This wasn’t a bedroom. It was a tomb. A mausoleum for a body they’d never found.
I fled into the hallway and started opening doors until I found a bathroom. I locked the door behind me and stared at myself in the mirror. What was I doing here? What the fuck was I doing here?
• • •
Maybe you won’t believe me, but I honestly never meant to take Daniel Tate’s life. He was just supposed to buy me time and breathing room so I could get away from Short Term 8. I had no idea how quickly things would start to move once I became him.
I picked Daniel because he was the first missing boy I’d come across who was the right age and look. It was probably the worst choice I could have made, because, as I soon realized, the Tates weren’t a normal family. I’d been counting on many days or weeks of bureaucratic red tape to give me the chance to make my escape, but then Patrick McConnell had swooped in. He and Lex had gotten on a plane the next morning. They’d greased the skids at the American Embassy with their money and their connections to get me a passport within hours, after only a cursory examination of my claims. Even Alicia had commented on it.
“I’ve never seen anything like this move so fast,” she told me as we drove back to Short Term 8 for my last night there. “Detective Barson said there was a lot of pressure coming from the Americans to get this sorted out quickly. You’re lucky, you know, that your family is so powerful and loves you so much.”
That was me. Mr. Lucky.
It all moved too fast, and I couldn’t put the brakes on it without exposing myself as the fraud I was. So I’d been forced to play along, and now I was in California with a family that was somehow buying my bullshit, and when they caught me, I was screwed. I wasn’t sure exactly what laws I’d broken, but the power the Tates had wielded in getting me out of Canada would no doubt be brought to bear in a serious fucking way on the con artist who’d impersonated their missing son.
I ran my fingers back and forth over the fake birthmark on the back of my hand as I considered what to do next. I’d only had the thing for a few days, but already it had become a nervous habit. The birthmark had been mentioned on Daniel’s missing poster, so the night before Patrick and Lex came to Vancouver to see me, I’d given one to myself. Inspired by Tucker’s juvie tattoo, I’d swiped a brown marker and a safety pin from the box of art supplies in the rec room and spent an hour in a bathroom stall pricking the ink into my skin and most of the night holding an ice pack I’d swiped from the first aid kit that hung on the wall in the kitchen against it to curb the redness and swelling. It looked surprisingly convincing if you didn’t look too closely, which so far no one, not even Patrick, had.
I would never pull this off.
I had only one choice, which was to do what I’d always intended. Run. Before the Tates’ emotional high wore off and they realized I was a fake. Sure, now I would be in a strange country where I was out of my element, but at least it was warm here. I didn’t have a penny to my name, and there would be people looking for me, but I’d been through worse.
I returned to Daniel’s bedroom and rummaged through my backpack. I pulled out the baseball card I kept in the hidden pouch inside of it and put it in my pocket. It was the only thing in the bag worth keeping, so I would be ready anytime.
First chance I got, I would go.
• • •
I thought about leaving right then but quickly dismissed the idea. I was inside a giant gated community, basically a fancy prison. We were a couple of kilometers from the nearest entrance, and the odds were the Tates would notice I was gone before I could even reach one. My Daniel act had been convincing enough so far; it would hold up for at least a few more hours, maybe days. Part of me wanted to just lock myself in this room until it was late enough to sneak away, but that would seem too suspicious. So I took a deep breath and went in search of the family. Once I reached the foyer, I followed the voices toward the back of the house. By habit, I paused and peered around a corner when I got close, to get an idea what was going on in the room before I entered. I could see a sliver of Patrick leaning against a kitchen counter.
“—have to be patient,” he was saying. “He’s not the way you remember him. His personality is different, and a lot of his memories are gone. He barely even remembers us. The doctor said we shouldn’t push him to remember or to talk about what happened to him until he’s ready. We just need to treat him normally, okay?”
“Why doesn’t he remember us?” Mia’s little voice asked.
“That’s hard to explain, sweetie,” Lex said. “Bad things happened to him while he was gone, and his brain sort of . . . protected him. By hiding his memories away.”
“What happened to Danny?” Mia asked.
There was the scrape of a chair, and then Patrick said, “Mom, wait—”
“I’m not listening to this—”
Jessica turned the corner, moving fast. She slammed into me and recoiled, horror on her face.
She knew. I was suddenly sure.
But she didn’t start to scream or accuse. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
She fled upstairs with Patrick on her heels and Lex on Patrick’s.
“Mom!” Patrick yelled after her. “Mom!”
“I’ve got it,” Lex said, and she followed Jessica up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Patrick turned to me, his annoyed expression changing into one of concern when he saw my face. I must have looked as ready to bolt as I felt. “Hey, you okay?”
Somewhere above us, a door slammed closed. Back in the kitchen, the phone started to ring.
“I . . .” Shove down the panic. Play the part. “She’s not happy I’m back,” I said, hopefully with enough pathos in my voice to tug at his heartstrings and keep him from noticing I wasn’t his brother.
“No, no,” he said, looking more stricken than I could have hoped for. “It’s not that, Danny. It’s just . . .” The phone was still ringing. Patrick glanced back into the kitchen, where Nicholas and Mia were still sitting. “Nicholas, can you get that, please?” He put a hand on my shoulder and guided me into a sitting room down the hall. He lowered himself onto a sofa that looked like it hadn’t actually been sat on in years, and I sat beside him. “Look, there are things you have to understand about Mom. She’s not the mother you remember. It started with my dad’s suicide, but you were so young, you might not remember.”
I tried not to show my surprise. I didn’t know Lex and Patrick’s father had killed himself. I didn’t even know he was dead.
“They’d been divorced for years, but they were still close, so it hit her hard,” he continued. “Then less than a year later you disappeared, and she just went to pieces. Barely got out of bed for months. Eventually she went to rehab and things got better for a while, but then your dad went to prison and they divorced and things got bad again.”
I nodded along and filed each fact away. Patrick was saving me a lot of research.
“I don’t want to upset you by telling you these things,” he continued, “but I need you to understand why she’s reacting this way. Any kind of change, even something good, is hard for her. And now that you’re back, she’s having to deal with all of her old grief and guilt. It’s overwhelming for her.”
Bad news for Jessica, but good news for me. Maybe she didn’t suspect me after all, and if she did, her instability would work in my favor. It looked like Patrick and Lex were the ones actually in charge in this family, and they both believed me.
“She’ll come around,” Patrick said. “She just needs a little time and some space. We all just need to leave her be until she gets her head around things. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said. That suited me just fine.
Someone cleared their throat. Patrick and I turned to find Nicholas standing in the doorway. Neither of us had heard him approach.
“Who was on the phone?” Patrick asked.
Nicholas’s eyes flicked over to me once and then back to Patrick.
Instead of replying he asked, “Is Mom upstairs?”
Patrick nodded. “Lex is talking to her.”
Nicholas snorted. “Great. She’ll never come out.”
Patrick gave him a look.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, and headed toward the stairs. Over his shoulder, he added, “Mia’s starving, by the way, and there’s nothing in the house.”
• • •
Having been replaced by Nicholas, Lex took over dinner and ordered from a local restaurant that delivered an obscene amount of food an hour later. Patrick made a face at her as he handed the delivery driver a couple of crisp hundreds from his billfold, but she just shrugged.
“We don’t know what Danny will like,” she said.
Despite Nicholas’s spending twenty minutes talking to her through her door, Jessica wouldn’t come out of her room, which was a little worrying. I just figured a mother would want to eat dinner with the son she hadn’t seen in six years, but apparently Patrick was right and it was too much for her. Or she suspected I wasn’t her son.
But as long as her belief held for a couple more hours, it wouldn’t matter either way because I’d be gone.
The rest of us sat down at the elegantly carved dining table that probably cost more than the house I grew up in and ate dinner from plastic containers, with filigreed silver flatware. It was one of the more uncomfortable meals of my life, which is saying something. Mia was the only one unaffected by the undercurrent of tension in the room. She chattered happily, telling me all about her teacher and her best friend, her horseback riding lessons, the puppy she desperately wanted. Trying to fill me in on the bulk of a life that Danny had missed all in one meal.
“I wanted to quit riding because my friend Daisy got thrown and broke her arm, but Mom said I can get a horse of my own when I’m twelve if I keep taking lessons, because that’s how old she was when Granddad got her a horse . . .”
“Gran and Granddad are in Europe right now,” Lex said, “otherwise they would be here to welcome you back.”
“That’s okay,” I said. The fewer relatives around, the better.
“It’ll take us some time to get you on the visitors’ list to see your dad,” Patrick added, “but he knows you’re home, so I’m sure he’ll call soon.”
When Mia finally ran out of things to say, silence descended on the table. I could practically see Patrick, Lex, and Nicholas struggling to think of a topic of conversation that wouldn’t reference something I couldn’t remember or the ordeal I’d been through.
“How’s the sea bass?” Lex finally asked. She’d already asked me a dozen questions about the food, what I liked to eat, could she pass me the salt or get me anything else. Food was a safe topic.
I looked down at the container I was eating from. I hadn’t even known the thing I was eating was sea bass.
“It’s good,” I said.
“Good,” she said, giving me a weak smile.
I glanced at the grandfather clock on the wall. It was almost late enough for me to plead exhaustion and go to bed. The phone rang, and Patrick jumped up and went to the other room to answer it. He came back a moment later.
“Who was it?” Mia asked.
“No one,” he said, at the same time Lex asked, “Who wants dessert?”
When dinner was over, Patrick announced that he’d better leave for his own home in L.A. Since he’d missed the last couple of days at the office, he needed to go in early the next morning to start catching up. He hugged Lex and Mia and then turned to me. He reached for me, hesitated, then laughed at himself and reached for me again. His embrace was quick and stiff. “We’re so glad you’re home, Danny,” he said.
“Me too,” I said, very aware of all the eyes in the room watching us.
He let me go. “I’ll be back tomorrow night. We should catch up.”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t intend to still be here tomorrow night.
“I’ll walk you out,” Lex said to her brother. As she and Patrick left the room, she said over her shoulder, “Nicky, Mia, will you?”
They nodded and immediately started to clean up, collecting food containers and paper napkins for the trash and silverware for the dishwasher. I guess I got out of cleaning duty on account of having been kidnapped, which left me hovering awkwardly, unsure what to do with myself. For a while I stood in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows in the dining room, pretending to care about the view of the darkened lawn and mountains in the distance. Then I decided to go find Lex and tell her I was going to bed.
I walked through a darkened corridor toward the foyer. Lex and Patrick were standing in the doorway, their profiles illuminated by the lights in the fountain outside as they spoke quietly to each other. I stopped in the shadows and watched them. Although I couldn’t hear them, the way they looked at each other indicated an intense conversation. Lex shook her head, and I could tell from her pinched lips that she was crying again. Patrick put his hands on her shoulders and said something that made her take a deep breath and nod. They exchanged a few more words before Lex turned to go, but Patrick caught her by the wrist and pulled her back to him. He cocked his head to one side as he asked her something. She looked at him for a long moment before nodding again and gently removing his hand from her wrist. He kissed her cheek and left, and after she’d closed the door behind him, she leaned against it for a long time. The air felt charged and uneasy, so I slipped away without saying anything to her.
• • •
I returned to Danny’s untouched bedroom and locked the door behind me. I didn’t know what to do. I needed something to occupy me until the time I could sneak out, but, truthfully, I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I’d barely slept the night before, and maintaining the Danny act was draining. The exhaustion had seeped into me, burrowing all the way to my bones. I noticed an alarm clock on the bedside table and grabbed it. I could let myself get a few hours of sleep before I snuck away, I told myself. It would probably be even better. When you’re tired, you make mistakes. I set the alarm for three and turned the sound down as far as it would go. I didn’t want to risk waking anyone else, and I was a light sleeper anyway.
I had nothing of my own to change into for bed, and I wouldn’t have worn Danny’s eerie, mummified clothes even if they weren’t child sized. I was about to shuck my jeans and shirt to sleep in my boxers when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Nicholas standing in the hallway.
“I thought you’d need these,” he said, holding out a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. “Doubt you still fit into whatever’s in the dresser.”
I took the clothes. “Thanks.”
Nicholas kept looking at me. It was the first time he’d made eye contact with me for more than a second or two, and other than that first hug at the airport, it was the closest he’d been to me. A fine crease started between his eyebrows.
“No problem,” he said. “Uh . . . do you need anything else? I’m sure Lex will—”
“What about me?” Lex asked cheerfully as she appeared in the hallway behind Nicholas. She looked like a different person from the fragile girl who had leaned against the door like she couldn’t stand on her own when Patrick left. Her smile was loose and her eyes warm and sleepy. I would have said she was tipsy, but I was pretty sure she’d only had the one glass of wine with dinner. “Oh, good, you lent him some clothes,” she said. “Danny, I was thinking that tomorrow we’d go shopping and get you the essentials you’re missing. Sound good? In the meantime here’s a spare toothbrush and some toothpaste.” She pressed the toiletries into my hand. “Is there anything else you need tonight?”
Maybe a less creepy room to sleep in—there must have been at least a couple of guest rooms in a house this size—but I couldn’t exactly ask for that. Besides, I wasn’t going to be in it much longer. “No, I’m fine.”
“Okay, well, my room’s the fifth one past the stairs if you think of anything,” she said. Nicholas had drifted away at some point, so it was jus
t the two of us. “Don’t worry about waking me, okay? I won’t mind.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Lex.”
“You’re welcome.” She looked at me and smiled, and then . . . something changed. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It was like the texture of our eye contact became different somehow. It felt like she was really seeing me instead of just looking at me. It made my breath hitch painfully in my chest.
She reached out and hugged me, and this time her arms were solid around me instead of weak and trembling.
“I missed you, Danny,” she said softly, the words warm against my neck. “I’m so happy you’re safe now.”
• • •
I lay in bed unable to sleep. The sheets were too crisp, the house too silent. I stared up at the ceiling, where I could just make out the outline of plastic star stickers that had long ago lost their glow.
I couldn’t stop thinking. First, I decided to stay the night. I told myself it was because it made more sense to run tomorrow night, after Lex had bought me some new clothes and other supplies. The truth, which I think I knew even then, was that I had felt . . . something when she looked at me and told me she was happy I was there. That I was safe. I’d believed her, and I hadn’t wanted to give that up so quickly.
And would it really be so bad to stay? For good? The Tates had eaten up my story, and in a way, I was doing them a favor. Danny was long gone, probably dead, and definitely never coming back. Me being here made them happy. And as for me, somehow I had stumbled into the con of a lifetime. A scam with the biggest risks I’d ever taken on but also the biggest rewards. If I could become Danny Tate, I could have a real life here, a better one than the little boy in Saskatchewan had even been able to dream of. Did I really want to just walk away from that? Wasn’t it stupid to go back to living on the streets and group homes when there was a perfectly good bed in a perfectly good mansion filled with a perfectly loving family right here?