“I won’t,” he said, and couldn’t imagine why he would. The prospect of having something new to puzzle out was mildly enthralling, so he watched her as she took a one hundred and twenty degree turn into a corridor. Her stride was premeditated and unhurried, as if she’d mapped out a path defined by ambivalence and then followed its projection to the inch.
He tucked it into a new file in his mind; one he’d opened without realizing it.
REGAN, it said, and within the subsection marked LIES, he filed the sound of her footfall while she was walking away from him.
* * *
REGAN TOOK ALDO TO A HOTEL BAR across the street, settling into a booth at the back of the room. It was barely five, still early, and there was a pianist setting up, but not much other source of noise. She ordered a ni?oise salad with a glass of wine and sat back, watching Aldo request a glass of water.
“You’re just going to watch me eat?” she asked, amused. Not that she typically ate much these days, and the pills had helped with what appetite she did have. The first month on this particular cocktail of medications had made her so sick she’d dropped an effortless ten pounds, the feeling of hunger gradually becoming preferable to the putrid sense of rotting from the inside out.
“Will that bother you?” he asked.
“No,” she said, shrugging, and took a sip of her wine. “Okay, so. What’s your story?”
He fidgeted a little, clearly made uncomfortable by the question. He seemed intensely uninterested in talking about himself, which was half the reason she’d brought it up. She’d spent enough time looking too closely at things to know when she was the one being clinically observed.
“I’m getting my doctorate in theoretical math,” he said, which she already knew, though she wasn’t going to tell him that. “I’m from California. Only child.” He took a sip from his glass of water. “No major arrests.”
“No major arrests?” she echoed, arching a brow.
“No arrests,” he amended quickly, and she scoffed.
“Well, there’s obviously a story there,” she remarked, tapping her fingers on her glass. “Something in your juvenile record?”
“I had problems in the past. ‘Illicit substances,’ I believe is the term.” She hid a blink of surprise and he took another sip. “I’m fine now.”
“Rehab?” she asked, finding the thought mildly amusing. He wasn’t exactly Kurt Cobain.
He shook his head. “My dad asked me to stop.”
She waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “That’s … it?” she asked, a little underwhelmed. “You had a drug problem, your dad said, ‘hey, quit that,’ and then you just … stopped?”
“Well, yeah.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I, ah.” His gaze cut away from hers for a second, then rose again. “Well, I overdosed. My dad was upset.”
He said everything with precisely the same degree of unambiguous fact that he’d used to address everything else. It scarcely registered, really, before dissolving into the small collection of data that Regan now possessed about him. She wondered if she should tell him she was familiar with the concept of medication （or self-medication, which his seemed to be） but his tone of blithe dismissal felt distinctly separate, as if he were referencing an amputated limb.
“It’s my understanding that people tend to not like it when their children almost die,” Regan commented, opting not to focus on the doom and gloom of it, and in response, something pulled at Aldo’s mouth, alighting near the corners.
“He was sitting next to my bed when I woke up,” Aldo said. “He just said ‘never again, okay?’ and I thought … yeah, sure, okay.” He shrugged, lifting his glass of water to his lips and discarding the mood entirely. “So I stopped.”
“That’s,” Regan began, and shook her head. “Supremely unlikely.” Not that she had much experience with addiction, but her understanding of the world suggested that his story was incomplete. It wasn’t as if people typically woke up with perfect resiliency, or that something could be made to vanish without leaving traces in its place.
But he’d lost interest in the subject; she could tell. His gaze hadn’t technically moved, but the spark of focus in it had receded.
“Time travel again?” she asked, and he blinked, catching himself.
“No, actually,” he said, in a way that suggested the answer was usually yes. “I was thinking about your counterfeit scheme again.”