Chapter 27
My fingers itch to grab for the phone, race out of this house, and call Milo. —Noah Hardaway
“Wow. I never knew glitter was such a feisty opponent.” Milo frowns down at the floor of the community center’s entryway, which currently features sparkling pops of purple, silver, gold, and blue. “How are these suckers still standing? I’ve already taken a broom, a mop, and a paper towel to them.”
Scout appears next to him, frowning as he wipes his hands on his jeans. “Oh, yeah. Grab a lint roller or some duct tape. That’ll get the rest of it up.”
“Good tip.” Milo grins at him and moves to give him a fast fist bump, but he steps away.
Scout’s definitely still skittish around all of us, even though he’s already proven to be a hardworking employee just a few days into his tenure here at the Devon Falls Community Center.
He’s always here before the rest of us, even Gabe.
He protests whenever we tell him to take a break, and two days ago he scrubbed down the entire kitchen area until I could see my reflection in the ancient refrigerator.
He was here at the crack of dawn this morning, cleaning up the aftereffects of the prom, when Milo and I showed up with coffee, a laptop, and a mop.
“We’re still hunting through the files,” Milo told Gabe when he arrived an hour later. “But we’re running into walls, so we figured we’d help. Noah and I will take turns reading and cleaning.”
I scroll down the screen through another page of The Life of Ezra Morehouse.
Milo and I stayed up most of last night scouring this thing, and so far we’ve found nothing that helps us understand why Ezra’s been behaving the way he is.
Every single thing in this file matches information I already knew.
SUNY undergraduate degree in Political Science.
Grad work at Cornell. Interned at several different campaigns, worked himself up through the New York State political scene, and eventually went to work for Uncle Stan, where he was quickly made COS by my father.
Known for his tenacity, his sharp understanding of policy, and his quiet work behind the scenes of any political mechanism.
My vision’s starting to blur. It might be time, I’m thinking, to pass the laptop back to Milo. I’m just about to close the screen and give up, at least for the moment, when a line of text I hardly noticed before bumps up against something in my subconscious.
Biological father: Frank Morehouse.
Work history: Set Design, Stage to Stage Tours.
Just like that, there is it. Well, there something is. I’m not exactly sure what, not yet. I grab the laptop and rush back across the room to where Milo’s crouched down with duct tape, patting the wooden floor almost desperately.
“Ezra’s dad,” I tell him, as I push the laptop toward him. He quickly drops the duct tape he’s holding. “Remember when I told you my mom was a dancer on tour? His dad and my mom worked together. On the same tour, at the same time!”
“Holy crap,” Milo whispers. He stands up, frowning, as he studies the screen. “What the fuck? What does that even mean?”
I shake my head as the rest of the room goes quiet around us. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “But that can’t be a coincidence, right? It’s too weird. Too coincidental.”
Milo nods slowly. “I agree. Okay, we need a plan.”
I swallow hard. “Um, I think I have one. But you definitely won’t like it.”
Milo raises an eyebrow. “Great. Exactly what I like to hear.”
“I still don’t think is a good idea.”
“Of course you don’t,” I tell Milo. “You’re not coming with me to storm the castle—oh, excuse me, fourteen hundred square foot ranch house.”
“I just don’t think you should be alone with that asshole.” I can picture him pacing the community center entryway, phone to his ear as Bear stands sentry next to him.
“That’s why we made this plan the way we did,” I remind him.
“I’m going to make sure I’m not alone with Ezra.
I told Uncle Stan I needed to talk to him and Ezra together.
He agreed. They’ll both be waiting for me at the house in Pottsville.
Uncle Stan isn’t going to let anything happen to me, Milo. ”
“I know. But I still think I should have gone with you,” Milo mutters.
“I wish I didn’t want to do this alone with them,” I mutter as I steer the car into the town center of Pottsville and turn at the town’s one stoplight.
“My heart’s going like a million miles an hour right now.
I just keep thinking about all the ways this can go wrong.
What if Ezra denies everything? What if Uncle Stan still doesn’t believe me?
” I swallow hard. “But I’m done, Milo. I’m done being intimidated and held down and pushed around by Ezra Morehouse.
I’m done being gaslit. That report? It proves he’s been hiding something from me and Uncle Stan.
” I clear my throat. “You know how much I want you here with me. But I’m not the guy you found on that elevator anymore. I need to confront Ezra myself.”
“What you’re doing is brave as hell,” Milo tells me. “Remember that, okay? You’re a fighter, Noah. You always have been. You’ve been a fighter since you were nine years old. You can do this, Chucks.”
Hearing him call me that nickname sends swells of energy through my chest, which is energy I need as I turn down the road toward the house I’ve shared with Uncle Stan ever since I was lifted out of that wall.
“I’m here,” I tell Milo as I flip my turn signal again and wait for a milk tanker truck to pass me. “Turning into the driveway now.”
“Okay.” Milo pushes out a long breath. “Whatever happens, Noah, remember this: you always have a family. Here, in Devon Falls, with us. I need you to hold on to that reminder, okay?”
My tongue is thick in my mouth, my lips as dry as sandpaper, and I nod at the car’s speaker a few times before I remember Milo can’t see me. “Yeah. Yeah, I remember, Milo. I promise to keep remembering.”
“Good.” He basically growls the word, and I laugh slightly as I shut off the engine of the car.
“There’s my favorite alpha,” I tease. He laughs too, then sighs.
“Sorry not sorry? I can never apologize for wanting to keep you safe. And Noah, if that asswipe hurts you in any way…”
He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. The low tone on the end of it says plenty. “I’ll tell Uncle Stan not to bother looking for the body,” I reply. “I’m hanging up now.
“Okay, Chucks. You’ve got this. I believe in you, Noah.”
I’m still smiling as I hang up the phone.
The air is tinged with a sour scent as I walk through the garage and up the small set of stairs into the house’s mudroom. “Hello?” I call as I kick off my sneakers and hang my coat on one of the racks there. “Uncle Stan?”
No one answers, and a sense of foreboding immediately moves through me. The kitchen is empty, but I see coffee on the counter and a half-empty mug on the table, so I keep moving through the house into the living room.
That’s where I find Ezra, sitting calmly in a recliner, typing something on his phone.
“Hello.” I nod, but I don’t sit down. “Where’s Uncle Stan?”
“Albany,” he says evenly.
I blink. “What are you talking about? He texted me that you’d both meet me here.”
Ezra rolls his eyes. “Noah, do you honestly think I’m not monitoring Stan’s phone activity? Still?”
A wave of cold washes through me, and I start to back out of the room. What an idiot I’ve been. Of course that wasn’t Uncle Stan texting me back, making those plans with me. I told Milo I’d talked to Stan, and I’m guessing he took for granted that I’d talked to him voice to voice.
Me? I’m just the moron who forgot to think about exactly how manipulative and conniving Ezra Morehouse has been up until this point. I feel like some too-stupid-to-live character in a fairy tale. “I’ll call nine-one-one,” I say desperately.
Ezra sighs. “Noah. Do you actually think I’m going to hurt you?
” He rolls his eyes. “I’m your uncle’s chief of staff, for crying out loud.
Both our cars are parked in his driveway right now.
I don’t have plans to harm you in any way, Noah.
” He waves a hand at me. “I just want to talk. Sit down. Please?”
“Okay,” I say uneasily. But I’m definitely not ready to take Ezra at his word, especially after this most recent lie.
As I take a few steps sideways and slowly sit down on the sofa in front of Ezra, I also reach into my pocket.
“Just let me tell my boss I got here okay,” I say.
Ezra nods, and I hit the buttons I’m looking for on my phone before I set it back down on the sofa beside me, upside down.
“So.” He sits up in the chair and steeples his fingers. “Milo Warner ran a background check on me.”
Technically it was his sister, but I’m not bringing her into this conversation. “What did you expect?” I ask him. “You’ve been acting like some kind of Bond character waiting to receive his next secret gadget.”
“Please.” Ezra rolls his eyes again. “I told a few half-truths, sent some flowers, and threw a phone into a pool.” He waves his hand at me. “I’m hardly being put up for a CIA position anytime soon.”
“You seriously don’t think it’s weird that you’ve been running around catfishing your boss and throwing his phone into pools?”
Ezra snorts. “I’ve been doing what I have to do to get Stan into this governor’s race, Noah.
I’m doing what you should have been doing for him all along.
Pushing him to be an even better leader than he already is.
” He points an accusatory finger at me. “But you can’t even put your own adoptive father, the man who gave up everything for you, first. You hate life in the public eye, and that’s all that matters to you. You only ever think about yourself.”
The comment’s an invisible arrow directly to my chest. “That’s not true,” I whisper.
“But it is.” Ezra leans forward on the chair. “So you found the deep secret in my background check, huh? You saw the connection. But I bet you still don’t understand it, do you?”
I’m not sure how to answer that, so I don’t. My fingers itch to grab for the phone, race out of this house, and call Milo. But I’ve come a long way since Milo stood in front of me in that elevator. Right now, I want something even more than I want protection: I want the truth.
Ezra frowns and lets out a long sigh. “I guess there’s no easy way to say this.”
He clears his throat, and his next words infiltrate the living room, taking up all the air around me.
“Your mother? She was my mother too.”