Page 4 of Never Lost

“What, deception and subterfuge? Yeah. I noticed.”

Langer smirked. “I’d tell you to look in the mirror, but you wouldn’t recognize yourself in those clothes.”

Funny guy.

“Anyway, a less self-aware man would expect a thank you.” Before I could scoff in outrage at this prospect, Langer continued, “But I don’t. Because as much as I’ve tried to create the illusion that you’re here by choice, you’re not, and to expect you to be grateful for that would make me as delusional as Keith. But I will take this opportunity to point out that you’ve yet to successfully catch me in a single actual lie. To you, anyway.”

“You’re wrong.”

Langer whipped his head around so fast I was surprised the convertible didn’t go flying off the road.

“You keep telling me my sister was never here, but you’re wrong.”

Eyes on the road again, Langer paused before answering. “I know.”

Now it was my turn to whip my head around. “What the fuck, Max? You knew and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t know until today, and I’m telling you now,” he said irritably. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore because she’s gone. She left. Okay?”

Even the roar of the engine seemed to quiet as I sat silently suspended in a wind tunnel of horror. “Gone? When? Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Do you know what this means? What I had to go through to get—” I groaned and ran both hands through myhair in frustration, unable to even form sentences. I was back to square one. Below square one.

“I fucked up, okay? I’m sorry. Resi lied.”

“No shit, she lied, and thanks to you, now my sister could be anywhere.” For the first time, I twisted in the seat, turning my entire body toward Langer. “Fucking hell, Max, how tightly does this woman have you by the balls? Why do you believe everything she tells you unquestioningly? You’re fucking her, aren’t you? Because that’s the only explanation I can think of that makes the least bit of sense.”

“I’m not fucking her.”

“Then what? What is this all-important, all-consuming history between the two of you that nothing, not even the truth, can come between?”

Wordlessly, Langer swung a hard right down a dirt side road, one that seemed to lead clear out into the middle of the desert, and I had a feeling, not for the first time recently, that I’d just made a huge mistake.

“She’s my sister.”

1 “Repeat yourself, please. Slowly.”

2

HIM

Ialmost choked, or maybe it was the road dust. “You mean, the one your father?—”

Langer nodded.

I had thought—even at the time—that it was one of the few things Max had said during his impromptu visit that couldn’t easily be dismissed as utter bullshit. And that’s why it had stuck. “But you said?—”

“When I told you I didn’t know about her,” Langer clarified, “I meant I didn’t know she was my sister. I did knowher. But I thought she was just another slave girl, the daughter of one of our housemaids. I had no clue we were half-siblings, and neither did she. Not until years later.”

As the mountains drew closer, my pulse sped up. Even more so when Langer skidded the Porsche into the driveway of a house—a sprawling, ultramodern specimen of desert architecture, one so well-suited to the land that I hadn’t even noticed it was there until just before we pulled into the drive. And when I slid out of the car and reluctantly followed Langer upto the door, I saw why—mirrors, set into the roof so as to reflect the nearby mountains. Actually, they were more thannearby. After a month in the desert, I’d finally made it close enough to actually touch them.

“Where are we?” I asked warily, trying not to look too awestruck as I craned my head around at the landscape.

“Myhouse,” Langer said witheringly. “Where the fuck else would we be?”

“But—oh.” Of course he owned two homes. It would be weirder if hedidn’t.