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This surprises me, and it doesn’t. He was in business with Cam, which means at some point our paths would have crossed. Cam parades me by all his staff, especially management and investors, but the problem is there are so many. I’m not like Tanya. It’s impossible for me to remember them all.
“Sorry, but I—”
“And you know what you said, every single time?”
I shake my head.
“You stuck out a hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jade Lasky. So nice to meet you.’ Don’t you just hate that? When people you’ve met and talked to multiple times treat you like a total stranger? When they think so little of another human being that they can’t be bothered to remember your face or name?”
Prosopagnosia. It’s a neurological disorder that makes people unable to distinguish between faces. I know because Cam is always teasing me that I have it.
In my defense, I meet alotof people. People who see me at the restaurants or with Cam at parties, who buddy up to us and act like we’re old friends, but none of it is real. They don’t know me, not really, and I sure as hell don’t know them. It’s part of being a celebrity chef’s wife; I’m lit up with the glow of his stardom.
“I can’t see your face,” I point out instead.
He comes closer, marching across the carpet and around the table until he’s close, standing right in front of me. I try to move back, but there’s nowhere for me to go. My calves are already pressed against the soft leather of the couch. I stare into his eyes and search for something I recognize, something unique in the shape or size or color, but there’s nothing. Hazel and almond-shaped, like half the people on the planet.
“You really don’t know?” He licks his lips. Smiles. “Are you sure about that, Jade? Like, really, really sure?”
The room falls silent, everyone waiting for my answer. Pain shoots through my cheek and I wince, blinking against it. I look him in his unremarkable eyes and force myself to steady my breathing.
“No, but if you take off that mask, I might.”
His pupils go dark, like a tiny man inside his eyeballs flicked off the lights. From ho-hum hazel to stormy black, just like that.
It’s the last thing I notice before he pulls off the mask.
J A D E
6:52 p.m.
It takes me a minute to place him.
Partly because he’s lost weight since the last time I saw him, a good twenty pounds melted off his limbs and torso and hollowing out his cheeks. His hair is different, too. Shorter. Lighter, almost completely gray.
The other part is because it’s been a few months. I haven’t seen him since the spring.
“I remember you. Except your name wasn’t Sebastian. It was something else.”
Though admittedly, that doesn’t explain the other times.
I close my eyes and try to reconstruct the meetings in my mind, but the only one I can come up with with any sort of certainty was this past April. Him, waving at me through the windows as he climbed the front steps. Me, opening the door to invite him in. He introduced himself, but not as Sebastian, as—
“Bas. You joked that your wife refused to call you that, that she preferred the name ‘Bossy.’ I laughed and said she sounded like a smart woman.” I pause, the obvious question rising in my head. “Which one is it?”
“The only one who calls me Bas is my mother, God rest her soul.”
“Do you even have a wife?”
He shrugs. “I guess, though I haven’t seen or heard from her in years. She could be dead for all I know.”
I don’t respond, mostly because I still don’t know what to believe. There have been so many lies, and if she’s been gone that long, I don’t see how their estrangement could possibly be Cam’s fault. The stories flicker through my head like a disjointed dream, random bits of information he hurled at me over the course of a couple hours. That he grew up in New Orleans, that he moved here after Katrina, that he married his high school sweetheart. The one thing I haven’t forgotten is that this guy was a talker.
Only one detail matches up to the bits and pieces I’ve heard from him today: “You told me about your daughter. You didn’t tell me what was wrong with her, but you said she was sick. That she was dying.”
My words hit him like a slap. He winces, then nods.
A rising high school junior and budding artist, a genius with charcoal and pastels. A sensitive girl with a pretty name.