Artem
A stoop-shouldered African American man sits inside the ticket booth.
“Excuse me.”
He looks up and his eyebrows rise as he takes me in.
“You don’t look like the type of person who takes the bus,” he comments.
“I’m not here for a bus,” I tell him. “I’m here for information.”
“Route map is right over there,” he says, pointing at the stand of brochures behind me.
“Not that kind of information. I need to know if you sold a ticket to a woman in the last few weeks. She would have been dark-haired, exotic features, very beautiful. Heavily pregnant.”
“What’s it to you?”
I grip the edge of the counter hard between my fingers. This man knows something. The trail isn’t dead after all.
“I need you to help me find her,” I say. “I’ll pay you whatever you need.”
He scrutinizes me up and down. Then, seeing something in me—fuck if I know what—he sighs.
“Yeah, I know that girl,” the man says. “Except she wasn’t pregnant when she left town. She’d had her baby.”
My body goes cold with stillness.
Esme had given birth.
In this shithole of a town.
“Beautiful little fella, too,” the man continues. “Didn’t look much like her, though. But he had her eyes.”
“He?” I say, feeling my heart swell with an emotion I can’t quite name.
Is it joy? Pain? Hurt? Loss? Regret?
Maybe it’s all the above, and my mind simply can’t process it.
I have a son.
Fuck.
I have a son.
“Phoenix.”
“Excuse me?”
“His name. The baby’s,” he tells me. “She named him Phoenix.”
Phoenix?
“I’m guessing you’re the father, am I right?” he asks directly.
“Yeah,” I mutter. I’m still lost in thought, testing the name in my head again and again.
I have a son.