“He told me he was representing your show and that you’d be the one doing the interview. I told him I'd consider it, but only if my son was never discussed. It was the only way I’d agree to any of it. Then I saw that news reel, and I knew what I had to do.”
Noah heard the words, and he knew his father was baiting him. Wanting him to discuss the idea of Angel where people were potentially listening.
It wasn't going to happen.
Ziggy glanced up and caught his gaze. She tilted her head a little to the left, narrowing her stare. She’d liked Hugh. Thought he was smart. Admired the way he attacked a story. Ziggy hated being wrong about people, and it was rare that she was, but the look on her face told him either she didn’t believe his dad, or she was kicking herself for not seeing this one coming.
For half a second, Noah thought about asking his father how he got his personal cell, but then that lie would be on record, and Noah wasn’t sure that was a good idea.
"You can make a public statement," Noah said. “Tell everyone that’s not what you agreed to. I’m sure my people would make it go away, and the interview won’t take place. You don’t need me to do that.”
His father didn't answer right away. In the room, nobody moved—not even Ziggy with her pen.
"I've had a great deal of time to think," Matias said finally. "Twenty-five years to be exact. I'm not the same man I used to be.”
Serial killers didn’t change. If Matias Salazar were ever let out of prison, even at his age, he’d kill again. Or he’d die trying. That was a fact that Noah had lived with his entire adult life.
“I want to be careful about how I say that because I know how it sounds. It's not about finding God—I've always believed. God has always been a part of my life ever since I was a little boy. That might be hard for some to understand, but it’s the truth.”
Noah had heard this speech before, and it made him physically sick—especially since as a kid, he and his parents had gone to church every Sunday. It was one of the many reasons he didn’t go now.
“It's about accepting who I am, what I've done. About honestly and openly taking ownership. Maybe that’s cliché, I don’t know, but I’ve sat in silence with what I’ve done for too long.”
What I've done.
Those words rolled through in Noah’s head like waves crash into the shoreline.
His father going to prison had never been the complicated part. He’d committed twelve murders and deserved every year ofevery sentence handed down in that courtroom, and Noah had never once in his life questioned that—not even at fourteen.
It was the other thing that didn't have a name. The unnamed piece that existed alongside the simple truth and refused to be argued out of existence, no matter how many years Noah put between himself and it. It was the truth that Noah had honestly felt loved by his father. It had been a genuine, active love. The kind built of days, weeks, and years of the unremarkable ways that added up over a childhood, shaping him into the person he carried into adulthood, whether he wanted to or not.
His father had shown up. Consistently. Without being asked. At thirty-nine, standing in someone else's living room, the weight of that tore at Noah's heart. Having a present father wasn't something every person had. It was, in fact, something many people spent their whole lives without.
But his father was also a monster.
Both things lived in Noah. They had always lived in him. And the cruelty of it was that accepting both didn't make either one smaller.
"Why did you call?" Noah asked. "What do you actually want from me?"
"You're the truth-seeker." The warmth again. Steady. Patient. Like it had been sitting there the whole time waiting for him to come back to it. "Bring this reporter on your show. Expose what he's doing.”
Noah saw its shape the second it landed—the architecture underneath the ask.
Ziggy must have seen it too, because her pen was flying across the page. Troy had pushed himself to a standing position, but Jag hadn’t moved a muscle. Amazing how that man could be so still, and yet so massively present.
"I can't bring a reporter from my own station onto my show," Noah said. "That's not something I would mention, it would beunethical. You want to deny the interview and make a statement. You don't need cameras. You don't need me."
Silence on the other end. Even as a boy, his father had taken his time to make important statements. Noah did it, too. Sadly, it was a trait he’d learned from his dad. It was two-fold. Think before you speak, especially important words. Understand what’s coming so there are no surprises. But the other part of that, the part that Noah kind of hated himself for, was the calculated part. The part he used on the show to get the confessions. To get the truth. To get to the story.
This was what his father was doing.
But Noah could be patient. So, he waited. He listened to his heartbeat, and he waited.
"I'm going to be seventy soon," Matias said. The warmth had shifted into something more deliberate. "I'm going to die in this prison. I've made my peace with that. But before I do, I want to tell my story. I want to tell it on your show."
"No."
"I think if you?—"