Chapter 2 #3
That could explain Frankie’s abrupt phone call.
Pine Ridge General, the hospital where Liam worked, was thirty miles from Hope Falls, where Yaya lived.
AJ mentally put the puzzle pieces together.
Frankie went to Hope Falls. For some reason she ran into Liam, or someone told her that he was working at the hospital.
Now she was on some fact-finding mission because Liam hadn’t spoken to his father, Dr. Sterling, or his brother, Tristan, since his mother’s funeral over a decade earlier.
If he was right, why hadn’t she simply spoken to him directly instead of relaying cryptic questions through AJ?
He found these social workarounds and interaction gymnastics mentally exhausting.
“Anyway,” his mom pressed on, “we wanted to tell them both in person that…” her words trailed off as her eyes darted up at Dr. Sterling, who offered a supportive nod.
“Can we talk inside?” Dr. Sterling asked, his hand gesturing toward AJ’s front door with a kind of practiced gentleness.
“No.” AJ stated it flatly. He didn’t want anyone in his house. He needed the familiar smells, the controlled lighting, and the predictable hum of his own machinery. The very idea of their unpredictable footsteps on his floors made his spine itch.
A tense silence fell. His mother’s mouth pinched at the corners, and Dr. Sterling’s eyebrows inched together, but neither seemed surprised by the rebuff.
“Is this a bad time?” his mother asked, a note of genuine concern replacing her earlier patience.
“Yes,” AJ replied.
It was the truth. He was hungry, overstimulated, and the entire interaction was a deviation from his plan for the next two hours.
Dr. Sterling, to his credit, didn’t take offense. He offered a small, almost apologetic smile. “Why don’t we put a pin in this and get together for dinner tonight?” he suggested, falling back on the lingo of compromise that had probably smoothed over dozens of tense meetings.
“No.” The word was simple, final, and unyielding. AJ had been told he had issues with compromise by more than one romantic partner.
He could see his mother deflate a little, shoulders softening. She pressed her lips together and squared up to make her announcement, bracing herself.
“Okay, well, we just wanted to let you know that we ran into each other, totally by accident, in Paris,” she said, her words tumbling out faster, unspooling a timeline that sounded rehearsed. “Eddie invited me to dinner. I said no at first, it was a whole thing. I won’t bore you—”
“Thank you,” AJ interjected.
“—but we are, Eddie and I are together now. And we wanted to tell you kids in person on our way to the Caribbean. I’ve never been, so Eddie’s taking me. We stopped by Tristan and Frankie’s, but—”
“She wasn’t here.” AJ knew he sounded impatient, but he simply disliked repeated information. It was redundant and made his skin crawl.
“Right,” his mother said, “and then we took the train to Boston and saw Niko, and you’re our last stop.”
“Thank you for telling me.” AJ turned with mechanical precision and started up the walkway to his front door.
He could already taste the neutrality of the air inside, the faint scent of ozone from his air purifiers, and the way the lighting would respond to his presence and not demand anything extra from him.
“Wait.” His mother caught him by the arm. The touch was light, but it stopped him cold. “Are you okay? Are you surprised?”
“Yes. No.”
“You’re not surprised?” His mom’s brows furrowed. “Can I ask why not?”
AJ drew a slow breath. “You are two heterosexual adults who lived in very close proximity alone for ten years after experiencing the shared trauma of losing a spouse as well as the shared experience of raising the same five children. You have domestic familiarity and trust with each other. You both possess attributes and fulfill roles the other would find attractive and necessary in a mate. Mom, you are nurturing, emotionally available, and a caregiver. Dr. Sterling, you are intelligent, successful, and financially secure. You share similar attractiveness, broad desirability, and comparable worth based on the matching hypothesis. It is the theory of assortative mating. If anything, it probably would have happened sooner, but Dr. Sterling purely saw you as the help when you worked for him, and now that you are retired, he sees you in a new light.”
Ten full seconds passed before either of them responded.
His mother’s mouth had dropped open, stunned, and Dr. Sterling’s face had gone blank, the way it often did when someone hit him with a fact he knew to be true but couldn’t quite process emotionally.
They stared at AJ, and he felt like a biological oddity under a microscope, a rare bug nailed to a board for examination.
He was used to people doing that. Growing up, he’d puzzled over it, tried to reverse-engineer the protocols that governed normal conversation.
But now, he’d reached an age where he simply delivered the answer to the question he was asked and let people do what they wanted with it.
He found this liberating, though he understood others did not.
“Okay, well, I guess we’ll let you go.” His mom lifted up on her toes, cradled his face in her hands, and kissed his cheek. “I love you, AJ.” She lingered just long enough to transmit the message: I will always love you, even when I don’t understand you. She pulled back with a slightly teary smile.
“Good seeing you, son.” Dr. Sterling shook AJ’s hand again, this time longer and more deliberate.
AJ suspected he was attempting to communicate something wordless and complicated through the grip, regret, pride, apology, maybe even affection.
He let the handshake finish, then watched as the pair walked back to their SUV.
His mother paused at the passenger seat, turned, and waved. AJ gave a clipped chin dip and then watched as the SUV glided away, leaving him alone on the driveway.
He remained there for a long moment after they were gone, feeling his heartbeat slow and return to its baseline rhythm. The sunset spilled gold across the street, and the neighbor’s sprinklers clicked on in synchronized bursts. He liked the regularity.
The man, Carl, rushed outside and put the roof up on his convertible so the interior of his Porsche wouldn’t get destroyed.
He waved at AJ before he turned to head inside his house, and AJ did the same.
At his front door, he pressed his thumb to the reader.
The lock’s tiny green diode blinked twice before disengaging, a release of validation AJ always found quietly satisfying.
He’d installed the biometric security system himself, along with every other smart feature the market offered.
The house had five bedrooms, a bit excessive, considering it was just him.
The interior was the kind of open-concept that made sound bounce unpredictably, sometimes catching him off guard.
The floors were polished concrete, heated from beneath by programmable radiant coils that adjusted by room and by hour.
The lights, recessed and completely dimmable, were motion-activated and tuned to a spectrum that minimized headaches and avoided the kind of sickly blue that made his brain fizz.
Every appliance was synced to his phone, from the coffee station in the kitchen (which was really the only thing he used) to the vertical, hydroponic planter lining one wall of the living room to the shower that remembered a dozen customizable temperature and pressure profiles.
The living room was dominated by a seventy-inch OLED screen, a trio of game consoles, and an array of smart speakers that could fill the entire block with perfect, lossless sound if he wanted.
Each device, each networked node, was configured, reconfigured, and monitored by AJ himself.
He dropped his keys in the shallow dish by the door, a ceramic, hand-thrown gift from Frankie.
He kicked off his shoes, placing them in the getabako, the traditional shoe container he bought in Japan, and set his phone on the wireless charger.
The charger chirped, confirming the connection.
He was home, he was alone, and for the next twelve hours, at least, every variable in his immediate universe was safely under his command.
That was until his phone buzzed against the charger’s soft pad.
He hesitated, considering for a second whether to leave the text unread until tomorrow.
AJ was fiercely protective of his alone time, but with his sister’s call and the new development, checking the phone won out.
He picked it up it had nothing to do with his family.
The message was from Emory. She was a graphic designer for a military contractor, ex-Navy, with a tattoo of a Fibonacci spiral running down her ribcage.
He remembered the texture of it under his fingertips, the way she’d always smelled faintly of printer toner and coconut oil.
They’d been seeing each other for about nine months before his last deployment, but it had been casual.
It wasn’t like they spent every weekend together.
She was seeing other people. He’d seen her post on social media about dates with other men.
Emory: You back in town?
He responded.
Me: Yes.
He set his phone back down and was walking away when another text came through.
Emory: Want company?
AJ felt a low hum of anxiety thrum through him at her question. The thought of his space with someone made his skin feel too tight.
Me: No.