Free to Fall (22 page)

I nodded slightly. “She died right when I was born.”

He buried his face in his hands for a second, and when he dropped them back to his sides, he looked his age for the first time. There were lines extending like sunbeams from the outer corners of his eyes. It was ironic, smile lines beside sad eyes.

“And your dad?”

I eyed him.
Was he trying to see what I knew, or could he honestly not know that I was his child?
“My dad?”

“Yeah. I mean, you know, is he in the picture? Is he around?” Griffin looked uncomfortable, like we’d crossed into unpleasant territory.

“I’ve never met my father.”

This didn’t seem to surprise Griffin, and in fact, something like relief flashed in his eyes. So he
did
know. He was trying to see if I did. I gritted my teeth. It wouldn’t help me to get angry with him. Putting him on the defensive was the quickest way to shut this down.

I kept my voice casual. “I know you have a speech to give and all, so I won’t take up too much of your time, but I was just hoping you could tell me what happened between you and my mom.”

Griffin sighed. “I haven’t talked about your mom in fifteen years.” He tugged at his tie. “No, longer. Not since she left.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out his handheld. It was shiny and metallic and the size of a matchbox. The Gemini Gold. He tapped his screen and it lit up. It was 7:35. “I have to be in the prep room at quarter till. This isn’t a ten-minute story, but I’ll try to make it one.” He snapped his Gold into the metal band on his wrist and ran his hands through his hair. It was the exact shade of mine, so dark brown it looked black, but straight where mine was wavy. Unlike my dad’s, whose straw-colored hair was flecked with silver, Griffin’s showed no hint of gray.

“Your mom and I met our first year at Theden,” he began, his eyes brightening for the first time all night. “I fell for her the very first time we spoke—we were in practicum together, and she sat next to me on the first day. There weren’t pods back then, just desks with laptop docking stations, and she couldn’t get hers to turn on. Our teacher was this horrible, crotchety old man—Mr. Siegler—and Aviana was terrified he’d yell at her if she asked him for help. So I helped her, and in the span of about five seconds fell madly in love.”

My heart turned over in my chest. It was easy to imagine that moment, my mom flustered and nervous the way I’d been on my first day, Griffin all confidence and charm. It was the beginning of something, something that could’ve gone a thousand different ways, with a thousand happily-ever-afters. Yet here we were.

“I never imagined I had a shot with her,” Griffin continued. “She was totally out of my league. I, meanwhile, didn’t even have the IQ to be at Theden. My family had to pull strings to get me in.” His eyes clouded over. “My parents never liked Aviana,” he explained. “My stepfather hated her.”

“Why?”

“She was . . . different. She didn’t play the game the way everyone else did.”

“The game?”

“The ambition climb,” replied Griffin. “I’m sure it’s the same now as it was back then. All that drive and competition, the fight for top grades. Aviana didn’t care about any of that. And yet, she was our valedictorian.”

“I don’t understand. My mom was expelled from Theden. How could she—?”

“Expelled? Aviana?” Griffin laughed. “Hardly. She was the campus darling.” He looked at me curiously. “Who told you she was expelled?”

“I saw the expulsion notice,” I said slowly.

In her doctored medical file.

“Well, I can promise you Aviana didn’t get kicked out of school,” Griffin replied. His expression darkened. “She took her finals then ran away.”

“Why?”

“I’ll get to that,” he replied. “Let me explain what she was up against first. Not that it excuses what she did, but I know it affected her more than she let on.”

“Your family.”

He nodded. “They were awful to her. And the closer she and I got, the more aggressive they became. They threatened to take away my trust fund, not pay for college, the whole nine. I couldn’t have cared less. None of those things mattered to me then. So I asked Aviana to marry me. And I told my stepfather he could take my trust fund and shove it.”

“You and my mom were engaged?”

Griffin seemed to hesitate then. “We were more than engaged,” he said finally. “Rory, your mom and I were married.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“We got married a week before graduation,” he said softly. “At the courthouse in Albany. We spent the next two days holed up in a little cabin in Canada, completely disconnected from the rest of the world. Just the two of us and a fireplace.” He blushed a little, as if he’d forgotten that I was there. “We spent the whole weekend making plans. Aviana wanted to get as far as we could from my family, and I just wanted to make her happy. Theden had a pretty good reputation in the UK, so we decided to move to London, apply to Oxford and Cambridge, make a life there. I had a little money of my own saved, and we figured it was enough to tide us over until we got jobs. The plan was to leave right after graduation.”

“But then she got pregnant,” I said. It sounded bitter, but I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t fair that something that was his fault as much as hers changed what he wanted. Changed how he felt. He wanted a life with her as long as it was just the two of them. A baby wasn’t part of the bargain.

His face darkened. “There was no ‘then,’” he said. “She was already pregnant when we got married. That’s how I knew it wasn’t mine.”

Confusion stalled my next thought. “Huh?”

Griffin hesitated. “I don’t want to paint a nasty picture of her, Rory. We were both really young. We were kids. I don’t blame her for lying to me. Not anymore.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. What did she lie to you about?”

“Aviana and I, we never— She said she wanted to wait until we were married.” He made a sound in his throat. “I guess that rule didn’t apply to other guys.”

“She cheated on you?”

He nodded. “While I was in Nantucket for spring break. I found out the morning of graduation. Someone emailed me a copy of her pregnancy test results. The test was dated April 14. Long before we ever . . .” He trailed off, his eyes hollow now. “It was at that moment, staring at her test results in black-and-white, that it all just clicked. That voice I’d been listening to, the one that led me to her, it wasn’t some higher power guiding me along. It was nothing more than cognitive dissonance working itself out. My rational mind sensed I shouldn’t be with her, but my emotional brain couldn’t accept it, so it invented a fiction, a voice that knew something I didn’t.” He looked up at the ceiling. “We’re better at lying to ourselves than most people realize.”

There were so many things I wanted to ask him—what my mom had said when he confronted her, why he didn’t go after her when he started hearing the Doubt—but the questions were lodged in my throat. Griffin kept talking.

“This company owes a lot to your mom,” he said then, gesturing toward the window overlooking the party outside. “If she hadn’t left, I never would’ve come to work for them.”

“Why not?”

“Your mom, she was very anti-Gnosis,” Griffin explained. “I never understood it. They were just a little tech startup back then. But somehow they’d gotten on Aviana’s radar, and she was adamant that I not have anything to do with them. The Monday after graduation, I drove to their offices and told them I’d work for free.”

“And you’ve been there ever since?”

He nodded. “It’s funny how things work out. When I started at Gnosis that summer, they’d just launched the R&D on a new decision-making app. An app that would keep people like me from lying to themselves. A voice we could trust. I decided right then that I’d dedicate my career to that app. The more people that used it, the fewer who would end up with their hearts broken.”

My mind leaped to the boy ten feet to my left. Was it worth it to avoid heartache if you also avoided its opposite, the feeling that your heart might burst with joy?

“Mr. Payne.” The voice caught both of us off guard. It was a hulk of a man in a black suit with an earbud in his ear. I recognized him as the guy I’d passed on the steps at the Masquerade Ball. Griffin’s bodyguard. “It’s quarter till.”

Griffin nodded at the man and turned to me. “I’ve got a speech to give,” he said. He sounded apologetic.

“She wasn’t pregnant when you got married,” I blurted out. It was now or never. “Whoever sent you those test results wanted you to think she was, but she wasn’t.”

Griffin’s whole body tensed up, like I’d hit him. “What?”

“My birthday, it’s March 21,” I said. “If she’d gotten pregnant when you think she did, I would’ve been due in early December. But I wasn’t. I was due in February and born in March. Three weeks and five days late.” The words were getting jumbled now, but I kept talking, afraid that if I stopped he’d walk away. “I saw a photo from her last ultrasound. The math all works out. She got pregnant on your wedding night.” Griffin was shaking his head. I grabbed his arm. “Look at my eyes. And my hands—” I held out my arm. “And my chin! The cleft on my chin. It’s just like yours. Our hair, it’s the same color, too. And—”

I could tell Griffin wasn’t listening anymore. His face looked broken. I got quiet, abruptly, and let go of his arm. It was several seconds before he said anything. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, like he’d been screaming. “You’re saying I’m . . .” He didn’t say the rest of it. It didn’t seem as if he could.

“My father,” I said softly.

All at once Griffin was crying. I took a step back, startled at the rawness of the emotion and how quickly it had come. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hands.

“All this time, I thought she’d betrayed me,” he said thickly. “The Doubt, it kept telling me to trust her, to go and find her. For months I couldn’t shut it off. I thought— I thought I was going crazy. I couldn’t make it stop. And then one day it did.” He rubbed his eyes with his fists as if trying to blot the grief away. “All that I’ve done since then—”

“Mr. Payne,” the man in black said.

“I need a minute, Jason.” Griffin’s eyes hadn’t left mine. “If I was the father, why did she leave?” he asked me. “She was supposed to give the valedictory address. She’d been working on it for weeks. But when I went to her dorm room that morning, to confront her about the email, she was gone. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Do you know if my mom was seeing a psychiatrist that spring?”

“A psychiatrist? For what? Because of the Doubt?” He shook his head. “Your mom never would’ve gone to a doctor about that. Why, did someone tell you she did?”

“It’s a long story,” I told him. “But I think someone may have been out to get her. I just don’t know who, or why. I was hoping you’d have some of the answers.”

“Unfortunately, I’m as in the dark as you are,” he said. “But maybe we can figure some of it out together. Can we talk after my speech? How long will you be here?” He smoothed his hair and the skin under his eyes, collecting himself.

“I wasn’t supposed to leave campus,” I admitted. “So I need to be on the nine-fifteen train back.”

“I’ll get you a car,” Griffin said. “If you leave by ten, you’ll be fine. And the speech won’t take long. I’d cancel it to talk to you, but they’re live-streaming it and there are a few things I need to say before this thing goes any further than it already has.” There was a tenor of resolve in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
Before what goes any further?
I wanted to ask, but the man in black was at Griffin’s elbow. “So you’ll stay?”

“Sure,” I said.

My father smiled, and for a second his eyes weren’t sad at all. “I’m so glad to meet you, Rory,” he said, taking my hand in his.

“What do the symbols mean?” I asked, nodding at the ring.

“Timshel,”
Griffin replied. “It’s Hebrew. Steinbeck used it in
East of Eden
. It means ‘thou mayest.’ The idea being that we all have a choice. To do good, to live well.”

“Timshel,”
I repeated. “I like that idea.”

“Me too,” Griffin replied. He examined his ring as if seeing it for the first time. “Your mom had it made for me for my eighteenth birthday. When she left, I kept it on as a reminder of the mistake I’d made, trusting something other than myself.” He looked up at the ceiling, as if searching for something there. “I think I missed the point.”

“Mr. Payne, the stream goes live in five minutes.” Jason was back, and his voice was urgent now. There was static buzzing from his earpiece. “They have to mic you, sir.”

Through the window I could see that the crowd had formed a semicircle around the fountain, facing the stage at the south end of the courtyard where Griffin would be giving his speech. There was a paper-thin screen mounted on the wall behind it, playing the latest TV ad for the Gold.

“I’ll find you as soon as I’m done,” I heard Griffin say.

And then he was gone, through the door and swallowed up by the boisterous crowd outside. North was at my side seconds later.

“How’d it go?”

“He never knew the baby was his,” I said, following North outside. “He got some email with the results of a pregnancy test dated two months before he and my mom ever slept together, so he thought my mom had cheated on him. When he went to ask my mom about it, she was gone.” I chewed on my lip. “Why would someone want him to think the baby wasn’t his?”

“I don’t know. You think the person who sent that email is the same person who messed with your mom’s medical file?”

“I guess so, but it seems weird, right? I mean, I understand the fake test results, but it’s not like Griffin would ever see her medical file. Why go to all that trouble?”

“Rory?” I spun on my toes, startled by the familiar voice. Beck was standing just a few feet away, in a navy suit that fit him perfectly but looked completely ridiculous. It reminded me of something Liam might wear, which made it the polar opposite of anything I’d ever seen my best friend put on.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, rushing over to give him a hug and nearly tripping in my heels in the process. “Another perk of being a beta tester?” I grabbed him by the elbows and gave him a once-over. He looked good. The zits he’d always battled had cleared up and his arms were bulkier, like he’d been working out.