Ness laughs. “You would’ve made a fine Egyptian princess.”
“And died when I was twenty from an infected tooth and then had my brains slurped out my nose.” I feed him a blackberry. “So why’d you get the tattoo, then?”
“Because…” Ness takes a deep breath. And then a sip of champagne. “I guess I spent a long time searching for myself before I finally realized I was looking in all the wrong places. College, marriage, work, meetings. When I got into shelling, I realized there was half a world I wasn’t seeing. Like the other side of a coin. Options I never knew I had. It hit me in Australia, off the Barrier Reef. I think it was there that I realized what kind of process my grandfather went through.”
“You mean from reading his journal?”
Ness nods. I take a sip of champagne and enjoy the light airy fizz against my tongue.
“So what’s your background?” Ness asks. He’s rubbing my arm and studying it.
“Are you asking me what kind of breed I am?” I pull my arm away from his touch.
“No… God, no. Not that. I love your skin. Your complexion is amazing. I mean—of course I want to know where your parents are from. I want to know everything about you. What I meant was, what was your childhood like?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to snap at you like that. That’s just usually what people mean when they ask that, so I get testy about it. My childhood was basically me and my sister sticking up for one another, people picking on us, black kids and white kids. Meanness is just as immune to color as kindness, as it turns out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Must’ve been tough.”
“We got through.”
“What does your sister do?”
“She’s an investment banker. She would tell you she stares at charts all morning and PowerPoint slides all afternoon. She thinks I live this amazing life, of course.”
Ness smiles and makes a show of sweeping his arm at our surroundings.
“Touché.”
He laughs. “Okay, so now that all that’s out of the way, exactly what kind of mongrel are you?”
I grab a pillow from the bed and swing it at him, and Ness has to block it with one hand and save his champagne with the other. “If I spill this on my pants, they’ll have to come off,” he warns me, laughing.
“If you really must know, my mom was from Antigua and my dad was from Boston. They’re both… they passed away when I was younger. I mean, I was an adult, but it was years ago. So I’m able to talk about them without turning into goo.”
“Can I ask how they met?”
“Yeah, well, it’s almost as good as how your parents met. Just a bigger spot in the sea than an oil rig. My dad went to Antigua for a destination wedding. It was for one of his frat brothers, who got hitched right out of college. My mom was a server at the place where they had the reception dinner. One of the other frat guys had too much to drink and came on to my mom, and my dad rescued her. Or as he used to tell it, he stole her away and was only able to do so because of the favorable comparison he made to his drunk friend.”
“So you’ve got island blood in you,” Ness says.
“Yeah, and Boston is a sea town if ever there was one. I think that’s why I feel lost when I’m away from the water.”
Ness nods and smiles. “That explains so much.”
“Yeah? Glad it was that easy for you to know the entirety of me.”
“Not the entirety, but what drives you. Most of us have simple passions at the core of who we are. Those passions might change over time, but at any one moment, I feel like there’s a striving inside us that frames our decisions. The shame is that most people never ask themselves what their passions are, much less look deep into others. They just do whatever feels right at any one moment, bouncing from thing to thing.”
“So is redemption your passion? You mentioned that in the sub.”
“Maybe,” Ness says. “I have a lot of passions. Too many, perhaps.”
“Well, just so you know, I understand trying to atone for a father’s sins. I totally get that. My dad wasn’t perfect either.”
“Yeah? How so?” Ness brushes the hair off my face, then rests his hand on my shoulder. I see worry in his furrowed brow.
“Oh, he wasn’t bad to me,” I say, reassuring him. “Nothing like that. My dad and I were real close. He just had… he did some things that I later learned weren’t very good.”
I eat a strawberry and take another sip of champagne, feeling dangerously honest.
“What did your dad do?” Ness asks. “I mean for a living. You don’t have to tell me any of that other stuff if you don’t want.”
“It’s hard to tease those two apart, actually. I thought my dad was a spy when I was really young, some kind of superhero private investigator. But he mostly followed people around and took pictures of them without their crutches, or with other women, and then handed that info off to lawyers so they could rain hell down on people.”
“Sounds like they were the kind of people who deserved what they got,” Ness says. He pulls the comforter over my bare legs when he sees me rubbing the goose bumps away.
“Yeah, that part of his job I understood. I mean, I do now. But I used to sit with him in his car when he had me for the weekend, just like you have Holly sometimes—”
“So your parents were divorced?”
“It’s… complicated. They split up, but they stayed married. My dad moved back in with my mom when she got diagnosed with cancer. Anyway, when I was young, they lived apart, and my dad would take me on these jobs with him. Side jobs. He would have me sit in the passenger seat and run the laptop while he took pictures of people with this great big lens.” I shake my head, remembering.
“Jeez, now you have to tell me.”
“You have to promise not to tell.”
“I get confused,” Ness says. “Was that a teaser or a cliffhanger?” He laughs, but when he sees I’m dead serious, he raises one hand. “Off the record. I swear.”
I readjust myself on the bed, holding my champagne flute so it doesn’t spill. “Okay, so keep in mind that this was back when facial recognition software first got really good but before people knew it was getting good. You know what I mean? Well, Dad was one of the first in his trade to see the potential. So he would park outside brothels, strip clubs, seedy massage parlors, places like that, and shoot everyone who came out. I mean everyone. Then he’d run the pictures through the DMV database, which a friend on the force got him access to. That was my job, running the laptop and switching out the memory cards. I was better at it than he was. We’d get a name from the DMV, do a Google search, and see if anyone had a high profile, if they were worth anything—”
“Blackmail,” Ness whispers.
“Yeah. Basically, instead of waiting for someone to get suspicious and hire him, Dad started sampling the crowd to drum up more business for himself.”
I feel like shit admitting my role in it all. It took me years to come clean with Michael. I have no idea why I’m telling Ness.
“That’s fucked up,” he says.
“I know. It’s not something I’m proud of.”
Ness’s face lights up. “You know, I’ve heard about scams like this. There was a senator from Connecticut who got ruined by something like that. Claimed he thought it was a regular massage parlor—”
“Senator Hutchins,” I say. And then, sheepishly: “I was with Dad that weekend.”
Ness leans back to study me. “No. You’re kidding, right? That was your dad?”
I feel a flush of heat on my neck, remembering the weeks after the incident. “I thought I was going to go to jail or something. I was too sick to attend school, couldn’t even tell my mom. It was the first time in my life that I started reading the paper—the physical thing. Which probably led me down the path I took, career-wise. Not just from reading the paper, but seeing the difference between telling the truth in print and all the sneaking around my father did for a living.”