Page 15 of The Villain Edit

I’ve had my fill of Ashley Foley, so I walk to the door. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Where are you going?” she asks.

I don’t answer her. She doesn’t need to know. “I’ll see you at seven thirty.”

Some things are impossible to escape. Ashley’s perfume clings to the Camaro’s interior, following me as I drive two hours to Buffalo. It’s spicy and rich, intoxicating. I hate that I like it. I hate that I want her so bad I can taste her.

She might be my type right down to that bratty mouth on her, but she’s not Gabriel Sinclair’s type, and I’ve always managed to avoid getting involved with women like her. I’ll deal with it. Somehow.

Frustrated and frayed, I park in front of an old house clad in pale, peeling yellow siding. Ever since I found out about Michael, I’ve felt this powerful need to see my childhood home.

The house is shabby and run-down, with a chain-link fence surrounding it. It looks darker and more dismal than I remember, but maybe I’m used to marble and chandeliers now.

This is the only stop I had planned before I got stuck with Ashley and I don’t know what I expected to feel when I arrived, but…I don’t feel anything. That part of my past is so disconnected from who I am now that even when the memories flood back, it’s like all those years happened to some other boy.

The sound of children playing somewhere in the neighborhood floats through the summer breeze, and it could be any day from my childhood, some twenty years ago. Sometimes I’d roam the neighborhood looking for trouble with other kids, but just as often I’d hang out while my father worked in the garage, because I never knew when he’d disappear—to jail, on the run, on a bender.

The detached garage where Dad spent all his free time held the scent of engine oil, exhaust, and stale cigarettes. The memory is so strong it briefly overpowers Ashley’s perfume.

There were other smells in that garage sometimes. Later I would recognize them as cannabis and cheap perfume, depending on who visited Dad. I seldom saw them. I was always sent into the house and told to watch TV.

But Sundays were our day. We ate bacon and eggs and hash browns and changed into our grungiest clothes before going out to the garage. Dad would work on cars, showing me the parts he was working on, and how he fixed them. He would smile proudly when I could recall the instructions he’d muttered with his head under the hood. He’d ruffle my hair when I could identify parts of an engine. Beam with pride when I learned to do simple tasks like changing the oil.

We’d stop for lunch—sandwiches, or sometimes fast food—at the workbench, ignoring grease-stained fingers. After, Dad would light up a smoke and gaze at the pictures on the wall, torn from magazines over decades and tacked to any surface not covered in tools. A few were naked women. I liked those most, with their ample tits and red lips. Not that I had a clue why I was drawn to them. Dad didn’t seem to see them. He always stared at the car.

A sleek silver 1969 Chevy Camaro. It was like something born from the storm gathered on the desert horizon behind it. A car fast enough to escape everything—or so my young brain rationalized. To leave behind the school I had to go back to in the fall and the scary-looking guys who visited Dad.

His father had the same Camaro, once. Lost it when he couldn’t pay his bills. Dad would tell me of the road trips his father had taken him on when he was a kid. They’d drive for days to visit family. Through sunbaked land full of so much nothingness it made a man’s heart hurt, with skies so big he felt small. Until he felt half mad with the need to see something, anything.

It wasn’t some family reunion out at the old farm in Oklahoma Dad would daydream about. It was the car and the open road. Escape. He’d look at me, his eyes full of something that made me feel sad but protective and fierce all the same, and say, “We’ll get this car one day, son. We’ll drive far away from here, just the two of us.”

We never did it. Dad never got the car. He went to prison, and I went to live with a series of foster families before my mother’s sister found me and gave me a new name and a new home. A new life.

I slide my hand over the dash of my car.Thecar. Dad’s car, my grandpa’s car. The same model, anyway. Their dream. It drives like freedom and rumbles like thunder. My past has hounded me, nipping at my heels for years, this fear that the world will find out I’m a fraud. I’m not some perfect angel, even if my uncle made me out to be one, in his image.

He was far from perfect, turns out. And all this time, I didn’t know.

Michael Sinclair, the man with a solid gold reputation for always doing the right thing in an industry that rewarded the opposite, was a liar and a cheater who couldn’t live by his own rules.

I have to be better than him, but if the great Michael Sinclair couldn’t help himself, how do I stand a chance when I come from some place like this? From people like my parents? My mother ran off after I was born and my father died in prison.

I need the escape my dad used to dream of so I could figure out what’s real and what’s a lie about my own life, and now I’m stuck with a woman who would happily ruin me because she dislikes me.

And I need her.

Michael wanted that Oscar for me almost as badly as I want it for myself. The critical reviews, the reputation, being the best. I want it, and Ashley Foley is a means to that end, so this fake relationship has to be a good thing, right? Would Michael approve? Should I still care, now that I know he kept a second family hidden away from the world and from my aunt?

There are no answers. There’s only me, alone, trying to be my best while tamping down my worst.

With a deep, shaking breath, I start up the car I bought and restored so I’d have an escape ready. I never expected to need that escape so soon.

My car still smells like Ashley’s perfume. It gets under my skin, so I stop at a public beach on Lake Erie for fresh air. Sitting in the sand, baseball cap pulled down low, sunglasses on, no one snaps a photo or asks for a selfie. I’m nobody, staring at the flat expanse of water.

I think we came here once, as a family. Maybe after my grandfather’s funeral. A picnic in the sand. A dip in the icy waters. I was told my dad’s ashes were scattered nearby.

When Michael and Cora Sinclair adopted me, my past died. They snuffed it out. No one has dug it up. Guess Michael was right—his reputation was enough for people to accept me. To never look beyond the surface.

I scoop up a handful of sand and let it slip through my fingers. Michael and Cora gave me a radically different life, saving me from following in my father’s footsteps. I’m grateful, and I’ll do my damned best to live up to the legacy my uncle left me, but when did it start to feel so suffocating?

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