Chapter 2 Miles
Ihadn't held a pen in three weeks. Not because I didn't need to write anything, I had a legal pad full of notes that needed transcribing, a stack of forms requiring signatures, and an entire life that demanded documentation. I just couldn't trust my own hand not to betray me.
Today, apparently, I decided to test that theory.
"Come on," I muttered, positioning the pen over the yellow legal pad. "It's one word. Just write one word."
The pen trembled. Not dramatically, not yet, but enough. A faint vibration that started in my thumb and rippled outward, turning what should have been a simple downstroke into something that looked like a seismograph reading during a minor earthquake.
I tried anyway. The letter 'A' came out looking like it had been written during a car accident.
"Fantastic," I muttered. "I’m a lawyer who can’t write, what a joke."
The pen slipped from my fingers, clattering against my father's mahogany desk and rolling off the edge onto the floor.
I watched it go without reaching for it.
What was the point? My hand was already shaking visibly now, agitated by my sluggish attempt at fine motor control, doing its little involuntary dance against the leather blotter.
I stared at it, the hand I used to draft contracts, shake the hands of judges, and hold a woman's face while I kissed her. It looked alien now. Like a faulty machine someone had attached to my body without my permission.
"It’s just stress, one day it’ll be back to normal," I muttered. It was more like wishing, instead of stating it as fact. I knew the truth.
The silence of my parents' house absorbed the lie without comment.
It was just empty silence, the kind that seemed to swallow sound whole, leaving only the hum of the refrigerator and the distant, accusing tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
My father had wound that clock every Sunday morning without fail, a ritual as precise and predictable as everything else in his life.
Now it was running down, losing minutes each day, and I couldn't bring myself to touch it.
Three months.
I'd been back in Riverside for three months, and the house looked exactly the same as the day I'd arrived: frozen in time, a museum dedicated to people who were never coming back.
The living room had become a cardboard skyline, boxes from the attic and the study and closets I hadn't opened since high school forming towers that cast long shadows in the afternoon light.
I'd pulled them all down in a burst of productive energy during my first week there, arranged them in neat rows, and then.
.. stopped. The boxes remained sealed, their contents unknown, their presence silent but constant.
The realtor's email had chirped three weeks ago.
Estate sale,
A good weekend event, with the right staging! But you'll need to sort through the personal items first, Mr. Cameron. Donate, keep, discard. The faster you do it, the faster we can list!
She'd included a smiley face emoji. I'd closed the email without responding.
My phone buzzed on the desk, pulling me from the spiral. I glanced at the screen.
Amanda Chen - Sterling and Steele Law
I considered letting it go to voicemail. I'd been letting most calls go to voicemail lately, a strategy that was working beautifully if "working" meant "avoiding all human contact while slowly losing my mind in my dead parents' house."
But Amanda had covered for me for three months. She deserved better than my avoidance.
I picked up with my left hand, keeping my right pressed flat against my thigh. "Amanda."
"Miles! Oh, thank God, you're alive." Her voice was warm, slightly breathless. She always sounded like she was running between meetings, which she probably was. "I was starting to think you'd been eaten by whatever wildlife lives in small-town Connecticut."
"Just the standard suburban deer. They're vicious but slow."
She laughed, making me feel lighter. Amanda was good. Sharp, driven, genuinely kind in a profession that didn't always reward kindness. I'd mentored her for two years before my leave, and she'd become something close to a friend, or as close as I let anyone get, which admittedly wasn't very close.
"How's the Henderson case?" I asked, redirecting before she could ask how I was doing.
"Settled yesterday. Both parties are happy, which means I did my job." I could hear her smile through the phone. "The mother got primary custody, father got generous visitation, and the family trust stays intact with oversight provisions. Textbook outcome."
"That's excellent work."
"I learned from the best." A pause. "Speaking of which, how are you, Miles? And before you say 'fine,' remember I'm a lawyer. I can tell when people are lying."
I looked at my right hand, still pressed against my thigh, still trembling faintly. "I'm... adjusting."
"To small-town life or to your parents' house?"
"Both. Neither." I exhaled. "It's quieter than I expected."
"Quiet can be good."
"Quiet can also be suffocating. Depends on the day."
Amanda was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was gentler. "The partners are asking about you. Not in a bad way, they're just concerned. Roberts mentioned that your office is still exactly how you left it. Nobody's touched anything."
"That's... surprisingly sentimental for Roberts."
"I think he's hoping you'll come back. We all are." She paused. "You don't have to tell me what's going on, Miles. But whatever it is, you don't have to handle it alone. You know that, right?"
I knew nothing of the sort. In my experience, handling things alone was the only reliable option. People say they want to help, say they'll be there, and when they see the reality of what "being there" actually requires, they make their quiet exits.
But I didn't say that.
"I know," I said instead. "Thanks, Amanda. I'll check in soon."
"You'd better. And Miles? Don't be a stranger. Even strangers call more than once a month."
"Noted."
I hung up before she could push further, setting the phone face down on the desk. The boxes stared at me from their positions around the room. They really did bother me sitting around the house.
The diagnosis had come five years ago. I'd been thirty-one, on the cusp of making partner, my entire identity built on precision, control, and relentless competence.
The neurologist, Dr. Reeves, a soft-spoken woman with gray-streaked hair and steady hands I'd envied even then, had delivered the news in that careful, practiced tone doctors use when they're about to rearrange your entire understanding of your future.
"Early-onset Parkinson's disease," she'd said, and then a lot of other words I'd stopped processing.
I'd asked the question everyone asks: "How long do I have?"
"That's not how this works," she'd explained gently.
"Parkinson's is progressive, but the progression varies enormously.
Some people live full lives for decades with proper management.
Others decline more rapidly. We'll monitor your symptoms, adjust your medications, and take it one step at a time. "
One step at a time. As if my entire life was some dance I could perform.
My father had raised me to believe that weakness was a choice, that discipline could conquer anything, that needing help was the first step toward failure.
"Camerons don't make excuses," he'd told me once, when I was twelve and struggling with a math competition.
"We find solutions. If you can't solve the problem, you're not thinking hard enough. "
I'd internalized that lesson so thoroughly that it had become my operating system. And now my own body was presenting a problem I couldn't think my way out of.
The tremor had started small, a flicker in my right hand during a deposition, easily dismissed as too much coffee.
Then it spread. My handwriting deteriorated.
My gait stiffened. Simple tasks: buttoning a shirt, tying a tie, and holding a coffee cup steady, became small daily battles I won less and less often.
I'd dated in those years after the diagnosis. A few women, each relationship more superficial than the last. They'd been attractive, intelligent, perfectly suitable on paper. And I'd felt nothing. No spark, no connection, no desire to let them see past the polished surface I presented to the world.
"You're very hard to know," one of them had said—Elena, a corporate attorney with excellent taste in wine and a habit of analyzing everything like a contract negotiation. "It's like there's stained glass between you and everyone else."
"I'm just private," I'd said.
"Private is fine. Closed off is something else." She'd studied me with those sharp, assessing eyes. "Is there someone else? You haven’t fully let go of something."
I'd denied it, of course. But lying to a lawyer is harder than lying to most people. She'd seen right through me.
The truth was, there had only ever been one person who'd made the glass disappear. One person who'd looked at me and seen something other than the Cameron name, the predetermined future, the expectations stacked so high I could barely see over them.
Charlotte Huston.
And I'd walked away from her fifteen years ago because my father told me to, and I'd been too young and too afraid and too convinced of his wisdom to fight for what I actually wanted.
Pragmatic, he'd called it. Mature.
For me, it was the worst mistake of my life.
I pushed back from the desk, suddenly desperate to move. Sitting still made the tremor worse, or maybe it just made me more aware of it. Either way, the walls were closing in, and I needed to escape before they finished the job.
The kitchen was bright with afternoon light, dust motes floating in the sunbeams like tiny suspended questions. My mother's apron still hung on its hook by the door, a faded floral print that smelled, impossibly, like her lavender hand lotion. I didn't touch it. Couldn't.