Chapter 17
Michael
Once Arya walks out, I stare numbly at my laptop screen for a good 15 minutes, my stomach a knot of shame, self-disgust, and worry. Why the fuck did I say that?
It was probably just a loss of temper. I lashed out at what I knew would be a sore spot for her because I was pissed and defensive of my family. Bottom line: It doesn’t really matter why. I fucked up, and I know it.
She needs time to cool off. I need time to find a way to make this shit up to her. This shit, the earlier shit, all of it. I’m no longer worried about how she’ll make me pay for it all if I don’t make good. I’m worried about never seeing her again.
Her absence doesn’t just hurt my pride. It lingers. I feel it as I drink my way through four beers, spend some time exercising in my home gym, and finally dive deep into the security records we were going over. But even then, as I finally force myself to do something useful, that emptiness lingers.
We’ve only been together a few days. Why do I feel like this? Because it’s unnecessary and was my fault? That’s probably part of it. But as time goes on and I switch from beer to iced coffee, eat leftovers I barely taste, and compare record after record, that small discomfort stays, digging in painfully the moment my mind is not occupied.
“This is ridiculous,” I mutter as I force myself to keep working.
But my focus shifts within minutes. Suddenly, I’m remembering Leanne and the whole two-year struggle to impress her and make her happy. She wore me out and tried to make me feel unworthy, and the whole time, I just wanted to love her. And yet, somehow, her walking away after two years had hurt less than Arya walking out—maybe temporarily—after three days.
I don’t get it.
However, not understanding it doesn’t make it go away. It gnaws at me as I keep checking the records and security videos. I’ve been over them multiple times now—some of them I’ve seen enough that I can predict every second of them.
Here’s Maria with her creepy probably-drug connection. He’s never away from her, always following her like a puppy.
Here’s Billy, thinking he’s being slick about driving home drunk, parking an inch from my mom’s begonias, and going in to be yelled at by Dad.
Here’s Uncle Ezio being embarrassing and creepy toward a pretty new maid.
Here’s my dad’s midnight snack habit. And my mom’s midnight snack habit, roughly an hour later. I wonder if they’ve ever run into each other while looking for sweets.
Here is my family in private: imperfect, messy, and sometimes embarrassing. But can one of them really have turned against me by stealing that money? And why?
If I hadn’t had doubts, I wouldn’t have gotten defensive with Arya.
My phone buzzes, and I snatch it off my desk, hoping it’s Arya. No such luck: It’s my father.
“Progress report on recovering those funds?” he asks curtly.
“I’m doing backgrounds on some friends of the family and workmen who were around during the right time frame.” My voice is all business, and the emotions are shoved neatly away so that he can’t see anything he might consider a weakness.
“I see.” He takes a deep breath. “I just got some information back on our staff’s background searches. We’re sacking one maid who has a reputation for repeated theft. She paid good money to have her records scrubbed of anything negative, but we got her by talking to a few past employers. Expensive repeated theft, so that’s a bullet dodged.”
“Well, that part’s good.” I want to demand why he hadn’t already made deep background searches and past employee interviews a part of the hiring process. But I know that won’t cause anything but an argument. Still... I feel my respect for him waver a little. “Nothing about computer access or spying on me in particular?”
“No. At this point, it doesn’t look like any of them were involved.”
My heart sinks as silence stretches between us.
“You think it’s one of us, don’t you?” he asks quietly but with a stony anger in his voice.
“I don’t know that yet. That’s why I’m looking into other guests. But... it’s a growing possibility.” It hurts to even say that.
“Don’t say anything to your mother about that,” he advises in a tone that tells me it’s actually an order. “Not until we know for sure. You know it will break her.”
“I know.” It hurts thinking about my mom breaking down because one of us turned out to be rotten. “Not a word until I have real proof.”
“If you do get a name... you tell me immediately. Not her, not your siblings, me. Understood?”
I take a deep breath, thinking about the bomb that may drop on my family soon, and I say, “I’ll go straight to you, no problem.”
My stomach is churning again after he hangs up. I want to call Arya and tell her I’m sorry. That we just got more evidence that her worst-case scenario may be right. That my family is being betrayed from within.
It’s too soon. She wants space. I have to respect that, even if it’s inconvenient and hurts. I’ll pull together what I’ve learned and send the whole thing to her tomorrow instead of jumping the gun because I want her back.
I wake up reaching for Arya across my mattress, my hand grasping nothing. Hints of her scent still linger in the room.
It’s fucking killing me. I can’t believe I drove her away like that. Most of the time, I just focus on how I’m going to fix the problem. But... most of the time, I know better than to go off like that.
This mess with the heist and my family has me off-balance. So does she. Her absence more than her presence. I know it’s too soon for that. It brings up words like weird and clingy and ignores all the problems she and I have to get through.
I’m still feeling it. I just refuse to let it make me do anything crazy.
I get back to work as soon as I have coffee in me. Focusing on solving these problems becomes a refuge. I start to understand why Arya gets like this. How much pain is she carrying that she has to distract herself like this?
I have a growing list of people to investigate, including Maria’s friend . My only leads are his face, the story from my dad that he’s helping her with her computer, and my suspicion that he’s selling her drugs. I start with isolating images of him and running high-level image searches on them.
There are a whole hell of a lot of average-to-fat, unkempt, beardy guys out there with computer expertise, bland features, brown hair, and pervy tendencies. If only I knew this guy’s name!
As it is, I have a lot of narrowing down to do, so I automate that as much as I can and go to run searches on the few others.
Three hours of that nets me a big fat zero. Annoying but not all that unexpected. I continue narrowing the search down on our mystery creep. I don’t like the idea that I can’t find anything on him. It’s like his Internet presence has been...
Scrubbed. Like that maid. But in his case, actually, scrubbed well.
But that just makes me even more suspicious. This guy seems pretty anonymous, pretty dull... but if he really were, my sister would never bother with him. He has something that makes him stand out to her, and I don’t think she’d put up with his weird behavior just for good weed.
I’m overthinking this. But what if I’m not? The guy’s creepy and bland and looks like he should be incompetent. But maybe he isn’t incompetent. Maybe he used my sister, who is an idiot, to get into our system somehow and rob us blind.
“How likely is this? The guy looks like a dork,” I mutter to myself.
So do some serial killers. The thought makes me tense a little. There’s really no bottom to how much of an airhead my sister is, so I don’t know how dangerous this guy really is or what he could get her to do.
It’s just a theory, but it’s setting off alarm bells in my head. Why is this nondescript weirdo such a ghost online?
I need to find out more about him, but I have to do it without setting off alarm bells in my family, and that’s going to be tough, especially if Maria is protective of him.
What I want to do is confront her directly and demand to know who the hell the guy is and what he’s talked her into doing. But that’s a good way to stir up a gigantic Maria tantrum.
Billy, on the other hand, is easygoing and charming and has mostly been able to stay on Maria’s good side in spite of her being a gigantic pain in everyone’s ass. He’s also better at bullshitting than I am. If anyone can get in under Maria’s guard, it’s my little bro.
I phone him up and hear classic metal in the background when he picks up. “Yo,” he says, sounding a little distracted.
“Hey, bro. I have more information, and I need to talk to you about it.”
He cuts me off gently. “Okay, but it might have to wait a bit. I’m out with my girl.”
Ouch. “Oh, shit, sorry.”
“That’s cool. Leave the details in an email for me if it’s urgent. I’ll call you back tomorrow morning.”
I sign off and mutter a curse as I shove my phone into my pocket. The last thing I want right now is to be left alone with my thoughts, waiting on other people. But here I am.
I spend the night going through the evidence and trying to chase Maria’s phantom friend down on the Internet. Nothing, nothing, and nothing.
It hurts my pride that I couldn’t find anything. It pisses me off that I am so incapable of catching up to him. Is this guy simply so nondescript and under the radar that he has no online profile to speak of? Are his features too bland and repeatable to be caught by my program? Or am I once again missing something?
Arya would know. Either she would point it out, or we’d figure it out together. God, we were such a good team. I was better around her. More focused, more skilled. Now that she is gone, all I really think of clearly is her.
I just hope that, wherever she is, she’s doing okay and plans to come back.