Page 81 of The Sinner: James

“No.”

No emotion shows in his eyes.

“She tried to be with you, didn’t she?”

“Yeah... she did,” he says, shifting his gaze away from the view.

“How come you didn’t want her?”

A small smile tilts his lips.

“She’s not my type,” he says.

I wonder what his type is.

Do I fit his taste? What about the women working here? Are they his type? Was Daria too much of a headache for his taste?

“Has she been with more than one man?”

His lips purse as he studies me briefly.

“Uh-huh.”

“At the same time?”

“Yeah...”

“Have Lex or Ed been with her?”

“Not that I know of.”

He flashes a secret smile, observing me.

“Why is it so important to you?” he asks.

“It’s not,” I say dryly, looking at the event room.

He does the same.

“Do you have any family left, James?” I ask after a while.

“No…” he says softly. “My dad was my only family, and he wasn’t much different than the men you see in this room. The only difference was that he never cheated on someone because he never committed to a woman.”

“So you follow his example...” I murmur, glancing at him.

“I know nothing else...” he admits quietly. “And life didn’t show me anything different than what I saw growing up.”

“How can you see something different if your life revolves around this?” I say, pointing to the orgy in front of us.

“Hmm... You don’t understand, do you?” he says. “You’re too young to understand, but you’ll learn in time. This is not confined to this room. It’s everywhere. The good you think you see in the world today is an illusion–a figment of the imagination. Nothing is what it seems. It’s a lie stacked up on top of another lie, and if you look hard enough and long enough, you'll see right through it. If you wait long enough, you’ll experience betrayal and disappointment to last you a lifetime. Evil has great power in this world. The good always struggles, while the evil is tenacious, versatile, and has a thousand faces. It roams freely in people’s hearts. The little gestures they do or don’t do, and the innocent lies they tell themselves or relay to others. That’s where evil lives and thrives. It’s dripping with poison, making people indifferent and blind and deaf to so many bad things. It compels them not to do the right thing. It’s the small evil in good people that feeds the big evil in bad people.”

I look at him, dumbfounded.

How can he see it so clearly, yet he is exactly like them?

“And that makes the bad people innocent?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. The bad people can’t stop it, but the good people can, yet they look the other way.”

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