The Match (Wilde, #2)(18)

“Please.” Wilde slowly turned back to face her. Their eyes locked. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve said that before. But I never blamed you. And I don’t want your apologies.”

He stood there and looked very lost.

“Wilde?”

“Tell Matthew I’ll be in touch,” Wilde said, and then he disappeared into the thicket.





Chapter

Six



Hester, Wilde knew, was right about Matthew. He should not have stayed away.

Things had changed. That had been his rationale. Matthew was grown and was at college. More to the point, Laila had a boyfriend now, the first guy she’d kept around since David’s death eleven years ago. Wilde had no rights here. He had no standing. He wanted no part of it. In the past, his presence had been, he hoped, a comfort to her. There had been a role for him. Now that role was gone. He could only cause disruptions.

So he stayed away.

Of course, Wilde still kept a clandestine watch on Laila and Matthew from the woods—that was how he knew Matthew was back—but his vigils were becoming less and less frequent. There is a fine balance between being appropriately protective and creepily stalking.

Still, Laila was one thing. Matthew was another. So maybe he was just making excuses. Maybe he had simply been selfish. In the past year, he had taken too many risks in terms of personal entanglements. Now he wanted to take none.

Hester had also surprised him by bringing up the car crash. Why? And why now?

Wilde stopped by a specific tree and dug up one of his hidden stainless-steel lockboxes. He had six such all-weather storage containers throughout the forest, all with fake IDs, cash, passports, weaponry, and disposable smartphones.

Wilde tucked the box under his arm and hurried back to his microhome—a state-of-the-art, off-the-grid abode called an Ecocapsule. The cutting-edge habitat was tiny, under seventy square feet of habitable space, yet it had everything Wilde needed—a folding bed, a table, cabinets, kitchenette, a shower, an incinerator toilet that turned your waste into ash. The Ecocapsule incorporated both solar and wind power. The pill-shaped exterior not only minimized heat loss but facilitated collecting rainwater into water tanks where it could be filtered for immediate use. With the pod being both mobile and camouflage-skinned—not to mention the advanced security features he had set up—Wilde had made himself very difficult to locate.

He opened the box and took out a military-grade disposable phone. The safety features made it virtually impossible to track, but the key word here was “virtually.” No matter what you’re told, there is always a backdoor when it comes to technology, always a way to track and uncover, always, at the end of the line, a human who can see what you are doing if you’re not careful. Wilde tried to mitigate that via various VPNs and internet masking technologies.

Once the protective protocols were in place, Wilde powered up the device and checked his texts and emails. For a second, Wilde wondered whether his father, better known as Daniel Carter, had reached out, but that would be impossible. Wilde hadn’t given him any contact information. When his alarms had first sounded—when Hester had crossed into the woods from his overgrown path—he’d let the thought that it was indeed Daniel Carter enter his mind, that after Wilde had taken off without a warning or goodbye, his father had taken it upon himself to do some research and had either figured out where Wilde could be or had gone to Hester to help find him or…

Didn’t matter.

Wilde checked his messages for the first time in months. He spotted a few from Matthew, always brief, basically asking him where he was. There were two from Rola, his foster sister, the first asking where he was, the second reading:

Sigh. Don’t be like this, Wilde.



He should call her too.

Nothing from Ava. Nothing from Naomi. Nothing from Laila.

Then he saw a message that surprised him.

It was from PB, sent via the DNAYourStory messaging service. The email was dated September 10, eight months ago. Wilde hit the message link. It brought him to the full thread of messages between him and PB in ascending timeline order.

The first communication had come from PB to Wilde a year ago, before he left for Costa Rica:

To: WW

From: PB

Hi. Sorry about not giving my name, but there are reasons I don’t feel comfortable letting people know my real identity. My background has too many holes in it and a lot of turmoil. You are the closest relative I’ve found on this site, and I wonder whether you have holes and turmoil too. If you do, I may have some answers.



Wilde hadn’t replied until months later, not until he sat in Liberia Airport and waited to fly to Las Vegas to confront his father:

To: PB

From: WW

Sorry I didn’t reply sooner. I found my father on here. I’m going to attach a link to his profile. Could you let me know if he also came up as a relative of yours? If so, we will know whether we are related on my mother’s or father’s side. Thank you.



But after Wilde’s visit to Las Vegas, he’d chosen not to pursue the matter anymore or check his emails. What was the point? He realized now that it sounded as though he was wallowing in his own pity party, but that wasn’t it. He craved isolation. It was just how he was built. The shrinks had a field day with how his upbringing made him this way, how important the first five years of life are, and to make no attachments during that era, no physical or emotional contact, to be alone with no other human beings, all of that made him become irreparably damaged.