“Okay,” he said. “What’d the doctor say?”
“Flu.” I handed him the bag of antivirals the nurse had given me and I took my coat. “I need access to Griffin Payne.”
“Uh, okay. And by access, you mean . . . ?”
“I need to talk to him. Alone.”
North reached forward and put his hand on my forehead.
“I don’t have a fever anymore,” I snapped, pulling away from him. “They gave me aspirin to bring it down.”
“You need to talk to Griffin Payne,” North repeated. “Alone.”
“Yes.” I zipped up my coat. “In person.”
“You do realize this is Griffin Payne you’re talking about. You’d have a better chance of meeting the president.”
“I’ve met him already. At a Theden event. He’s nice.” I walked past North toward the automatic exit. Outside, the clouds hung low in the night sky, giving off an eerie green glow.
“I’m sure he’s lovely,” North said, following me out. “But that doesn’t mean he’ll take a meeting with a high school girl.”
I stopped at the curb, letting North catch up. The sidewalk was deserted. When he reached me, he stepped down off the curb so we were eye level. “Rory, what’s this about? You go in to see the doctor and you come out saying you need an in-person meeting with the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world.”
“He’s my father,” I said quietly. North’s face registered the shock I felt.
“I don’t understand,” North said. “Since when?”
“Since he and my mom had sex seventeen years ago, I guess.” My voice was terse. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m just—still processing it.”
“But how’d you find out? I mean, you grew up with a dad, right? I’ve heard you talk about him.”
I nodded, and took a shaky breath. “I found my mom’s medical file in the Department of Public Heath’s database about a month ago, when I was working on a research paper for my cog psych class. Last night I went back through it. Turns out I was born almost a month past my due date, not three weeks before it like I always thought, which means my mom was pregnant when she left Theden.”
“The blood type thing,” North said. “You think that means your dad isn’t your dad.”
“Not think. Know.” My voice trembled. I would not cry. “There was an ultrasound photo in my mom’s file. She was A positive and I’m AB negative. My dad—the man I thought was my dad—is A positive too.”
North exhaled. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t know how,” I admitted. “It’s a kind of heavy thing to lay on someone you barely know.”
“You more than barely know me, Rory,” North said, taking my hands in his. “And I can handle heavy.”
I just nodded, not trusting myself to speak. “So what makes you think Griffin Payne is your real father?” North asked.
“She’s holding his hand. In their class photo. She’s holding Griffin’s hand.”
“That hardly means—”
“Look at him,” I said, shoving my phone into North’s face. Griffin’s senior photo was still on my screen. “Then look at me.”
“There’s a resemblance,” North allowed. “There totally is.” He exhaled, running his hands back and forth along the sides of his Mohawk. “Wow.”
We were both quiet for a moment. “Well, then I take back what I said earlier,” North said finally. “It’ll be easy to get in to see him. Just tell him who you are.”
“I can’t,” I said. “If I want to know what really happened seventeen years ago, he can’t see it coming. I don’t want to give him the chance to lie to me.”
“You assume he’s going to?”
“I don’t want to take any chances. It has to be in person,” I said firmly. “And it has to be a surprise. I want to be able to see his face.”
“You think he’s the reason your mom dropped out of school?”
“She didn’t drop out,” I reminded him. “She was expelled.”
“Could the pregnancy have had something to do with why?”
“Maybe. But there was no record of her being pregnant in her medical file. No test results, no mention of a baby in any of her psych reports. If she knew she was pregnant, she didn’t tell her doctor.”
“Can you show me the file?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have access to it anymore. I have only a photo of the final page.”
“I’ll see if I can get it,” North said. “You know your mom’s social security number, right?”
“Yeah, but her file was deleted from the system. You won’t be able to find it.”
“Au contraire,” replied North. “Deleted files are even easier to get. Before they’re permanently removed from a server, they’re almost always put in these little holding bins for a few weeks. It’s a stopgap for accidental deletions. Because the bins are hidden from users, companies think they don’t need to protect them.”
“Can we do it now?” I asked him.
“Sure. It might take me a couple of hours, but you’re welcome to hang out. Stay over, even.” His eyes twinkled. “So I can play doctor.”
“I can’t stay over,” I said, though his place was the only place I wanted to be. “I should probably just go back to the dorms now,” I said reluctantly. “Weeknight curfew is at ten.” Now that I knew exactly what Tarsus was capable of, I had to be a model student. “Can I come by tomorrow?”
“Of course,” North said. “I’m working the early shift, so stop by the café first. But give me your mom’s full name and social security number, and I’ll see what I can find tonight.”
I caught his hand and laced my fingers through his. “Thank you.”
He brought my hand to his lips and kissed the tips of my fingers. “It’s going to be okay. You know that, right? You’ll figure all this out.”
“Yeah.” My vision blurred as the tears I’d been holding back spilled over. I blinked, but it was too late. They were dripping down my cheeks. “Damn it,” I muttered. So much for my resolution not to cry. I swatted at my eyes.
North lifted my chin with his finger, all the confidence I didn’t have bright in his eyes, and then, even though I was probably wildly contagious and smelled like a hospital and hadn’t brushed my teeth in twelve hours, he kissed me and for a moment I forgot everything but what it felt like not to be alone.
21
I SET MY ALARM as an afterthought, certain I wouldn’t sleep well enough to need it, and it was a good thing I did because I’m not sure I would’ve woken up before noon without it. I slept deeply and dreamlessly that night and woke up in the same position I’d been in when I’d lain down. My mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls, but otherwise I felt pretty good. Better, at least. I touched my handheld to my head to check if I had a fever. “Your temperature is in the normal range” came Lux’s reply. I hadn’t heard her voice in more than a week. There was a time when I talked to Lux more than I talked to anyone else.
Clearly, those days were gone. I’d been consulting Lux so infrequently that I spaced on dropping my dirty clothes at the campus laundry service on Friday. I had nothing clean. After hesitating for a split second at the door of her closet, I put on Hershey’s stretch velvet pants, which were too long but looked okay tucked into boots, and one of the four gray cashmere sweaters I found wadded up on her shelf.
Izzy was in the courtyard when I came out of the building, drinking coffee from a paper cup and reading something on her tablet, her cheeks red from the cold. She wasn’t wearing a jacket. “Hey,” I said coming up to her. “What are you doing?”