Double Read Free

missing persons and social services. They were all coffee and triumph and activity. My lie had snowballed into fact already while my back was turned.
    “Cassiel, my man ,” Gordon said, wheeling his chair away from his desk. “How’re you doing?”
    It was embarrassing, him talking like that. I knew it and he knew it. I looked at him and he looked away.
    “It’s Cass,” I said. “That’s what people call me.”
    I didn’t know I was going to say it, but when it came out it sounded right. I liked the feeling of the name in my voice. I was tall and I looked down on Gordon in his chair. I had a family and friends and somewhere to be. I was somebody. The fugitive I’d been had finally disappeared.
    Nobody could get me now.
    “Sorry,” he said, clearing his throat. “Cass. What can we do for you?”
    I said I’d finished on the computer.
    “Good lad,” he said, straightening himself. “Find what you were looking for?”
    I shrugged. (Yes Yes Yes. I’d found everything I ever wanted.)
    I said, “What happens next?”
    Ginny said that they were arranging for my family to be told. She said, “Someone will let them know as soon as possible. Then we can sort out getting you home.”
    Home.
    I didn’t know what to look at. A kind of hunger burst open in my gut, this cool empty space. I licked my lips, and I felt a sudden fine sheen of sweat rise in my hair and under my arms.
    Gordon said, “It won’t be long now.”
    I heard what he said and I didn’t hear it at the same time. I think I nodded.
    Home. Was it that easy?
    Ginny said, “You do want to go home, don’t you, Cassiel? Is that what you want to do?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I want it more than anything in the world.”
    I thought she might laugh. The whole world could have burst out laughing right then and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Who was I to want anything?
    “Well, good,” Ginny said. “Of course you do.”
    Gordon sat back in his chair with his hands behind his head, and because the conversation seemed to be over, I left the room. I put one foot in front of the other, and when I got out I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes and made my heart slow down just by asking it to.
    I was him.
    And with each step I took as Cassiel Roadnight, with each new slowing heartbeat, I replaced something I wanted to forget about having been me.

T H R E E
    M y grandad’s place was a big house that backed on to the park. I don’t remember anything before that. I’ve tried. Through the window I could see the playground, kids moving all over it like ants on a dropped lollipop.
    Being in that house was like going back in time. It was quiet and dark and book-lined and mostly brown, full of clocks ticking, real clocks counting the days away in every room. The curtains were always closed, as though outside didn’t matter. Grandad thought the best thing a person could spend his day doing was reading in the dark. I don’t think it ever crossed his mind that not everybody wanted to do it.
    After the accident, people kept saying it was no place for a child, the health visitors and social workers and neighbors and noseyeffingparkers, as Grandad would’ve called them.
    They didn’t ask me. It didn’t matter what I thought.
    There were thirteen rooms in that house. I counted them. Grandad only lived in one.
    I thought he must have used them once, must have needed them for something, like a wife and kids or dogs or lodgers or whatever it was he had before he had me. He never talked about it, even if I asked him. He acted like there wasn’t anything to remember before there was him and me. He called it The Time Before, and that’s all he’d say about it.
    Grandad was happiest just to sit and read and sleep and drink in the front room, the one with the big bay window you couldn’t ever see out of. Sometimes he got up and shuffled out to the bathroom or the kitchen or to get the mail off the doormat, but not all that often. Sometimes he ventured out to the