Hannah came in the next afternoon. McGee was sober — showered, dressed, sitting on the blue couch with her hands around a mug of coffee like it was an anchor.
"It took a lot of convincing," Hannah said, standing in the doorway. "I put my ass on the line, and you owe me. But you can see him." A beat. "Anderson agreed."
McGee looked up. "When?"
"Now. Car's waiting."
---
The vehicle was unmarked, the windows blackened. McGee sat in the back with a driver she didn't know and watched the black glass, and didn't ask where they were going, because she knew they wouldn't tell her. The city slid past unseen. When they stopped, she still didn't know where she was.
They walked her through corridors that all looked the same — no signs, no windows — and into a room with a metal table and two chairs. Then they left her there.
She sat. She waited. The room was stale-quiet — no air conditioning, no air movement, nothing. She could hear her own breathing.
The door opened. Two guards walked him in.
White t-shirt. Orange jumpsuit pants. Uncuffed. His hair was longer than she remembered, or maybe she was just seeing him clearly for the first time. The guards stepped back out. The door closed.
Just him and her. The silence settled back down like dust.
"Hello, Marcene," he said.
Her name in his mouth — the real one, the one nobody else used. She'd waited two weeks to hear his voice, and now here it was, and she didn't know what to do with it. He looked tired. That was the thing she noticed first, before anything else — tired, the way he never was. Thomas never got tired. Thomas was coffee and yellow houses and Dog the dog. This man had shadows under his eyes.
"Was it all a lie?" she asked. Her voice sounded thin in the still air. "Was I just a puppet in your production?"
He didn't look away. "No." His hands were flat on the metal table, palms down, steady. "Every story I told you was true, Marcene. Every feeling I had — one hundred percent true."
The words sat in the stale air between them. She wanted to pick them apart, find the performance in them, and there was nothing to find. Just him, looking back at her, letting her look.
She thought about the eggs. The heartbeat under her cheek. Last night was amazing. All true, he was saying. All of it true, and he'd done it all anyway.
She looked at him — Thomas's face, the man from her kitchen, the eggs, the heartbeat — and believed him, and hated believing him, both at once. If he'd said it was all a lie, she could have hated him cleanly. This was worse. This meant she'd have to grieve something real.
"Your father," she said.
Something moved behind his eyes. He looked down at his hands on the table for a moment. When he looked back up, the showman was gone. Just Matthew.
"My mother had cancer," he said. "They denied her coverage. Said the cost was exceptional — that it exceeded what she was worth." His voice didn't change. "Those were their words. What she was worth. We couldn't afford the medication. She died."
The silence. No air moving.
"My father was around for two more years. But he was never a father again." A pause. The stale air didn't move. "I found him. In the garage." His jaw worked, and for the first time since she'd known him — Thomas, Fauwks, Matthew, all of him — he looked young. Eleven years old, holding a placard. "I can still hear the creaking of the wood as he hung there."
She just stared at him, tears forming in her eyes.
Chapter 36