“Never. Not once. Not ever again. Maybe I sh-should’ve tried to ssee her, but when I c-called, sh-she wuh-wouldn’t speak to me. I only knew she told p-people I went to the academy because Mikey heard that from his mom. I didn’t sssee the house again until she d-died.”
His eyes had shuttered, his expression set. Granite Man.
“And your mom?”
“I never saw her again, either.”
Katie turned her cheek into the cushion and let herself feel it. The bleak recrimination in his voice. The loneliness and craving and guilt. He’d come home to bury his mother, but clearly, she wasn’t buried yet.
“Mikey and I guh-got into hacking,” Sean continued. “Juh-just for kicks in c-college, but it turned out to b-be useful. We sstarted this security c-company, Anderson Owens, and it took off. I got therapy for the sstutter and thought I’d managed to shake it. Ssome people do, you know. They juh-just manage to k-kick it to the curb. Permanently.”
He raised his mug to his lips for a deep swallow. She knew without asking that he’d thought he was one of the ones who’d managed a permanent recovery, and he wasn’t happy to discover otherwise.
“And then she d-died, and I came back to Camelot to p-pack up her stuff, and now I sssound like this, at least ssome of the time. Not just with you, either. It’s sspreading. The wuhwonders of the human b-brain, eh?”
“You sound fine,” she said.
A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“I mean, you don’t. I’m not trying to say you’re not stuttering, or that I don’t notice …” Katie sighed, feeling like a moron. She didn’t know what the protocols were for a conversation like this. Somehow, she and Sean had gone from barely knowing each other this morning to blundering into what felt like every possible avenue of personal revelation. It was awkward, and part of her wished they could just go back to the way things had been a week ago, with her thinking he hated her and him never speaking.
Except that had sucked, too.
“I don’t care how you sound,” she said finally.
“Thanks.”
She wondered if there was something more she was supposed to say. Something nice, like, I like you, so what does it matter what you sound like? Or empathy. Parents really do screw us up, don’t they?
But Sean didn’t invite further conversation. He stared at the TV as though naked girls were going to jump out of it any second. He stared at it as though his life depended on it.
So she stared at it, too, and drank her wine, and listened to the snow fling itself against the windows. And when the movie ended, she touched his shoulder with two fingers, said good night, and went back to her room to sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
Judah didn’t get Sean.
Tapping a Sharpie against the clipboard that bore the set list, he dropped into a folding chair with enough force to send it skating along the concrete floor. The green room of Nellie’s, the seedy bar that boasted Buffalo’s best wings and a surprisingly excellent sound system, was not high class. Folding chairs and card tables were the only furniture a dive like this ever had backstage. Anything nicer got trashed.
From across the room, Judah watched Katie’s partner issue directions to Ginny as if she worked for him, and he tried to make the guy add up.
Katie, he’d expected to be good. She’d done a hell of a job getting him to spill his guts, after all. This morning at breakfast, she’d questioned Paul, tucking into her pancakes with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old and asking him a dozen pointed questions that his manager had answered in gruff monosyllables.
Paul lived to manage, and for the past fifteen years he’d lived to manage Judah. He tolerated interlopers, but only when Judah pulled rank and told him he had to.
Eventually, Katie had abandoned the full frontal assault and started lobbing Paul fan-girl questions about his influence on the recording sessions and how he’d handled the logistics of the heavy touring years. She worked the conversation around to Paul’s wife and nineteen-year-old twin daughters back in Chicago, and by the time the check came she had him laughing at all her jokes and volunteering the answers he’d kept to himself earlier.
She was a pro. Judah had known it, even if she didn’t.
Sean was something different. He was supposed to be an hourly employee of Caleb’s company, but he wore a deceptively modest ten-thousand-dollar watch and carried himself like someone who was used to getting his way.
Most of the time, he looked as if he’d just as soon shoot you as talk to you, but Judah had caught him watching Katie when her back was turned with this small, secret smile on his face.
Then there was the computer-detective thing. Judah didn’t know how Sean had gained access to all the incriminating shit he’d dug up, but the man clearly had skills.
“Ginny,” Judah said, and her head snapped up, her eyes finding his from across the room and softening the way they always did.
The girl was nuts about him. It was getting bad enough that he’d started thinking about firing her. Admiration was one thing, but all that syrupy sweetness in her eyes made him irritable. He’d flat-out told her she was too young for him, but it made no difference. Ginny seemed content to wait for his love to blossom. She’d been especially attentive when he was in rehab, no doubt hoping he would hit rock bottom so she could scoop him up on the rebound.