going to call me a damn Yankee if I admit I was born in upstate New York?”
“Nothing so nice,” I replied with a small laugh.
He folded one leg over the other, resting his ankle across his knee. “I guess I’ll have to brave the insults then. Saratoga, New York. Went to high school at Saratoga Springs High then left for the bustle of the big city.”
“New York City?”
He grinned. “Cleveland.”
This time my laugh was genuine. “Oh, my. Culture shock!”
“In more ways than one.”
I tucked my feet underneath me. “What about your folks. Do they still live in Saratoga?” I knew what the answer would be. Or rather, I knew what he needed to tell me.
He shook his head, a shadow flickering across his face. “My mother passed away right before I started college. My dad about five years later.”
I made the appropriate sympathetic expression. He believed it. Surely nobody was that good an actor. “Any brothers or sisters?”
“Nope. I have some cousins I never see, but that’s about it.”
Hunh. I’d expected him to say that both his parents had been only children or some such thing. But maybe whatever caused him to have these fake memories also made him have no desire to seek out the rest of his mythical family.