12. Mia
MIA
The cottage smelled of pine cleaner and cold air and someone else's life.
I stood in the small kitchen with a mug of coffee. Sophia had left grounds in the cabinet.
The space was mine now. Two rooms. One bedroom. A kitchen counter where my books sat in their color gradient because there was no shelf yet.
Tony had promised to build one.
I pressed my fingers to the spines. Deep reds on the left. Oranges and yellows in the middle. Greens and blues on the right. A sunset laid on its side. The only thing I owned that mattered.
Unpacking took eleven minutes. That was a generous estimate. I'd included the time I spent staring at the four hangers in the bedroom closet like they were judging me.
Jeans. T-shirts. Two sweaters. A jacket with a torn lining that I couldn't throw away because Cory's photograph was hidden inside it.
I slid the photo out and held it for three seconds. Brown eyes. That stupid, beautiful grin. He'd been telling me about a building. Arches and light.
The photograph went into the nightstand drawer, face down. I closed it.
Then I made the bed.
Sophia's fresh sheets smelled of detergent and lavender. I tucked the corners the way my grandmother taught me. Tight. Military.
"A messy bed makes a messy mind, mol." She was wrong about that. My bed was always made and my mind was always a disaster.
The back window stopped me.
Floor-to-nothing glass, crooked in the frame, the silicon starting to yellow at the corners. But the view. Mountains filling every inch. Snow on the peaks. Dark pines marching down the valley. The lake catching the last of the light before it disappeared.
I stayed there until the sky turned to ink.
This was the first space that could be mine. Not assigned. Not temporary. Not an apartment with a dead radiator and a mattress that dipped in the middle and a key that stuck every single time.
Someone had offered me this. Not because the FBI told him to. Not because I was running. Because a five-year-old asked, and her father said yes.
That was different. That was terrifying.
I carried my coffee to the front porch and sat on the top step.
The air was cold. The kind of cold that found the bullet in my spine and pressed on it. I pulled my sleeves over my hands and wrapped them around the mug and breathed.
Somewhere down the valley, a dog barked. Then nothing. Just silence so thick it had weight.
I'd forgotten what silence sounded like. In New York, even at 3 a.m., there was always something. A siren. A taxi horn.
Here, the quiet was so complete it rang in my ears.
The Castle glowed.
Fifty yards across the meadow, through the trees, Tony's glass house burned with light. Every wall transparent. Every room visible. The kitchen. The reading lamp in Ludo's study that nobody turned off. The faint glow from the studio wing where he worked at all hours.
A man who lived inside glass walls and let nobody in.
I watched the house and the stars and the dark mass of mountains behind it all. I tried to remember the last time I'd sat still without checking over my shoulder.
Then the fireflies came.
They blinked into existence across the meadow. Dozens of them. Tiny bursts of gold drifting between the tall grass, tracing patterns that made no sense and all the sense in the world. They floated between the cottage and the Castle, unhurried, purposeless, perfect.
I forgot to breathe for a second.
New York didn't have fireflies. Not real ones. Not like this.
I heard footsteps on the path before I saw him.
Soft footfalls. No rush. The sound of someone walking through grass in no particular hurry to get anywhere.
I knew it was Tony before he stepped into the porch light. I knew it the way I knew things about him that I shouldn't. The weight of his step. The way silence reorganized itself around him.
He came through the tree line and stopped.
Jeans. A dark T-shirt that stretched across his shoulders. A beer bottle hanging from his fingers by the neck. His hair was wilder than usual. His jaw was tight.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Neither of us spoke.
The fireflies blinked between us. The mountains stood behind everything. The air carried pine needles and cold grass and a charge I couldn't name.
He walked to the porch and sat on the step below mine. Close enough that his shoulder almost touched my knee.
Close enough that I could see the paint under his fingernails. Cadmium yellow. Or what I assumed was cadmium yellow. I'd been learning.
He took a sip of his beer and stared out at the meadow.
I took a sip of my coffee and stared at the side of his face.
He had a profile that belonged in a museum. Strong nose. The jaw. The dark curls falling across his forehead and over his ears. The crease between his eyebrows that I was starting to think was permanent.
"You have a lot of books," he said.
His voice was low and rough and it did something to my nervous system that was not at all convenient.
"I have a problem," I said. "A diagnosed problem. My grandmother used to say I'd read the label off a soup can if there was nothing else."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. A ghost of one.
"Your grandmother."
"She was from Kerala." I wrapped my hands tighter around my mug. "She lived with us when I was growing up. She read to me every night. Myths. Folktales. Stories about gods who turned into animals and women who moved rivers with their grief."
I stopped myself. I hadn't talked about my grandmother in a long time. She'd died three years before the shooting, and everything that came after had swallowed the grief into a larger one.
"What was her name?" Tony asked.
The question surprised me. People didn't usually ask that. They said "that's nice" or changed the subject.
"Ammu. Everyone called her Ammu."
He nodded. He didn't say "that's nice." He didn't change the subject.
"She sounds like my dad," Tony said.
I watched him. He was still facing the meadow.
"He read to me too. And wrote. The journals, the ones you're transcribing. He wrote about everything. The color of the light in Tuscany. The smell of his mother's kitchen. The way a painting comes alive in the last hour, when you stop thinking and just let your hands remember."
His voice cracked on the word "remember." So small I almost missed it.
"Have you read them?" I asked.
"No."
One word. Flat. Final.
"I can't." He turned the beer bottle in his hands. "He wrote them for years. Started when I was born. Stopped when he died. Every journal is dated. Every entry is in his handwriting. And it looks so much like mine that I open a page and can't tell whose hand I'm seeing."
My chest ached.
"That's why I hired you," he said. "Not just the transcription. I need someone else to touch them first. To turn them into typed words on a screen so they stop being his voice and start being just... information."
"They'll never be just information," I said.
He turned to me then. Green eyes. Dark in the porch light but still that green. The gold flecks were gone in the low light, but I knew they were there.
"No," he said. "Probably not."
We sat in silence for a while. The fireflies kept drifting. An owl called from somewhere in the pines. The Castle glowed.
I wanted to tell him.
The words built in my chest. All of them.
At once. My name isn't Mia. I'm not from California.
I was a journalist in New York and a man shot my boyfriend and put a bullet in my spine and the FBI hid me here because someone wants me dead and I'm lying to you every single second of every single day and I don't know how much longer I can do it.
My mouth opened.
My eyes found the fireflies. Then his profile in the dark. The line of his jaw.
The way his bare feet rested flat on the dirt path. The way his shoulders carried a weight that had nothing to do with me.
If I told him, this ended.
Not the job. The job was the smallest thing. This. Whatever this was. This quiet. This night. This man who talked about his dead father's handwriting as if it were sacred and shattering at the same time.
I closed my mouth.
"Mia." His voice was careful. Like he was handling something breakable. "Who are you?"
I laughed. It came out wrong. Too high. Too thin. Like air escaping from something that had been sealed too long.
"Nobody interesting."
His eyes held mine. Long and steady and devastating.
"That's the first thing you've said that I don't believe."
The silence after that was enormous.
I could hear my own heartbeat. I could hear the fireflies, though fireflies don't make sounds. I could hear every lie I'd told since February stacking up behind my teeth.
He stood.
The step creaked without his weight. He towered over me. His face was half in shadow and half in porch light and I wanted to reach up and touch the line where the two met.
For one terrible, perfect second, I thought he was going to kiss me.
His eyes dropped to my mouth. His body leaned forward by an inch. Maybe less. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I wanted it so much that my brain invented the lean.
He didn't kiss me.
He straightened. Took a breath. Something crossed his face that I couldn't read. Decision, maybe. Or restraint. Or both at war with each other.
"Goodnight, Mia."
My name in his mouth sounded different than it did from anyone else. Slower. Heavier. Like he was turning it over and examining it and deciding whether it fit.
It didn't fit. That was the problem. It was a borrowed name and he was saying it like it mattered and I wanted to scream.
He walked off the porch and into the dark. The fireflies closed around where he'd been. Gold lights swallowing his silhouette until the night took him back.
I sat there for a long time.
My coffee went cold. The stars burned overhead. The Castle dimmed as lights went off, one by one, until only the reading lamp in Ludo's study remained. As if even the house missed the man who'd built it.
Forehead to my knees. Breathing.
My heart was still hammering. My hands were still warm from the mug. My secret was still burning a hole through my chest.
The words came out before I could stop them. Barely a breath. To the fireflies. To the mountains. To the dark space on the step where he'd been sitting.
"I'm so screwed."
The fireflies didn't answer. But I swear they blinked faster.