Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
HIM
Silence is a kind of answer.
It’s not my favorite kind. But still.
The motel room continues to hum around me—mini-fridge, heater, bad fluorescent in the bathroom buzzing like a mosquito under the door. The laptop sits on the table by the window, screen casting blue light over the cheap curtains and the half-empty styrofoam cup by my elbow.
The chat window is still open.
Nightjar: last seen 00:17.
SmartLittleBird: online.
The two lines I sent her sit at the top of the box, patient.
rude, little bird. i missed you.
did you like my present?
They’ve been read. The system is clear about that. The little indicator flipped almost immediately, the way it does when someone clicks through fast, chasing that dopamine hit of new information.
She opened them.
I can tell she took screenshots.
I’m going to say she sent them to her sheriff buddy, because she’s in his pocket.
And then she closed the window.
I know because the connection hiccupped—changed IP to a different node, although it carries the same device ID underneath. Now she’s routing traffic through a different pipe, one with better locks and a prettier front door.
New Wi-Fi name. New house. This is not my favorite upgrade, I gotta say.
I’ll wait anyway.
She’s going to answer. Tallulah Gentry is not built for leaving things unfinished.
She has a compulsion to tie off loose threads, finish equations, close loops.
When people don’t respond to her messages, she pings them again.
And again. And again. Little digital nudges until they give her something.
So.
I give her a nudge instead.
A second ago, she was there. I felt the tiny shift in the backend, the way you feel a floorboard dip when someone crosses the room behind you. Her handle flared briefly. Then the screenshots went out. Then she clipped the connection like a child slamming a door.
I drum my fingers lightly on the table. This is new.
Last time, she couldn’t help herself. She engaged. Questions, deflections, arguments. She talked to me like I was a puzzle with sharp edges, and I let her work the pieces as long as it amused me.
Now it’s like someone else is teaching her tricks. I can almost hear them over her shoulder.
Walk away. Starve the monster. Don’t feed the fire.
They tell people that in those little community meetings, the ones where a cop and a therapist stand in front of a PowerPoint and talk about “boundaries” and “digital safety.”
Don’t respond to taunts. Don’t reply to threats. Don’t give the predator the reinforcement he wants.
They say it like predators are dogs, and attention is table scraps.
They forget that not all hunger looks the same. That was Jason’s brand of hunger. Mine is a little different.
I stare at the blank input field under my two lines and imagine her in that office on the horse farm. Cotton Bishop’s house—Bishop, now Gallagher. Magnolia money. Gambling money. Horse money. Whatever flavor of money they call it, it smells the same.
They moved her there like a chess piece they’re trying to tuck behind a more valuable one.
A fortress, they think.
For the first time since I returned, something like doubt chews at me. Tallulah Gentry is connected. Friends with money, family in the fucking Irish mob. She may have been a little more of a project than I bargained for.
Maybe I should just…leave?
I straighten in my chair. No. Never. Money or the mob, they all bleed the same. And Tallulah Gentry has it coming.
I’ve been on the road leading up to the Bishop farm. I remember the front gate and the stone pillars and the long drive curving out of sight. I remember Beatrice Thurston’s place on the hill too. Different architecture, same logic: distance as armor.
It didn’t work then either.
I roll my shoulders, easing the tightness between them. The motel chair isn’t made for sitting this long, but I’ve been more uncomfortable in nicer rooms.
On the screen, nothing changes.
She’s still there. I know she is. I can feel her like a static charge on the line. She’s got the window closed, not the account. That’s important. She didn’t delete. She didn’t run. She’s just…choosing not to speak.
I shouldn’t like that as much as I do.
It’s inconvenient. Annoying. It interrupts the script I have laid out in my head—her poking, me answering, the two of us circling in a tighter and tighter loop until the space between us disappears…until I have her exactly where I want her.
Instead, she cuts the scene short.
That means one of two things—or maybe both.
One: someone else is in the room with her.
Two: she’s decided silence makes her powerful.
I tap the trackpad with one knuckle, watching the cursor blink. A suggestion. A pulse.
The easy thing would be to push. Send another line. Press where it hurts.
why so quiet, tallulah?
you were more talkative last time.
I can picture the response. I know what she’d say—something barbed and precise, turning my words back on me, refusing to give me the reaction I asked for and giving me a different one instead.
She’s very good at that. She would make an excellent interrogator, which is probably why the sheriff gives her leash to poke at me.
I flex my hand and make myself not type.
The thing most people don’t understand about control is that it isn’t just about what you grab. It’s about what you let go.
Jason never learned that. He wanted everything, all the time. Every impulse followed. Every itch scratched. He ate too fast and then wondered why he choked.
Tallulah choking herself on silence is…interesting.
“Okay,” I murmur to the empty room. “Have it your way.”
I close the chat window on my side, too.
The notifications box shrinks, tucks itself into the corner of the screen. The desktop comes back into focus—folders, notes, captured stills. I have an entire directory labeled LF_NEW with subfolders for SHERIFF, COUSIN, DOC, FARM. I’m nothing if not organized.
I click FARM.
Photos spill up from the bottom of the screen—long-distance shots of the driveway, overhead views from public satellite images, grainy zooms of people on the porch and in the side yard.
Cotton, pregnant, hand on her lower back.
Brodie, watchful. The little girl with that impossible Irish name no one can pronounce dragging a stuffed animal through the grass.
Her friends. Her people, just a few of them.
She’s always had people orbiting her—family, friends, the sheriff with his guilt. But they saw the utility first. They wanted what she could do with her brain. The affection came later, if at all.
I close the photo and open another—Tallulah in her apartment, alone this time, bare feet tucked under her, the thin strands of a silvery necklace catching the light as she bends over her keyboard.
That’s what I sent the message for, really.
Not to scare her, but to remind her whose game she’s in.
Her ignoring me doesn’t change that. If anything, it sharpens it.
Fine.
If she wants to pretend the digital room is hers, I’ll give it to her. I’ll leave it empty and let her pace in there until the echoes get too loud. She can talk to her sheriff, her cousin, her brute. She can walk away from the computer and tell herself that closing a window means closing a door.
While she does, I’ll work on other rooms.
Neighbors. Routes. Schedules.
The toy store event Cotton signed up for next week, where there will be hot chocolate and fake snow and a hundred little distractions for people with children and people with secrets.
You learn more from the way someone relaxes than the way they brace.
I open a different file—one with times and dates and vendor lists pulled from the town’s social media. My irritation thins into something more useful. Anticipation.
She wants to withhold one kind of conversation? That’s all right. The next one won’t require a keyboard.
I let the chat icon sit dormant in the corner of the screen and start mapping.
Silence is only a temporary kind of answer.
I can speak another language.