“What do you have for me?” I ask.
“Nothing. You know—” Footsteps. Curses, a whole echoed wall of them, then static and finally, silence. His volume drops. “You know the feds are all over this now. I’m just a grunt.”
“What about later? Can I just get an outline?”
“I like having a job, Aeron. Paying bills, clothing my kids, pizza on Saturdays. That kind of thing.”
Posner took a strange liking to me after our meeting in the hospital. I was suspicious at first, but seems to me…he thinks I’m secretly nice. Once he’d interviewed Leo and realized what a terrible accident we’d had, regardless of whether he actually believed that part, he came to believe that I’d forgiven her—he waltzes into my boardroom every now and then and sees evidence of this very fact. It appeals to the last bone in his body desperate to repel cynicism, and who am I to deny a man a little hope? It doesn’t hurt him to have a friend in the business of news, that’s for sure. And in case you haven’t noticed, my “friends” always happen to be in places like the White House, or security, or NYPD Homicide.
“I could pay those bills,” I say cheerily.
“I don’t take bribes, asshat. Bribes also get me fired.”
“Then you could come work for me.”
“I’d rather bite my own hands off and shove the stumps in salt.”
We’re both chuckling, though I don’t know if it’s because he could never say this stuff in my boardroom, or because me being an asshat CEO is just so humorously cliché. Let’s go with a cynical cocktail of both.
I sit down on the bed to pull fresh socks on. “What do I have to do to get inside this?”
“Nothing. Stay away from it.” He lowers his voice. “I’m serious—report what you need to, whatever, but on a personal level? Stay the fuck away.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Pigeons, Aeron. Cupcakes. Rainbows,” he says in a monotone voice, and then hangs up.
In the words of Gwen Cooper, who may or may not be full of shit: well, that clears that up.
What the actual fuck?
SIX YEARS AGO
Leo
Aged 18
Home, NYC
Lies are not bricks, and so you cannot build a house with them. Yet it seems my mother has tried.
It was bad enough when I discovered she was divorcing Dad for having an affair, not because they’d grown apart, like she’d said. It was also bad when I found out, around the same time, that we had no money except what Dad sent over, and it would mostly dry up once I went to college, leaving Mum up crap creek without a paddle. Those things made me feel awful. But this. This. Oh, this.
I am so not equipped to build a house back up. I’m just a scientist. I don’t know how.
I’ve been hiding in my room since I pushed Mum to confess about The Inheritance—or rather, the lack thereof. Somebody died and as a result, we got paid, but not in the traditional sense. The legal sense. The morally right and true sense. I keep pacing about just to burn off nervous energy, as if wishing the world away would crack these walls, peel off the paper and smash off the plaster and raze this sorry excuse of a home to the ground. So what if it has a pool and a state-of-the-art kitchen? None of it will ever be ours.
It would have been Dad’s, but now it will be his. Aeron Lore’s.