Page 34 of The Night We Lost Him

She looks confused until it must click, something washing over her face. Something like fear. Or is it anger?

“You think that someone hurt him?”

Sam puts his hands up. “No. Absolutely not. No one’s jumping to that,” he says, even though he is the exact person who has been jumping the fastest to that.

“What does any of that have to do with his decision to sell Noone Properties?”

“I guess that’s what we’re asking you.”

But Cece isn’t exactly listening to what Sam is saying. She is shaking her head, as if considering it—what one thing could possibly have to do with the other.

And she looks genuinely upset. She looks so upset that I realize this is precisely why I asked her the question. To see if she was as surprised by this being a possibility as I was.

“We have something of a complicated history, your father and I, but I’ve always cared for him. A great deal…”

She looks up—her eyes pained and glossy.

“We hadn’t spoken in several months. And I stand by what I said about why Joe took the lead. But it was somewhat unlike your father that he wouldn’t want to reach out in some way, to acknowledge the deal, but Joe and your father had a specific dynamic so that was between them.”

She pauses, almost as though she is torn about saying what she feels compelled to say. She closes her mouth, as if deciding against it. Then, she leans forward and does it despite herself.

“But in the spirit of things that we shouldn’t be offering up, your father did reach out to me. He didn’t leave a voice message, so I don’t know exactly why. It may have been nothing, but he did call me. Twice.”

Sam sits up. “When was this?”

“The night he died.”

Forty-Eight Years Ago

“Liam?” she said.

He knew who it was before he even turned around. He knew it from the sound of her voice, quiet beneath the snow and the wind and the loud street. He knew it from how the air shifted, making room for her again, giving all the room to her, even if Cory wanted to pretend it was a question.

This was his first Christmas going home. He’d avoided going back to Midwood for the holidays. He’d avoided going home for more than two years. The only exception had been at the end of his sophomore year, when he had to come back for Joe’s high school graduation. Which, of course, was Cory’s graduation too. He saw her standing there in her graduation gown, her floral dress peeking out beneath the lapels, her curls in a matching hair clip. She’d looked beautiful and happy and sure of herself.

He’d walked the other way, wanting to be generous to her—to not make that day about them. But that wasn’t the only reason. It was also about protecting himself. He knew what would happen if they met face-to-face. Exactly what was happening now in front of the damn liquor store on Avenue J. His unraveling.

She was wrapped in a thick scarf and a beanie, her curls long and wild around her shoulders. Snowflakes dotted her black coat, dotted the wine bottles sticking out of her paper bag. And it was as if not a second had passed, not one, looking at her again. Where had he been that mattered more than this?

“Cory,” he said.

“How are you?”

“Fine. Good.”

He was neither thing. If you had asked him yesterday, he would have insisted he was better than good. He was thriving at school in ways he could calculate (his grades, his classwork, his extracurriculars) and ways he couldn’t (his daily sunrise run from his residential college to the library where he couldn’t believe he got to study, where he couldn’t believe he belonged).

Looking at Cory again, that all disappeared. Everything disappeared. There was only her.

“How about you?” he asked.

“Oh, you know.”

She forced a smile, offered a shrug. She’d made it so easy for him to disengage from her. He’d tried calling at first, those early weeks of college, and she never came to the phone. And while he imagined taking the train home from New Haven and showing up at her front door, he never did it. And then he started to get busier and stopped imagining doing it. He eventually did his best to not allow himself to think about her at all.

“Joe told me you’re at Brooklyn College,” he said. “How’s that going?”

“I love it.”

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