“At a life!” Jack flared a hand angrily around the cabin. “That isn’t this. A wife. Maybe even kids. I tried to free you. I didn’t think you’d scurry right back to it, Assassin for the People.” He tapped his palm on the table, a judge’s gavel. “That is what you do now, isn’t it? Freelance jobs? For others, people who can’t—”

“You’ve been keeping tabs on me?”

“From afar,” Jack said. “I couldn’t let you go. I could never let you go. I know you can’t see it this way right now, but it was a sacrifice, what I did.”

“A sacrifice.”

Jack firmed at Evan’s tone. “You’ve never been a father.”

Evan felt the pulse fluttering his neck. “A father? You weren’t my father. I wasn’t a son to you. I was a weapon. You shaped me into what you needed and used me until I was used up.”

Jack stiffened. The skin around his eyes shifted, and for an awful moment Evan thought he might cry.

Jack cleared his throat. “You know that’s not true. However angry you are, you know that’s not true.”

“I have been paying penance,” Evan said. “For the blood on my hands. Including yours.”

Jack sagged back in his chair. “I couldn’t risk losing you, Evan. Not after I lost Clara.”

“You swore. You swore you’d never lie to me. It was the one thing I could count on. The one solid thing I could trust in the world. You don’t know what my first twelve years were like. In that home—in all the homes. You … you were the one thing I could ever count on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you.” Evan stood and stuffed the stack of printouts inside his jacket. He grabbed the cash and the fake license and walked out.

For a long time, Jack sat in his chair, staring at the empty seat across from him.

His breathing grew harder.

He raised a hand and pressed it over his mouth. Tears forded his knuckles, spotting the rough wood of the table.

He did not make a sound.

62. That Gnawing Feeling

62

That Gnawing Feeling

The boy’s phone number, a 301 area code, was branded on Evan’s brain. It had guttered across the cracked screen of the RoamZone only a few times, but he’d committed it to memory. He turned the ten digits over now in his head. As familiar as a remnant from a dream.

Bouncing along the bitter interstate in the passenger seat of the semi he’d hitched a ride with, he snatched a pen from the cup holder and jotted down the number on the back of his hand. He stared at the scrawled digits. That same feeling gnawed at him again, that he’d seen the number before.

“You all right, bud?” the trucker asked, exhaling the smell of Red Man tobacco.

“Fine, thanks.”