I cleared my throat. “He didn’t want to tell me this, but I pushed. I pushed hard, and he finally buckled.”
“What? What did he tell you?” Bryce asked.
“This is so awful.”
“What, Marjorie?”
“He found some documents. They weren’t overly clear, but he’s pretty sure—”
Nausea crawled up my throat in an acidic trail. I didn’t want to tell Bryce. Didn’t want to tell him his father was even more of a monster.
“—that his father sold him. To your father.”
Stark silence on the other end of the line. Neither Bryce nor my brother spoke.
I cleared my throat. “I told him that probably wasn’t the case.”
Still silence.
“I mean, your father and the others never dealt in men, right? Just children”—I bit back the gagging in my throat—“and women. Right?”
Still nothing.
“You guys okay?”
But of course they weren’t. Especially Bryce. In one day, Bryce had found out his father had bought his son for him and a young stud plaything for himself. If what Colin said was true, it wasn’t hard to believe. If Tom Simpson could buy his own grandchild, he could certainly buy a grown man.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re scaring me now.”
Bryce, then, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Sorry, Sis.”
“It’s okay. I’m pretty sick about it myself.” And if I felt sick, I could only imagine how Bryce was feeling.
“I wish we knew how all of this fits together,” Bryce said. “My dad. Colin. Ted Morse. Justin. The guy in the gray hoodie at the school.”
“Don’t forget the Spider,” Joe said. “He’s still missing.”
“And the rock and the baseball card and the cufflink. Ruby thinks the cufflink was a plant.”
“I trust her instincts,” Joe said.
“I do too,” I said. “But someone wants us to think Colin was where gray hoodie guy was.”
“You don’t think—” Bryce began.
“God, no! Colin is a shadow of his former self. He’s not going to go skulking around a school playground. What would he have against Dale and Donny or any kids? Also, Dale thought he recognized the guy. We know Colin wasn’t anywhere on that Caribbean compound.”
“Whoever the gray hoodie guy is, he somehow got his hands on Colin’s cufflink,” Joe said.
“Or one that’s identical to it,” Bryce added.
I walked away from the bench where Colin and I had sat, and—
Chapter Forty-Seven
Bryce