“Are you okay?”
His concern, as genuine as it sounds, tells me I need to get a hold of myself, of this conversation. I wipe my expression clean and drop my cup back onto the saucer.
“I’m fine. But I asked you here because I wanted to get your take on something.” I pause to receive his nod. “I called ESP, the company you told me offered Will a new job. I talked to their head of HR. She didn’t know Will, and what’s more, she told me the last executive job was filled over eight months ago.”
“I don’t...” Corban’s gaze doesn’t let mine go, but his dark brows—along with his lashes, the only hairs on his head—dip in a sharp V. “You’re telling me that Will didn’t get a new job in Seattle?”
“That’s right.”
“But... I don’t get it. Why would he feed me that elaborate story about a new job on the West Coast if it wasn’t true? Why would he tell me about these hotshot new colleagues he was going to have, all the cool and crazy things they did on their team-building excursions? He told me they were taking him skydiving, and that their office building had a zip line. I mean, those are some pretty specific details. Why would he make all that up?”
“He didn’t make it up. I’m pretty sure he got it from ESP’s website.”
“But the new job, the move to the West Coast, his worries you wouldn’t want to leave your family... That was all fabrication?”
“Apparently so.”
Corban’s frown deepens, and his eyes flash with something I recognize as disappointment. His friend, the one he misses like hell, lied to him. He seems so genuinely offended that I decide to switch tracks.
“Did Will ever tell you where he was from?”
Corban tries to shake it off, crossing a denim-clad leg and bouncing his red Converse sneaker under the bar. “Oh, sure. I have a couple of cousins in Memphis, so Will and I were always comparing notes. Turns out we’ve been to a bunch of the same neighborhood haunts.”
“Will is from Seattle.”
“Okay.” Corban drags out the word like he’s humoring me, but his legs go still. “But then he moved to Memphis when he was what, five? Six? I know for sure it was when he was still a kid. Will went to Central, the big rival of the school where my cousins went.”
“Will went to Hancock High. In Seattle.”
For the longest moment, Corban is speechless, a lapse of silence that amplifies the coffee shop sounds all around us. His face goes slack, like he’s run headlong into a door. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. I have the yearbook to prove it.”
“So, okay. That’s...” He runs a palm over his shiny scalp, and I can see his mind working, trying to puzzle the pieces together. That he can’t make them fit seems to have him baffled. “Sorry, but I have to ask. Why all the lies?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. But if it makes you feel any better, he told them to me, too.”
His head tilts. “You thought he was from Memphis, too?”
“Yes.”
“Then how’d you find out about Seattle?”
I don’t see any reason not to tell him, though I do keep my answer as vague as possible. “I received a condolence card from Hancock Class of ’99. One thing led to another.”
He takes that in with a curt nod, then falls still for a long moment. “Okay. So on the one hand, I’m more confused than ever, but on the other, in some weird, twisted way, things sort of make sense.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Will’s behavior lately. He just seemed so...distracted and...I don’t know, off. Moody and super stressed out. A couple of weeks ago, some guy at the gym told him to wipe down the machine, and Will just lost it. He starts screaming and throwing punches, and I had to physically drag him outside and calm him down. I’ve never seen him lose his temper like that. Now I’m wondering if one thing had to do with the other, like if he was acting funny because of all the lies, or if the lies were to cover up something else. Does that make any sense?”
A flurry of emotions rise in my chest, a familiar hurt leading the pack. “It makes total sense, unfortunately.”
“Was he acting stressed with you, too?”
Events from the past month flash across my mind like a slide show. The time I was making dinner while he paced the backyard, his cell pressed to his ear and his face clamped down in a scowl, talking to a person he would identify only as a “colleague.” The time I came downstairs to him sitting in his car in the driveway, staring into space for a good twenty minutes. The time I rolled over to find him wide-awake, watching me with an expression I’d never seen before, an emotion I couldn’t define. When I asked him what was wrong, his answer was to make love to me.
But AppSec had just acquired the City of Atlanta as a client, and Will’s team was working under a tight deadline. He brushed his behavior off as work stress, and at the time, I believed him.
Or maybe I just wanted to.
Now, though? Now I’m certain there was something else going on. Something that made Will get on a plane to Seattle.
“You knew him better than anyone else,” Corban says. “What do you think was going on?”
I roll his question around my mind for a long moment, coming at it from every possible angle. I think about Will’s sketchy past, the destruction he left in his wake back in Seattle. The deadly fire that burned down a block of apartments and landed Will’s mother and two innocent children in early graves. His father, alone and bedridden in a state facility for the indigent. And these are only the people I know about. How many others are there?
I swish around the last of my tea, watching the dredges swirl around the bottom of my cup. “I think something—or more likely, someone—from his past came back to haunt him. I think that’s why he was acting strange, and why he got on the plane to Seattle.”
Corban doesn’t answer. I look up and he’s gone completely still.
“What?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you this, but based on that answer, I feel like I have to.” He pauses, holding my gaze with eyes so black, I can’t tell his pupil from his iris. “A day or two before the crash, Will called to ask me for a favor. He made me swear on my mother’s grave that I would do it.”
He stops, and so does my heart. “That you’d do what?”
“I promised that if anything ever happened to him, I’d look out for you.”
*
I return home to a mountain of Lowe’s bags climbing the walls of my foyer, and my father on his knees, a drill in his hand and a tool belt slung around his waist.
“What’s going on?”
“Floodlights at both doors, that’s what’s going on.” He roots around in one of the bags, pulls out a handful of light switches. “I’ll mount these guys on the inside wall, but the outdoor fixtures have motion sensors. Anybody who gets within five feet will find themselves in the spotlight. Literally.”