Harper considered before answering.
“It doesn’t in the everyday, practical sense, no.”
“It would serve no purpose.”
“It would help me to see him better, though . . . to see beneath the legend and the enigma. To understand him better.”
To love him better.
She winced. Jacob was the most elusive man she’d probably ever meet in her life. Was she a masochist, or something? There was no surer guarantee of pain than falling for him. Trying to disguise her sudden transparency, she reached for her coffee and took a sip. She had a sneaking suspicion Cyril had somehow divined her mortifying thought.
“I don’t think it would help at all. It might just make him feel exposed, even betrayed, if you insisted upon knowing about every detail of his history.”
“Yes. There is that risk,” she agreed, squinting out at the sun-gilded Pacific Ocean. Her heart felt heavy. There was definitely that risk with Jacob, as shut off as he was. The strength of his armor had to be commensurate to the pain from which he guarded himself, didn’t it? That was a forbidding thought.
Cyril stubbed out his cigarette.
“Why did you mention South Carolina earlier?”
“Because that’s where Jacob was born and grew up. He told me, on the first day we met.”
He shook his head. “He didn’t grow up in South Carolina.”
“What?” Harper asked, startled from her ruminations. “South Carolina, born and bred,” she repeated what Jacob had said on that beach.
Cyril shook his head. “No. He mentioned where he grew up a few times in passing, but it wasn’t South Carolina.”
“Where was it?” Harper asked, leaning forward in her chair, the back of her neck prickling with curiosity. Why would Jacob have said he grew up in South Carolina that first day if he hadn’t? Cyril must be mistaken.
Cyril’s brow creased as he thought. “That’s just it, I can’t recall precisely. As I said, he’s rarely mentioned it. And I’m British, you know. I get your states mixed up sometimes, especially some of the eastern ones. Virginia, maybe? Maryland? Somewhere in the backwoods. He’s joked once or twice about being the country bumpkin, how he never got on a plane until he was eighteen or on an elevator until he was fourteen, things like that. But no, it definitely wasn’t South Carolina. I have a friend who moved to South Carolina, and I’ve visited there, so I would have remembered that,” Cyril said firmly.
“Is Latimer his adoptive parents’ name?”
“I’m not sure Jacob would approve of me talking about all this with you,” Cyril stated.
“I see,” Harper said, feeling awkward.
Cyril exhaled. “Look, I don’t think you have evil intentions toward Jacob. It’s pretty clear you’re as taken with him as he is with you. It’s just . . . he’s mentioned to me before that he is concerned about the fact that you’re a reporter. He’s not overly fond of your tribe. With good reason, if you ask me. They’re always poking around him, looking for a story . . . sometimes making them up when they can’t find anything worthwhile.”
“I’m an editor,” Harper corrected. “And I’ve told Jacob repeatedly that I’m not doing some kind of undercover exposé on him. I would never sleep with someone to get a story. That’s despicable.”
“And if you got wind of a story when you were already involved with a man? What then?”
“That’s not why I’m asking these questions! I’m asking because I want to know him better. Is that so bizarre?”
Cyril threw up his hands and leaned back in his chair. “It all comes to the same thing, though. It doesn’t really matter one way or another why you’re asking me questions about Jacob—”
“I disagree,” she interrupted forcefully. “How can it not matter? Are you saying there’s no difference between asking because I care, and asking because I plan to use the information against him?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Cyril said, his pale blue eyes flashing. “Because either way, Jacob wouldn’t want it. Don’t you see? He doesn’t want anyone stirring up his past. I have the feeling at times that it’s like he’s buried that part of himself. Laid it to rest, just like you would a loved one. Who he was pains him, somehow. To bring it up now, to start digging around and poking at the skeletons in the clos
et, it’s like trying to raise the dead. Besides,” he continued in a more subdued tone. “It’s not as if plenty of other reporters haven’t tried to resuscitate the bones of his past. They can’t find much of anything, beyond Clint Jefferies,” he said, rolling his eyes. “And all of that is just sensationalism and empty speculation, not facts.”
Harper didn’t reply. She suddenly felt very hollow. Sad. Surely Cyril was right. Who was she, to question Jacob’s past? Jacob clearly didn’t want it, so why should she?
Because you don’t like seeing his pain. If the past held the origins of his pain, he’d never really heal if he constantly avoided those wounds.
A sharp feeling of loss went through her unexpectedly. Her thought had sounded like something her dad would say. And yes, Harper agreed in theory. But more than that, it was as if in denying his own past, Jacob was denying her something. And for whatever crazy reason that meant something to her.