“I keep bringing it up because she’s been helping me, you know….” Phantom expelled a long breath as if this was the hardest thing he’d ever had to explain before finishing with “Talk and shit.”
“Okay, good for her….” I said with no idea of where this was leading.
“Han, Victor, and me, we’re good at empire running—but talking? Not so much, so I’m just saying maybe you want to try talking with him?”
“First of all, no, I don’t want to ever talk to him again. Second of all, fuck Han. If he wanted to talk, he should have done that instead of this.” I once again held up the unwanted wedding ring on my left hand.
“Yeah, I hear you.” Phantom expelled another breath, and he turned to go.
Good. I refused to feel guilty, even if I could tell having this conversation with me had been really uncomfortable for Phantom.
But just as I was about to turn back to finish packing the suitcase I’d set out on the bed, he asked me a quiet question. “Did he tell you about his mom?”
It was the one question….the one…I couldn’t bring myself to ignore.
“Yeah, I guess. A little bit,” I answered reluctantly, pretending to be totally focused on folding the clothes I’d haphazardly thrown in the suitcase.
“He tell you about Victor too? And what happened with his mom after?”
Okay, fine, I guess I’m in this conversation. I set down a half-folded pair of surf shorts and answered, “He told me about saving Victor, yeah. But he didn’t say what happened to his mom.”
“Han told people that she died too—that he didn’t have anybody left to take care of him after that. But Victor’s father told us the truth.”
Phantom dipped his head to level with me. “She didn’t die. She ran. She took one look at what Han had done, and she cut out like she didn’t even have a kid. Then she called Victor’s dad and told him where he could find his family—but only in exchange for not killing her—just her. She didn’t negotiate fuck all for her son. She’s still alive out there somewhere. She just didn’t want anything to do with her kid after everything was done, and it wasn’t like Victor’s dad didn’t tell Han what went down too. He knew—he lived with what really happened. And that’s the real reason he thought women weren’t worth shit….at least until he met you.”
The horror of Phantom’s story froze me in place as memories of Han’s words on the Fourth of July echoed in my head. “Most people are cowards. You cannot trust them to stay when danger is involved. It does not matter if they once claimed to love you.”
I’d thought he’d just been trying to make me feel even more stupid for ever dating Brad—which I totally did. But now, those words hit different.
Cynicism hadn’t made Han tell me that, I realized, but lived experience.
“I…I didn’t know,” I said to Phantom.
“Yeah, well, that’s because he doesn’t talk about it,” Phantom answered with a shake of his ogre head. “Not to me. Not to Victor. Not to anybody.”
Phantom expelled a guilty breath. “And he’d be pissed if he knew I was talking to you about it now. But Han never heard from her again. She might as well have been dead, which is I guess why he told people that—because to him she was. And I guess you could say that fucked him up….”
Phantom went quiet for a moment, like he was trying to find the right words, then came back with, “He’s that guy, you know. Gets all the chicks easy AF. But he never trusts them. Never lets them in. He let you in, though. He let you stay with him, and when you did everything in your power to save him instead of saving yourself, I don’t think he knew what to do with that. So bam, Mrs. Han, as opposed to doing something not crazy, like you know, just saying thank you or buying you jewelry or some shit like that.”
I looked to the side, my head swimming with all this new information. “So you’re saying Han forced me to marry him because I surprised him by having common decency.”
Phantom stuffed his hands in his pockets, and he appeared embarrassed as he answered, “What you did ain’t common. If it was, Han wouldn’t be so fucked up over you.”
I stood there, not knowing what to say or how to respond to any of this. This was a wipeout of a different kind—a gigantic wave of information out of nowhere in a placid sea.
“Listen, this ain’t my bag, so I’m going to shove off. But talk to him again or don’t—it’s up to you. I just thought you should know that,” Phantom said.
With that, he finally departed, leaving me wiped out on the rocks. Not sure how to recover.
