12. Sage #2
“Excuse you. I’m taking you to my lair,” Milo says theatrically. “My mom’s house is the front. The only untraceable box on the grid is in the sub-basement.”
Holden looks at him. “That should be reassuring but it isn’t.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “If your server is so untraceable, why are we all here?”
“Because if Stephen’s watching, having me bring everyone’s devices here will tip him off. This way, it looks like we’re all just hanging out.”
He pulls into the driveway of a house so aggressively normal it looks like a stock photo. Beige siding. White trim. A garden gnome by the front steps. A wind chime tinkling on the porch.
Milo kills the engine.
“Ground rules,” he says, turning in his seat to face all of us. “Don’t touch anything without asking. Don’t mention the server room to anyone who isn’t in this car. And if anyone asks what you do for a living, you’re all in a softball league and I’m your coach.”
“Softball,” Knox says.
“It’s the least threatening sport I could think of.”
“You could have said book club,” Micah offers.
“Knox in a book club.” Milo looks at Knox. Knox looks at Milo. “Very believable.”
“I read,” Knox grumbles.
Everyone laughs. I laugh too—half a second late, like a tourist clapping on the wrong beat. The body does the laugh. I get there afterward.
“Why aren’t we using bowls as the cover?” Eli asks.
Milo shoots him a look. “Because we’ve played exactly one game and forfeited the rest due to no-shows—we’re the laughingstock of the tournament.
” He turns to me. “No shade on you, kitten. I’d rather be with you any day.
But those octogenarians are a mean bunch.
People say they aren’t great at technology, but I think those all-caps emails are intentional. ”
He’s out of the car before anyone can argue further. The rest of us follow, stretching our limbs after the cramped drive.
“Coming?” he calls, shaking his keys.
I follow the others up the walk, and for a fleeting second, I let myself pretend we’re just friends going to someone’s house to hang. That the silk scarf covering my neck is a fashion choice. That the men around me are just guys. That the dead man in my phone is a glitch.
Then the door opens and we file in.
The entryway is tidy and smells like Pine-Sol. There’s a shoe rack by the door, a framed cross-stitch that says BLESS THIS MESS in cheerful yellow thread, and a man on his hands and knees scrubbing the tile floor.
He’s maybe late forties, stocky, with a receding hairline and the kind of thick forearms that come from decades of manual labor. He looks up when we come in and smiles.
“Hey, Dad,” Milo says. “I’m taking my friends to the basement to hang out.”
“No problem, son. Have fun.”
He goes back to scrubbing. Milo breezes past him without introducing anyone and leads us into the living room.
Where there’s another man.
This one is tall and thin, mid-fifties maybe, with reading glasses pushed up on his head and a bottle of furniture polish in his hand. He’s working the coffee table in slow, careful circles, and when he sees us, he straightens and gives a friendly nod.
“Hey, Dad. I’m taking my friends to the basement to hang out.”
“No problem, son. Have fun.”
I look at Micah. Micah looks at Knox. Knox looks at Holden. Holden looks at the ceiling like it might offer an explanation. Behind me, I can practically hear Eli’s brain short-circuiting.
Milo keeps walking. Through the living room, past a bookshelf full of paperback thrillers and framed school photos of a grinning kid I recognize as a younger, even more chaotic version of Milo and a girl I’m assuming is his sister, and into the dining room.
Where there is a third man.
This one is at the dining table, sorting mail. He’s compact, dark-haired, wearing a Hawaiian shirt over a turtleneck—I realize now they’re all wearing turtlenecks. He’s humming a Michael Bublé song.
“Hey, Dad. I’m taking my friends to the basement to hang out.”
“No problem, son. Have fun.”
Milo opens a door at the far end of the dining room, revealing a set of stairs descending into a well-lit basement. He starts down. Doesn’t look back.
The rest of us stand at the top of the stairs for a collective three seconds of silence before everyone tries to talk at once.
“What the fuck was—” Holden starts.
“Were those all—” Micah.
“Three separate—” Knox.
“How many dads do you have?” I ask, because someone has to say it.
“And why are they all wearing turtlenecks?” Eli asks.
Milo pauses halfway down the stairs and looks back up at us, genuinely confused. “What do you mean?”
“Milo. There are three different men in this house and you called all of them Dad.”
“Yeah. Those are my dads.”
He says it the way you’d say those are my shoes or that’s my car. Zero emphasis. Zero awareness that this requires further explanation.
“You have three fathers?” Holden repeats.
“Four, technically. I think Rodrigo’s at work.”
I watch this information land on each of them in sequence.
Holden processes it first—I can see the detective brain filing it, cross-referencing it, slotting it into the mental profile he keeps on all of us.
Micah’s face goes soft and knowing. Knox doesn’t react at all.
And Eli laughs. It’s short and startled and sounds like it surprises him as much as it surprises me.
“That . . . actually explains a lot,” Micah says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Milo asks.
“It means you were suspiciously cool about this whole arrangement from day one. Most guys would’ve had at least one existential crisis about sharing.”
Milo shrugs. “I was raised around men who understood their job was to show up for their woman. Cook, clean, be present. That’s what they do. That’s what I do.” He gestures vaguely at all of us. “You guys act like this is complicated. I’ve been training for this my whole life.”
He turns and continues down the stairs like that’s settled. And I suppose it is. But I don’t have time to think about it because we stop in front of a door with several locks on the outside.
Nine deadbolts and a biometric pad guard the server room. Milo unlocks each bolt in a rapid-fire sequence, then presses his thumb to the pad. The lock emits a joyful beep, and he flings the door wide with a little flourish, like a game show host revealing a prize.
Inside, it’s a refrigerated closet—icy, humming, lined wall-to-wall with rack servers and backup batteries and tangles of colored cable so dense it looks like the place was colonized by cybernetic snakes.
In the center, on a rolling steel cart, sits a small, battered laptop with a cracked sticker that reads, MILO’S brAIN.