Page 12 of A Life Betrayed

She looked at him expectantly, turning the handle of her coffee cup. “You used to send him around every month while you were out of town. It made such a difference with the little things.”

Mathias frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“He’d shovel the walk, clear the snow from the stairs. He even unjammed the stuck window in the study. You know the one—polite, doesn’t talk much.”

That’s for fucking sure. This is the first I’ve heard of it.“He came by every month?”

She nodded. “For the life of me, I still can’t figure out where he’s from.”

Mathias fought the urge to roll his eyes.An hour north of here.

“Isn’t his French marvelous? So integrated! You know these immigrants—they can be so stubborn, refusing to adapt, chattering on in their language as if it’s our job to understand.”

How quickly his mother had forgotten that she was an immigrant herself.

“I hope you paid him well for his trouble. He never took the money I left him.”

Mathias hid a wry smile.Of course he didn’t.

“Those are nice.” She reached out to brush his right cuff link with her fingers. “Are they new?”

Mathias withdrew his hand and raised the cup of coffee to his lips. The cuff links had arrived at his apartment in an unmarked box in early November. Silver, a small opal set into each face—they were expensive and inarguably his style. Mathias had been surprised by the man’s taste. The only clue was the note inside the box:bonne fête.

The gift had come about following a conversation he’d had with Rayan while in Toronto about a year before. Rayan often did this when Mathias was still wrapped in their warmth, his mind addled with pleasure—he ambushed him with questions.

“When did you know?”

“Know what?” Mathias asked.

Rayan, pressed naked against him on the sofa, raised his head to look at him. He often struggled to follow the current ofRayan’s mind, the way it shifted, dipping below the surface into swirling depths.

“That what you liked was different.”

Mathias preferred not to dwell on the subject. It brought up other, darker feelings that seemed to have died with his father but sometimes resurfaced in quieter moments, catching him off guard. “Who knows? Things went from either-or to equally appealing. Until recently—” Mathias stopped, shocked at his own carelessness.

“Recently?” Rayan echoed.

I seem to want only you.

“Christ, always with the questions,” Mathias muttered, extracting himself and reaching down to the floor for his pants. “What’s next, my first memory? My favorite color?”

“How about your birthday?” Rayan asked, sitting up. “You know mine.”

He did—the first of March, a date his brain had oddly retained after seeing it on Rayan’s police file. “What makes you think that?” he scoffed.

“My pay was always more that week.”

Mathias set his jaw. “Misplaced optimism. Thought you’d actually spend some of it, I don’t know, on bottle service and a lap dance.”

Rayan let out a snicker.

“What did you do with all your earnings?” Mathias stood and refastened his pants. “You lived like a monk.”

“I hid the cash under the floorboards.”

Mathias blinked, incredulous. He picked up his shirt and pulled an arm through the sleeve. “And when you left Montreal? Stuffed down your shirt?”

“I gave it away.”

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