“It only matters if it makes sense to you,” she says.
“Well, that's exactly how it feels. Even in all that time that I didn't go up there, I could feel it. It was looming there. This chunk of the past that made me feel sick when I thought about it. But I didn't want to get anywhere near it. All those things were hidden from me my entire life. I can understand why my grandmother wanted to keep them. No matter what Jonah did or continues to do, he was her child. He was her little boy, and no one could have imagined what he would turn into. She wanted to cling to that. Even if she could never see it or talk about it or acknowledge it even existed, she wanted to make sure somewhere in the world; there was still a part of him that she could hang on to.”
“As you've told me before,” my therapist notes, “you have a very strong grasp on why that room existed the way it did. But why don't you tell me more about why you wanted to change it. You could have just taken everything out, thrown it away, and sealed it back up.”
“I could have. But that would have been letting him keep it. It still would have been hiding something. This way, I have that space back, and I can use it the way I want to. Nothing needs to be hidden from me anymore. I know who Jonah is and what he's done. I don't have to make guesses or try to come up with ideas about why my mother was taken from me. I got all the answers I wanted about that, so there's no need to hide from it anymore. Jonah is in jail, and he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He can't hurt me anymore.”
“It's good to hear you say that.”
“Does it sound convincing?” I ask.
“That depends on who you want to convince.”
“I know both him and Anson are in custody. They're being held in maximum security and have no movement. They're not in the general population; they aren't being moved from facility to facility. Everybody is very aware of Jonah’s influence and Anson's intellect. They know what these men are capable of doing and are going to every extent to keep them from doing anything. I know that.”
“But?” she leads.
“But I can't get them out of my head. I can't stop thinking about what they might have planned or orchestrated that none of us know about. Jonah’s managed to exist under the radar for almost thirty years without me knowing anything about him. For more than twenty of that, everybody thought he was dead. He was able to continue throughout his life, rise to the top of a terrorist organization with a reach we are still trying to get a grasp of, and build up a following of slavish devotees without the FBI, the CIA, or anyone else detecting that he did not die the night of that car accident.”
Then she drops the million-dollar question.
“Do you believe Leviathan was behind Greg's death?”
It's a question I know she's been clamoring to ask me for months now. She touched on it early in my renewed course of therapy, but I closed it down. I wasn't ready to let my mind go there. But now that's where I'm standing. There isn't anywhere else to turn.
“I don't know,” I admit. “Obviously, that was the prevailing theory early in the investigation. He had only just survived more than a year of captivity and a near-fatal beating at the hands of that organization. It was his survival that directly led to us uncovering the details of Leviathan and confirming its existence. His information directly led to Jonah being captured. It only made sense that the organization would be out for his blood. They lost their leader who they saw as the most powerful and important person in the world.”
“Then why don't you sound convinced?”
“There wasn't enough evidence. Our understanding of Leviathan is still so basic. Even with my father back and revealing everything that he's learned about it after going deep undercover for ten years, we still don't know enough about the organization to be able to effectively trace the members, or even how the hierarchy is built. We can't figure out how to identify who is in the organization and what they're responsible for doing. It would seem that people walking around with these sea monster tattoos on their backs would be so obvious.”
“You would think,” she notes.
“And yet they're not. That's what's so frustrating about it. They stay undetected. They just moved about among everybody else without anybody realizing who they are or what they're capable of. Even if Greg's death was a hit in retaliation for Jonah’s arrest, we can't trace it.”
“It's more than that,” she tells me. “It isn't just that there's no concrete evidence. You've solved crimes before where you had barely anything to go on. What are you really thinking about Leviathan's responsibility?”
My eyes narrow slightly.
“I thought I was here to work through my personal baggage. Not the investigation into Greg’s death.”
“We're going to talk about whatever you want to talk about,” she responds coolly.
“Then let's talk about something else,” I tell her.
She opens her hand to me in invitation.
“Go ahead,” she says.
We spend the rest of the session dabbling into my relationship with Dean and what it's been like coming to terms with having a cousin fathered by the uncle I didn't know about. This lets our conversation drift over into what it's been like to have my father in my life again. From the beginning, I figured that would be deep analysis fodder. His disappearance has been a central part of my therapy from the first time I sat on the dusty pink
