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You were so impossibly small and vulnerable, and I so unprepared, that it seemed ludicrous they’d allowed you out of the hospital with me. From the very beginning, we didn’t fit. Rebecca held you easily and naturally, as though she’d been born to you rather than the other way around. Whereas I always felt
awkward, scared of this fragile weight in my arms, unable to tell what you wanted when you cried. I didn’t understand you at all. That never changed.
It’s not going to be easy, and I need to start with an apology. Because over the years I’ve told you many times that there’s no such thing as monsters. I’m sorry that I lied.
This casual destruction was much like the increasing aggression the boy showed in school. It was an attempt to make an impact on a world that seemed so oblivious to his existence. It stemmed from a desire to be seen. To be noticed. To be loved. Because that was all any child wanted, deep down.
When you go after something as hard as he had, there were few things as irritating as someone who could have had it more easily but never seemed to want it.
The man whom Pete had eventually caught. The name alone conjured up such horror for him that it always felt like it should never be spoken out loud—as though it were some kind of curse that would summon a monster behind you. Worse still was what the papers had called him. The Whisper Man.
Now, just for a moment, the odd arrangement of windows reminded me of a beaten face, with an eye pushed up over a badly bruised cheek, the skull injured and lopsided. I shook my head and the image disappeared. But an ominous feeling remained.
But as we worked our way through each room, I couldn’t shake the sensation that we were not alone. That someone else was here, hiding just out of sight, and that if I turned at the right moment I’d see a face peering around a doorframe. It was a stupid, irrational feeling, but it was there.
It was as though, outside these walls, Carter had been a dangerous animal, angry and at war with the world, but caged in here with his celebrity status and coterie of fawning fans, he’d finally found a niche in which he could relax.
He had loved her as deeply as she loved him, but the gift and receipt of love was a language with foreign grammar to him. And because he believed he was undeserving of such love, he had slowly drunk himself into a man who was. As with his memories of his father, distance had helped him understand all that. Battles often make more sense from the sky. Too late.
How long does it take, and how much does a person have to change, before the person you hated is gone, replaced by someone new? Pete was someone else now. I didn’t not like him. The truth was that I didn’t know him at all.
That thought was so much better. It was the difference between regret and relief, between a cold
hearth full of dead, gray ash and a fire that was still alight. He hadn’t lost this. He might not have found it fully yet either. But he hadn’t lost it.
When he was a child, his father had been a language he was unable to speak, but he was fluent now. The man wanted him to be someone else, and that had been confusing. But he could read the whole book of his father now and he knew that none of it had ever been about him. His own book was separate, and always had been. He had only ever needed to be himself, and it had just taken time—too much time—to understand that.
