Sliver of Truth

Epilogue

So, no, I didn’t shack up with Dylan Grace. I had grown smart enough to realize that after everything I’d been through, all the shape shifting I’d done, I needed time to get to know Ridley Jones. I had learned the hard way that I wasn’t Ben and Grace’s daughter, and I wasn’t Max and Teresa Stone’s daughter, but I was both of those things. And more than that, I was my own person forging my own path in this life. Nature, nurture, free will—it all plays a role. Ultimately it’s all about choices. The big ones, the little ones…Well, by now you know my shtick.

So Dylan and I are dating. I think it’s funny that his last name is my mother’s first name. It’s such a feminine name and he’s such a tough guy—there’s something cool about the dichotomy of it. There are lots of cool things about Dylan Grace. Anyway, we go to the movies, go out to dinner, visit museums…but most of all we talk.

“All that time, watching you,” he said during our first official date dinner. “That was the thing that drove me crazy, that we couldn’t have a conversation.”

He pretends he doesn’t know everything about me, and we stay up all night trying to find out if we have anything in common, other than our obsession with Max, and a knack for getting into mortal danger and high drama. And I don’t think I have to tell you, the sex is white hot.

I was thinking about how nice it all was between us, as we walked up Fifth Avenue after doing some gallery hopping in SoHo. I think he thought most of the art we saw was pretty awful, though he didn’t say anything. We’d cut through Washington Square and were passing Eighth Street, sipping hot chocolate from Dean & Deluca cups. I caught my reflection in a storefront window. I’d been to the John Dellaria Salon earlier in the week and had my hair dyed back close to my natural color, but it was still short and spiky. I’d kind of started to like it like that, though I guessed I’d probably let it grow out eventually. As I was looking at myself, I caught another reflection: a thin man in a long overcoat, across the street, resting his weight upon a cane.

I turned to look at him. A stranger. Not Max.

This happens a lot and I suppose it will continue to, though I know he’ll never come looking for me again. He’s with me. He’ll always be with me. In my darkest fantasy, I thought I could rid myself of him, but I know now that had I done that, he would have haunted me day and night as long as I lived.

As it is, there are things that still bother me; I’ll never understand some of the things that have happened. I don’t think I’ll ever fully remember my voyage on the plane, or how I got from the Cloisters to that plane in the first place. The passport in my bag was a fake; mine was waiting undisturbed in its file when I got home. And all that cash in my bag? That wasn’t mine, either. Looking on the bright side, at least I got some cool new clothes out of the deal.

“What are you thinking about?” Dylan asked as we waited at the light. I guess I’d been quiet for a while.

We usually avoided talking about Max. Neither of us brought up Potter’s Field—how we didn’t get what we were looking for that night, and we never would.

“I was wondering if you ever felt robbed. Like you didn’t get the justice you were seeking for your parents, for the women Max murdered. He got away. Does it hurt you? Do you think about it?”

He shook his head. “He didn’t get away.”

I looked at him, wondered if he knew something I didn’t. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the thin sunglasses he wore. He tossed his empty cup in a wire trash basket.

“I have come to believe that we carry our deeds with us. The evil he’s done must eat at him like a cancer. One day it will consume him.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed. I thought of my conversation with Nick Smiley.

He wasn’t sorry, Nick had told me. I could tell by the way he looked at me. He was so sad-faced for everyone else. But when we were alone, he turned those eyes on me and I knew. He killed his mother, accused and then testified against his father. Effectively, he killed them both. And I don’t think he lost a night’s sleep over it.

“I’m not talking about remorse,” said Dylan, reading the doubt on my face. “I’m saying that justice is more organic than a trial and punishment. Karma, you know?”

I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue with him. If he’d found a way to make peace with the fact that the man who killed his parents was at large and probably living pretty well, I wasn’t going to try to talk him out of it. He was clearly a more evolved person than I.

I won’t lie to you; I have lost some sleep over the fact that Max got away, that his appetites probably haven’t diminished. If anything, I imagine exile has made him more ravenous. I’m sure you were hoping for a neater package—the villain is caught and brought to justice. I live happily ever after. Wouldn’t it be great if we could change all the people and circumstances that pain us? But, of course, that’s not always the way life works. Sometimes things are as they are, no matter how you struggle against them. The real challenge is making peace with that, making the best of it, and moving forward, even if that means, as it does in my case, that you’ll always be looking over your shoulder.

I tossed my own cup into the trash and Dylan took my hand. We walked in heavy silence toward the Flatiron Building.

“What about you?” he asked, lifting up his sunglasses and resting them on top of his head. He turned those gray eyes on me. “Is that how you feel, Ridley? Do you feel robbed?”

I thought about it a second, remembered that last sight of Max as he lifted away in his helicopter, the note he’d left for me. I’d always have to wonder where he was, if he was watching me somehow.

“Not robbed,” I said. “Haunted.”

I saw that my answer made him feel sad. He put his arm around me and squeezed me close as we walked the rest of the way home.

I’ve spent a lot of time cataloging all the mistakes I’ve made. I’m sure you’ll agree that the list is long and colorful. But I think my biggest folly was believing that I could bring Max home. I’ll forgive myself for that one. Because there was something I didn’t understand until the moment I saw him disappear: In death, the ghost is already home.