I nodded. “Private First Class Geoffrey Waters,” I said.
“Yeah,” Everett said sadly. “We were honoring him posthumously with the Medal of Honor.”
I felt sick to my stomach because I knew very well what my father had done at that event. After the service had ended, he’d gone to the young man’s family to thank them for their sacrifice and then had proceeded to ask if their son, who’d been rumored to have been gay, had sought absolution before his death so he’d get to sit at his heavenly father’s side in the afterlife. While my father had left the event when he’d politely been asked to do so, he’d used the cameras of the reporters waiting outside to suggest that the young soldier would still be alive if he’d followed the path of God.
It was the first time I’d questioned my father…and my faith. I just hadn’t had the guts to go against him, and when he’d gotten home that night crowing about his success, Brody and I had both sat on the couch, silent as church mice as we’d listened to our father call it a victory for good Christians. A few months later, Brody had come out to me, and I’d gone running to my father to tell him his own son had been possessed by the lure of the devil.
“Can I ask you what made you do it, son?” Everett asked.
I flinched because my first thought was that he was talking about what I’d done to Brody. But then he said, “What made you switch sides?”
I had the stock answer on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t give voice to it.
Because it just wasn’t true anymore, no matter how hard I’d worked to convince myself I’d done what I had for Brody and others like him.
I met Everett’s eyes. “Because I’m gay.”
It was the last thing he expected me to say. That much was clear.
I’d expected the words to be harder to get out, but it was surprisingly easy, and the fact that Nash would have been able to hear the admission didn’t bother me in the least. Vincent had most definitely broken something inside of me, but in the best way. He’d broken something that had healed wrong after all those years of pretending I’d done the right thing by Brody when I’d betrayed him.
Everett studied me for a moment and then held up his coffee cup. I lifted mine and clinked it gently against his. “Bet that felt good,” he said softly.
I laughed and said, “You have no idea.”
He watched me sadly for a moment and then said, “Yeah, Nathan, I do.”
It took me a really long time to get what he was telling me. I shook my head in disbelief. He couldn’t be…
“How?” was all I could ask, though I wasn’t even sure what I was really asking. “You…you were married! You have a son.”
Everett smiled patiently and lowered his mug. “A son who won’t talk to me anymore,” he said quietly.
“Everett, I’m sorry,” I began, but he waved me off.
“I knew something was wrong when I married Eleanor, but I didn’t know what it was. I was in denial for a really long time. When Reese came along, I put everything that was wrong with the marriage behind me because I needed to make it work for my son. And we managed it for a lot of years – making it look like we were the perfect, happy couple.”
“What changed?” I asked. I’d seen the president and his wife together hundreds of times in the years Everett had been in the White House, and I’d never seen even a hint that something was off between them.
“I met someone who made me realize I’d been hiding who I really was. He…he was the worst possible person for me to fall in love with, and it came at one of the most inopportune times in my life, but none of that mattered. I knew as soon as I saw him that he was going to change everything for me. And for once, I didn’t care.”
The sadness that overtook Everett made my heart hurt. I glanced over my shoulder to see if Nash was still listening, but was surprised to find he’d left the room at some point.
“It’s okay, Everett,” I said as I reached my hand across the table and covered his. “We don’t have to talk about this.”
But he continued like I hadn’t spoken. “He was in the army, so he wasn’t free to be with me, either. I still had a few years left in my second term…so we settled for stolen moments whenever we could. My marriage to Eleanor had been over for a while, but we’d agreed to keep pretending the marriage was real until my term was finished. We didn’t even tell Reese.”