“She’s not an alcoholic,” he says and then adds, “This is for me, though.” After a swig, he eyes me. “I’m not an alcoholic. Do I cope with it? Do I misuse it at times? … I’m working on it. Spare me your judgment.”
“Drink all you’d like. I just don’t want Ella to have it.”
“Yeah.” Surprisingly he agrees and Kam motions with the bottle. “I know there’s an association between misuse and …” He hesitates and the color drains from his face.
“Suicidal thoughts.” I complete the sentence for him.
Kam nods and then says, “I don’t know if you know, but when she gets like this, it fucks me up a bit.”
I watch him. Carefully this time.
Kam unscrews the top and tips back the bottle. After taking a pull he offers it to me, but I decline with a gesture.
“When she gets like this?” I question. “You say that like it happens often.”
Kam lets out a sarcastic huff. “I thought we were bonding here.”
I give him a humorless laugh in return. There’s a moment of silence. Kam has another swig as I look out the back window. He didn’t drive here, because there’s no car outside. He walked.
That must mean he was fucked up before he came. He wasn’t planning to drive. That’s one point in his favor. If he’d driven here, drunk behind the wheel—
“Nobody drunk should ever be behind the wheel, especially not if they’re fucked up,” Kam says, as if he can read my mind. He stares into the distance and I watch the memories go through his eyes as he takes another sip from his bottle.
Nerves have me on edge. “You all right?” I ask him.
“I’ve just been thinking,” he answers.
“About what?”
“Just what she’s been through.” Kam was the one to witness it all firsthand.
“It wasn’t just after James died,” he says after a while, abruptly, like he snapped back to bonding with me. Or like this is too heavy for him to keep inside anymore. “She had a difficult life.”
I think about all the information Cade gave me. All those files.
Slowly, I pull out a chair at the table and take a seat with him.
I take a moment to study him. He came here with alcohol in his jacket pocket, and he’s been talking openly about her rough childhood. I don’t know what has him so upset, but maybe if I just listen, he’ll feel like elaborating.
“Her childhood wasn’t her fault,” he says and then finishes the bottle.
But what if Kam thinks he has some responsibility for that? If he blames himself for things that happened to her, then it would explain how he’s behaving right now. If he was involved in how things played out for her, even more so.
I’m not sure how to press him for details. I haven’t worked with Kam like that. Taking a deep breath, I settle on acknowledging the obvious.
“From what I’ve heard, it was pretty rough.”
“‘Pretty rough’ is putting it mildly,” he comments. I wonder if he’s only telling me this because he knows that I’m looking into it.
“You know what happened to her mom?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, searching his gaze. “Is there something else you want to tell me about that? Maybe something I don’t know?”
Kam looks at me for a long, long time. Too long of a moment passes and then he runs a hand down his face. “No,” he says finally. “I just wanted to talk. I just wanted to ask you about the cameras.”
It already seems like a year ago that he asked me about those cameras. That was his pretense for showing up. It barely lasted five minutes.
“You sure?” I question.
He hesitates for a beat. “Yeah. Will you give me a heads-up first next time you plan to change something major? Just so I know?”
Nodding, I tell him, “I can do that.”
“I think I shouldn’t have had that last drink,” he mutters while rubbing the back of his head.
“You want a ride back home?” I offer and he stares at me for a long moment once again.
Kam stands up from his seat at the table, answering “no” and tucks the empty bottle back into his jacket pocket. He glances toward the staircase. “I’m going to head out. Tell Ella I said hi.”