chapter two

The mess hall smelled like burnt coffee and diesel, and someone had bolted the chairs to the

floor at some point in the boat's long service history, which struck Wren as either extremely

prudent or a quiet admission that things aboard this vessel occasionally got thrown.

She sat with her back to the bulkhead—old habit, older than Julian, older than the job, a

habit her mother would have recognized from a lifetime of sitting with her own back to walls in

rooms where men raised their voices—and watched Julian not eat the food a silent crewman had

set in front of him twenty minutes ago. Some kind of stew, gray-brown, steam long since given

up on it.

"You're not hungry," she said.

"I'm never hungry when I'm about to be interrogated."

"This isn't an interrogation."

"You're sitting with your back to the wall and you haven't touched your water glass because

you're waiting to see if I flinch when it's poured from the same jug as mine." He still hadn't

looked up from the stew. "That's an interrogation, Wren. I recognize the choreography. I taught

you half of it."

"You taught me the half where you don't get to complain about being on the receiving end

of it."

That got a real laugh out of him—short, surprised, gone as fast as it arrived, like he hadn't

meant to let it out and was already regretting the leak. He looked up then, and for a second the

amber light did something unfair to the gray at his temples, made him look less like the man

who'd wrecked her and more like the man who'd once fallen asleep on her shoulder on a redeye

to Lagos, exhausted past pretense, trusting her not to move.

She hated that she remembered the weight of his head. She hated more that some traitor part

of her still catalogued it as *evidence*.

"Tell me about Malta," she said. "Not the shape. Malta itself. Start there and maybe I'll

believe the rest."

Julian's jaw tightened—not much, a half a millimeter of muscle only someone who'd spent

four thousand hours studying his face across conference tables and courtroom benches would

catch, but she caught it, the way she'd caught everything, right up until the day she stopped

being able to bear cataloguing him at all.

"You already know what happened in Malta."

"I know what happened *to* me in Malta. I was standing in it. I don't know what happened

*around* it, which, if six years of very expensive therapy taught me anything, is a distinction

that matters." She turned her water glass a slow quarter-turn on the table, not drinking it, just

needing her hands to have a job. "You disappeared for eleven days. You came back with a story

about a supply-chain audit in Rotterdam that fell apart the second I checked one flight manifest.

And then you sat across from me in a hotel room in Valletta and told me, with your hand

completely steady, that you'd never lied to me about anything that mattered."

"I hadn't."

"You'd lied to me about Rotterdam."

"Rotterdam didn't matter." He said it simply, without heat, the way you'd state a fact about

tide tables. "What mattered was that I came back. What mattered was that I was in the room.

Everything else was—logistics."

"That's a very tidy way to describe deceiving someone you claimed to love."

The word *love* sat in the recycled air between them like something spilled. Julian's hand,

resting on the table, curled—not into a fist, just a slow closing, knuckles whitening slightly over

the swollen joint she'd noted earlier—and he looked, for one unguarded second, like a man

who'd been struck somewhere old and half-healed.

"I did love you," he said. "I did not stop loving you to go to Rotterdam, or wherever I

actually went, which I am still not going to tell you, and I understand exactly how that sounds,

and I am not going to insult either of us by pretending it sounds like anything other than what it

is."

"Which is what?"

"Guilt with excellent posture."

Despite herself, despite six years of careful architecture built specifically to keep this man's

gravity from bending her orbit again, something in Wren's chest loosened a fraction of an

inch—not forgiveness, nothing so generous, but recognition, the old dangerous pleasure of

watching Julian Voss say a true thing about himself instead of a useful one.

She hated how much she'd missed that particular pleasure.

"Where were you," she said again, quieter. "Really."

He held her gaze for a long moment. Down the corridor, metal groaned against metal, the

ambient pressure conversation the hull kept having with the ocean, endless and mostly

one-sided.

"I was learning," Julian said finally, "that someone I trusted a great deal more than I trusted

my own instincts had spent four years building a version of me. Not a lookalike. Not an actor. A

version constructed out of my documents, my patterns, my *tells*, Wren, the ones you and I

spent a decade cataloguing in each other because we thought that kind of intimacy was safe just

because it went both directions." His voice had dropped, gone flatter, the register he used when

he was no longer performing calm but had actually, temporarily, run out of performance. "I

went to Rotterdam because I received proof that this version of me had done something in

Malta eleven days before I arrived there. Something with my face. My signature. My voice,

apparently, though I haven't been able to independently confirm that part, because the recording

in question was destroyed—conveniently—in a fire that also took out the one building in

Valletta that might have had corroborating footage."

Wren went very still.

"You're telling me," she said slowly, "that there was a second you. In Malta. Before you."

"I'm telling you there might have been."

"And you didn't think, in six years, in *any* of the four separate occasions you attempted to

contact me and I hung up on you, that this was information I might have wanted."

"I thought," Julian said, and here, for the first time since the hatch sealed above them, his

composure actually cracked, hairline, a single fissure spreading fast across old glass, "that if I

told you there was a man wearing my face doing things I don't remember doing, in a country

where you nearly died, you would either think I was lying to cover something worse, or you

would believe me completely and spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder for a

version of me that isn't governed by anything I am. Both of those outcomes seemed, at the time,

considerably crueler than letting you hate me clean."

The stew had gone fully cold between them. Somewhere above, a bulkhead alarm chirped

once, briefly, and was silenced by someone with clearly more authority than patience.

Wren found she'd stopped turning the water glass. Her hand had gone flat and still against

the table's cold surface, and she made herself notice that, made herself catalogue her own tell

the way she'd catalogue anyone else's, because if she didn't do it herself Julian absolutely

would, and she was not going to hand him that.

"Say his name," she said.

"Whose name."

"The other one. The version. You've clearly given him one in your head, Julian, you give

everything a name, you named the boat we're sitting in after your grandmother's dog, don't tell

me you've spent six years thinking about a man wearing your face and never once needed a

word for him that wasn't just *me*."

Something flickered behind his eyes—surprise, maybe, that she still knew him well enough

to be right, or something closer to fear, that she knew him well enough to ask.

"Lazarus," Julian said quietly. "I call him Lazarus."

The hull groaned again, longer this time, and somewhere in its long dark iron throat, water

began, almost imperceptibly, to tick against the outer plating in a rhythm too even to be the sea.

to be continued...

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