Blond Stella held hands with her weedy, ginger-headed hubs. I saw how their features and their colors blended in the three little girls. The boy towered in the middle, dark and barrel-chested.
I clicked back two pics, to one where the boy stood tall and thick and sturdy in the surf, the littlest girl climbing up him like he was her own pet tree. I leaned in, studying his face. He had big brown eyes with heavy lids. His hair was thick and wiry, and his skin was olive. He was tanned, while the rest of the family was in various phases of turning pink and peeling. His teeth were very straight, but the front two had a gap in them.
I knew that gap. I’d always liked it on Zach Birdwine.
I did the math. The boy was big, but he had no hair yet on his chest, barely any on his legs, and he still had a round-cheeked baby softness to his face. As old as fifteen, maybe as young as twelve. Either way, before my time. Either way, his life span overlapped with Birdwine’s marriage.
I sat back. It could not be so. I’d worked with Birdwine for almost a decade. We’d been lovers for more than half a year. Now we were supposedly friends. This was a large and toothy chunk of history to leave out.
At a glance, his boy had landed in a good place, with books and beach vacations and a wild pack of adoring little sisters. The Hubs’s arm looked both possessive and comfortable, resting on the boy’s shoulder. The whole family had good body language in their pictures, actually, leaning in and turning slightly toward each other. They looked like a regulation happy family. On Facebook, at least.
Was this why Birdwine had abandoned him? If so, it was a cop-out. The kid wouldn’t see it like that. Kind as Mrs. Mack had been, I hadn’t felt relieved or grateful when the state of Georgia spared me from the company of my mother.
Julian appeared in the doorway, his face set in stress lines, holding a manila folder. “It was in his car.”
As he brought it to me, I minimized the browser. Pissed as I was, I wouldn’t sell out Birdwine by opening up his private life to Julian, who already didn’t like him. Also, I didn’t want to look at a happy family, posting happy stories that might even be true. I was here with some jagged ends from families that hadn’t worked.
There were more of us. The world was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.
I said, “Good job,” and took the folder. Julian hovered over me, hands twisting.
The top pages were Birdwine’s interview notes, scrawled in his dark, side-slanted writing. First up, an interview with Tolliver, Kai’s Austin boyfriend. Her sudden disappearance in the dead of night had baffled him. She hadn’t even told him she was sick, though by his account they’d been deeply in love. Sure they had.
I glanced up at Julian, but he wasn’t reading. He was still twisting his hands, looking at me.
“What’s eating you?” I asked.
“I didn’t realize you two were a thing. You and Birdwine,” Julian said.
“We’re not a thing,” I said, flipping another page.
“Oh. Okay,” he said, with exaggerated disbelief.
“Julian, stop hovering. We’re not a thing,” I told him, and the last sentence came out raw and angry. Mostly because bare minutes before I saw Birdwine’s cuckoo bird, dropped into some other fellow’s nest and left behind, I’d been considering him. Considering us, even.
He moved to sit across from me and folded his hands on the table. “Well, good. Because he’s a scary guy. And he clearly has some kind of substance problem.”
“Oh, you think,” I said, flicking blindly through four more pages. “Drop it. It isn’t relevant.”
“It will be, though,” Julian said. “When we find Hana. That guy, he isn’t— He doesn’t seem like he’d be good for a kid.”
I felt a lightning stab of blue-bright anger. If he’d said it half an hour ago, I would have called him on it, hard. I would’ve snapped, Try not to be a privileged little shit. But between my embarrassing Goodnight-Sweet-Prince tableau at Birdwine’s bedside and this moment, I’d gone through a sea change.
One look at Birdwine’s son, ditched down in Florida, and my loyalties had shifted, from history to blood. Julian, after all, was desperately trying. He was chock-full of hopeful plans, wanting to make a family for Hana. Birdwine had so thoroughly abandoned his own child that the boy didn’t even live in Birdwine’s conversation.