Jed plucked the passport from Kim’s hands. They were getting there, slowly, but he needed more. “So how did you go from a sleepy commuter town in the UK to Max becoming someone else? What happened to your parents?”
Kim let out a shaky breath, but Jed resisted the urge to comfort her. He got the feeling that if he distracted her now, she’d lose her nerve.
“You have to promise me that I can trust you, Jed. I shouldn’t be telling you anything… I should let you and Max part ways, let you pack up and move on like you did before.”
“Why don’t you?”
Kim met his gaze properly for the first time since she’d begun to talk. “Because I know you love him.”
Jed had no answer to that. Instead he took her hand and said, “Go on.”
Kim pulled a photo the size of a passport from her back pocket. “This was taken a few months before they died. It’s the only picture I have. Max doesn’t have any. He won’t let me reprint this for him.”
Jed scrutinized the faded picture of a tall, fair-skinned white man, his African wife, and their children. “Max had dreadlocks?”
“For a long time. I don’t think he cut his hair at all after he turned seven.”
Jed smiled in spite of himself. He loved the feel of Max’s fine buzz of hair under his chin, but there was something captivating about a dreadlocked, teenaged Max. He got a hold of himself and handed the picture back. Recently, it seemed his heart was ruled by the power of faded old photographs. “What happened?”
“My dad took a case defending Loyalist prisoners against the British government. It brought a lot of flak from both sides. The Loyalists didn’t want a Catholic defending their own, and the Republicans saw it as treason. Put together with their shared disapproval of his African wife….”
Jed got the picture. “Was he threatened?”
“So many times I think he stopped taking it seriously.”
Jed closed his eyes and asked again, one more time, “What happened?”
“They came for him,” Kim said flatly. “I was away at college in New York, but Max was home. Some men attacked my father with an ax, and when he was dead, they killed my mother too. Max tried to protect her, but they bludgeoned him with a poker from the fireplace. There were three of them, and he was only sixteen. He didn’t stand a chance.”
For a long time, the only sound in the quiet cabin was the gentle tick of Max’s homemade clock. Jed felt shattered. He’d seen more death and carnage than any man should have to see, but he’d never once imagined Max’s past harbored a secret so devastating. He steeled himself as a conversation from a few months back flashed into his mind. “Max told me he was seizure-free as a teenager. Did this bring them back?”
Kim nodded and wiped her eyes. “Yes. He suffered a serious head injury… bleeding on the brain. I nearly lost him too.”
Jed’s chest hurt. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t bear to imagine a world without Max. “What happened next? Did you leave right away?”
“As soon as Max was well enough to travel. The security services couldn’t guarantee our safety—they didn’t even know which side had ordered the hit. I panicked, Jed. I was so scared. Nick was the only person at college I could turn to. We shared an art-history class before Nick changed his major to business. He wired me some money so I could fly us back to America. We stayed in New York until we could buy new identities, then we came here.”
Ashton was about as far from New York as you could get on US soil, but one thing didn’t make any sense. “If Nick was your boyfriend, surely it wouldn’t be that hard to find you?”
Kim smiled, wistful and wry. “No one knew we were together. Nick didn’t have any friends even then, and I was a little embarrassed to be dating such a….”
“Dweeb?”
“Don’t tell him I said that.”
“I won’t,” Jed promised absently.
“Come on, Jed. I know there’s a lot of bad blood between you, but he was there for me, for both of us, when we had no one else.”
“What about the rest of your family? You must’ve had other relatives.”
“Not really. My mum’s family are scattered around the Congo, so we’ve never known them, and my dad didn’t have much family left. The authorities implied it might be safer to let them think Max had died of his injuries. They arranged everything, then put us on a plane to NYC. Nick suggested we come back here, and it all seemed to make sense. I never stopped to think about what might happen ten years later.”
Jed could relate to that. The circumstances were radically different, but he’d spent more than a decade hiding from himself in the military machine, burying himself in war to avoid admitting how much he missed the kid brother who’d once been his shadow. “So if anyone really is looking, chances are they’re only looking for you?”
Kim shrugged. “I guess, but—”
Jed held up his hand. “I get it. You were scared, and you ran before you really knew the score. What was your father’s name?”