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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I log into my account and search for Sidney Ewen. There are seven Sidney Ewens.

The fourth one is a picture of an old man sitting in a rocking chair with a huge orange cat on his lap.

Bingo.

I type a quick message, then run upstairs.

:06

It’s 3:04 a.m. when I make my way into the kitchen the following day.

My dad is at the kitchen table.

He hardly glances up.

We haven’t seen each other since I screamed at him about my mom.

“Hey, Pops,” I say.

He gazes up at me. “Heyya.”

“Making any headway?” I ask, grabbing a container of Isabel’s delicious green chili and tossing it in the microwave.

He takes his glasses off and swivels around.

“You wouldn’t believe this case. This Jennifer girl had a journal where she kept notes on all the people she was blackmailing.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah, but the pages were all torn from the journal and scattered about at the crime scene. The detectives tried to put them together chronologically, but I think they got a couple things wrong. I’ve spent the last couple days reading them and piecing them together.”

I nod along, grab my bowl of chili and a protein shake, and join him at the table.

My dad’s Adam’s apple bounces up and down as he shuffles through papers. A nervous tick, the same thing he would do with his cards when he had a full house or better.

“Listen, Dad,” I say.

He holds up his hand and says, “No, me first.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the boxes. When you came to me last year asking about your mother, I told you everything I knew about her, which wasn’t all that much.”

And he had, though nearly everything he knew about “Sally Bins” was fabricated by my mother.

The only true revelation had been that my father knew my mother worked for the CIA. He found out when I was two years old, when he accidentally stumbled on one of my mother’s fake passports. She didn’t tell him much, only that she was an agent with the CIA. He thought her some sort of spy; little did he know, she was the preeminent torture specialist in the world.

I remember asking him how he was okay with this. How he was okay with being lied to. I’ll never forget what he’d said:

“When you love someone, you look past that. When she was here, with us, she was Sally and she was great. When she walked out the door, she went to work. If she had to be somebody else, I was okay with that.”

My dad is still speaking and I tune back in.