Page 136 of Broken Brothers

I just hoped what she had said about Morgan didn’t mean that Morgan was suddenly playing games with me too. Unlike Layla, he had something that he could use to hurt me. He could devastate me if he wanted to.

Even as I followed Layla, the city remained in a kind of peaceful calm that felt like the eye of the hurricane. I had just emerged from far too much chaos the night before and had woken up only to find the city at its calmest during the day that I had ever seen… which probably meant that at any minute now, shit would pick back up all over again.

Layla ducked into a side street, 59th Street, without any traffic at all. She went up to a building, opened it, and led me inside. We walked up to the second floor, came to her apartment, and opened it up.

“Welcome to my home,” she said. “I know here we can speak freely.”

“OK, just what the hell’s going on,” I said.

“Well, might as well get right to it, huh? Morgan texted me this morning and asked me to meet you outside your apartment while he walked.”

“Walked where?”

“I couldn’t say. Somewhere south, but my place is south of yours anyways.”

That told me absolutely nothing. It could have been anything to Wall Street to Times Square to some tiny Chinese restaurant that only Morgan knew about.

“In any case, though, it was an easy request to fulfill since I quit my job this morning.”

“What,” I said, my jaw dropping.

I knew that Layla had contemplated such a move for some time, but hearing that she’d actually pulled the trigger surprised me a little bit.Good for her. Uncle is a creepy asshole. She had to do it.

“Yep, I called my uncle and said I couldn’t ethically work for him any longer. He yelled at me but I just kept the phone a safe distance from my ear and it worked out surprisingly well. Not too much drama, anyways.”

“I see,” I said. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll figure that out over the next few days,” she said. “I’ve got enough cash to live on my own for a year, and if I really need to, I can find relatives or friends who aren’t sickos.”

Like me. But don’t offer that right now. Not with everything going on.

“Makes sense,” I said. “Well, congrats. It sounds like it was the right move.”

“And an easy one at that. But anyways, I saw Morgan. He said he didn’t like me but that he felt I was someone you trusted. I said that was true and that you had good reason for doing so, even after everything that happened. Morgan snorted at that and didn’t seem like he quite believed me, but he went with it. Hetold me then that he had to take care of some things for you guys but that he couldn’t tell you about them because he knew you would overreact.”

Morgan was damn right I was going to overreact, but not because of what he might say—rather, it was the fact that he didn’t feel like he could tell me instead of Layla.

“He wanted a third party to know that what he was doing was in the benefit of you and he said to make sure you knew that no matter what, he was on your side.”

A long pause came. I couldn’t even make sense of any of this. So Morgan was speaking in code now to my former lover? What was… what did any of this mean?

“As if this couldn’t get any more bizarre,” I said, sighing. “I don’t even know what’s truth anymore.”

“Welcome to my childhood,” Layla said.

I looked up at her and let my eye gaze encourage her to continue speaking.

“My uncle loved to twist games with the truth,” she said. “When you’re that young, you don’t have the confidence in your truth so you just go with what you are told. Even if you note that something is a lie, you get told so adamantly that it’s the truth that you just start to accept it at some point. I feel like it took until this morning for me to unravel that my uncle had lied to me about so much. But it mind fucks you.

“Because when you think about it, you have no idea what’s real and what’s not. I know I helped play a role in that for you, Chance, and I’m sorry. You probably think I’m fucking with you right now. I am not. I am telling you everything I know and am trying to avoid interpreting anything for you, fearing it might lead you down the wrong thought train. Maybe that’s crazy, but I just can’t let myself guide someone as poorly as my uncle did.”

I felt like I was in a trippy dream.

“Morgan didn’t say anything else?”

“No,” Layla said. “All he said was make sure that you found out about this and that you were told this alone. He was adamant that I tell you in private. He was extraordinarily careful about when he spoke to me on his walk. That’s what he said so little on what felt like a relatively long walk.”

He’s definitely dealing with Edwin Hunt, then. But in what way? Why can’t I just know?