Page 68 of Unlocked Dive
“He told you about it?” His voice is resigned.
“He told me his brother was there.” Slow horror creeps over my chest.
“Gabriel.” He closes his eyes, and the muscles clench beneath his clean-shaven jaw.
Gabriel.
“Echo said there was a video,” I say, carefully.
He looks up at the door, where the son he loves fights for his future, and the last of his arrogance leaks away.
Why couldn’t he have loved them both the same?
As if I don’t know the answer.
“Gabriel deleted the video. He said it would be too traumatizing for Echo or his mother to see, and too tempting for Echo.” His eyes meet mine, and he looks a hundred years old. “He called the paramedics. He called me.”
“But you still think he could have had something to do with the fall. Something more than taunting him into an unstable trick.” Bitterness leaks from my tongue. “You think he moved the mat.”
I can picture it, stark behind my unwilling eyes. In my vision, Gabe is still young, darkly jealous of the lucent boy he named Echo in a shabby bid to dim his light. I remember his baffling fragility and the cut of his cruelty.
Wash straightens in his seat, shaking off the edge of his decay in the face of my accusation.
“I don’t think anything.” He sighs, giving away the lie. “I know there was envy and resentment when they were younger. I know I failed Gabriel when his mother and I divorced, and that Echo suffered for it. But Gabe is a grown man, successful now in his own way. Surely he’s outgrown his petty rivalry.”
A broken laugh escapes me. “You don’t know either of your sons nearly as well as you think you do.”
He frowns at me, insulted. “And you do?”
I freeze.
“I know Echo.”
“And Gabriel?”
I don’t owe him anything, but the air is already heavy with confession, and my throat is hollow with the ache of grief. I slump on the bench and let my head fall back against the wall.
“I knew him in college.”
“In Tilburg?”
“He never mentioned me?” His ignorance shouldn’t surprise me. Byrd Baardwijk isn’t exactly a common name, and I can’t imagine Wash letting Reggie hire me if he’d known the connection. ButChrist, Gabriel and I were together for over a year before I broke his rules and he broke my heart. And he talked about his father all the time in school.
He doesn’t deserve your pity.
“We were…not close during that time.” Wash shakes his head, dismissing his fatherly flaws. “You were friends?”
A bitter laugh escapes me. “Something like that.”
Calculation stirs in the haunted shadows of his eyes. “You were lovers.”
“Yes.” I blow out a breath and let the word hang, eyes fixed on the door across the hall.
For a long moment, his eyes burn into the side of my head.
“Does Jericho know?”
“Not yet.” I wait for his condemnation, but he surprises me again.
