35. Milo #2
“I’ll let her know.” He clasps his hands, still hovering. “She says eat something or she’ll come down here herself.”
“Tell her she’s not allowed in here. We have an agreement.”
“I know. It’s just—”
I pick up a slice and take a bite while he watches. He nods, satisfied, and turns to leave.
“Dad.”
He stops at the door.
“What would you do if someone was threatening Mom?”
Gene turns. His face does something complicated—a rearrangement of features that settles into an expression I can only describe as careful.
“Whatever your mother wanted me to do.”
“Okay, Dad. Thanks.”
He nods once and closes the door.
I stare at the banana loaf. Eat another slice.
FENRIR:
I want to try something. The spoofed number uses Davis’s actual carrier account as the display mask.
The account is still active because nobody’s reported him dead.
If I access the carrier’s backend, I can see inbound authentication requests from the spoofing service.
That won’t give us the sender, but it’ll give us the platform. And if I can crack the platform...
Me:
You get the account that’s using it.
FENRIR:
Theoretically.
Me:
I love it when you say theoretically. It means you’ve already figured out how to do it and you’re managing my expectations so I’ll be impressed when you deliver ahead of schedule.
FENRIR:
Underpromise, overdeliver.
Me:
Do it, you sexy thing.
I close the channel and sit in the hum of the servers. The data’s running. Fenrir’s hunting. The timestamps haven’t given us a name or a face. What they’ve given us is worse: the knowledge that he’s watching her. Her hours are his hours now. When she moves, he knows.
We’ve been looking for Stephen in the dark corners of the internet. The forums. The encrypted platforms. The places where bad men hide.
But a man who reshuffled his whole pattern the week she went back to work isn’t hiding in the dark. He’s closer. Folded into it somewhere we haven’t thought to look.
We’re all over her immediate vicinity. So that means he’s either outside it with a fucking telescope, or watching inside it digitally. My gut feels hollow at the thought.
I fill it with banana bread, a soggy cookie, and peppermint tea.
Then I close the laptop. Pack up.
At the top of the basement stairs, I stop. There’s still a light on in the kitchen.
Mom is at the table. Silk robe, reading glasses, a steaming mug in front of her.
She’s not reading. She’s sitting with her hands folded, looking at the sliding glass door, and in the reflection I can see her face, free of makeup and those mask sheets she likes to sleep in because they make her skin all “glowy.”
She looks tired.
I almost back down the stairs and hide out in the basement a little longer.
Mom and I don’t do late-night conversations.
We do brunches and phone calls and carefully choreographed family dinners where everyone plays their part.
We don’t do this—the kitchen at midnight, the robe instead of the outfit, the face without the layers of makeup.
She sees me before I can retreat.
“Milo.” She doesn’t seem surprised, which means she was probably waiting for me. “Come sit.”
I sit and she pushes a Tupperware container across the table. “Chicken parm. For your kitten.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
We sit in the quiet. The fridge hums. Outside, the garden is dark.
I can’t see the plots from here, but I know they’re there.
Six rectangles along the back fence. Lavender, roses, daisies, wildflowers, marigolds, and one I’ve never asked about because the flowers are dead and Mom replants them every spring and they die again every summer.
That one’s been there the longest. Since before I can remember.
“You’re working a case,” she says. Not a question. She watches me the way I watch everyone I love.
“Yeah.”
“The person who hurt your girl?”
“We’re getting closer.”
She nods. Takes a sip from her mug. Her reading glasses are smudged and she doesn’t clean them, which is how I know she’s worried. Gloria in calm mode is spotless perfection and perfect posture. The Gloria tonight has fingerprints on her glasses and a slump in her shoulders.
“When you find him,” she says, “what will you do?”
“What we always do.”
“Good.” The word is flat. Final. She holds her mug in both hands, the way Sage does, like it might fly off if she lets go. “Cowards deserve death.”
I should leave it there. Go home. Wait for Sage. But it’s midnight and she seems open, and the house is quiet in a way it almost never is, and the question’s been sitting in my chest since we had lunch together a few weeks ago.
“Mom.”
“Mm?”
“Why don’t we talk about my dad?”
She goes still. Not in the same way she does when she’s commanding a table. A deep stillness. Cellular. The kind of quiet a body learns when noise used to mean danger.
“You know why,” she says. Carefully. Every word set down like she’s checking the floor for mines.
“I don’t—” I stop. There’s a thing I do when I get near this, which is that my brain goes somewhere bright and loud and unhelpful, snack lists and pigeon conspiracies and that gas-station baseline, the whole carnival cranking up to drown something out.
It’s doing it now. Static where the memory should be.
“I don’t remember him. That’s the thing.
I’ve got this whole life back there and there’s just—a hole where he should be. ”
“That’s normal,” she says, too fast. “You were young when he left.”
“Then why do I remember the kitchen?” A flash.
It comes sideways, the way they always do—not a scene, just a fragment.
The kitchen. This kitchen, but older, the cabinets the brown they were before she redid them.
A sound I feel in my teeth more than hear.
My own hands and there’s something wrong with them, they’re red—
The static surges. My ears ring.
“Milo.” Her voice changes, the wariness sharpening into fear.
But I’m chasing it now, the fragment, the wet hands, the sound, the gaps my brain doesn’t want me looking at, and before I can stop myself the question’s out, small and cracked and not at all the way I say anything—
“Wait. Was it . . . me?”
The kitchen goes airless.
My mother is across the table and her hands are on my face before I’ve registered her moving, cool palms, thumbs at my cheekbones, and she’s close, so fucking close, her eyes locked on mine.
“Look at me. Milo. Look at my face.” Her voice is low and even and absolutely in command, and my eyes snap to her because they always do, because that voice is the first law I ever learned. “Breathe. In through your nose. There. Again.”
The static doesn’t stop but it stops climbing. The fragment slides back under whatever trapdoor it crawled out of. My hands are shaking on the table.
“When did you last take your pills?” she asks. Not a question I can dodge.
“I—” I have to think, which is its own answer. “They make me feel weird.”
“Milo.”
“I’m fine, Mom. I’ve just been busy. The case, Sage, I haven’t—”
“You need to take them.” Each word is its own sentence. Her thumbs are still on my face. “I don’t care what the side effects are. I care that you don’t start going off the rails just because you want to be a hero.”
“It’s not that bad. I’m managing.”
Her eyes narrow. “Managing is not the same as doing well. You remember what happened last time you stopped, don’t you?”
I do. I fucking do. My jaw twitches. “It’s not like that anymore,” I say, a shred too loud.
“Milo.” Her fingers tense on my skin. “Look at me. You need to take care of yourself, or you can’t take care of your girl. Or anyone else who depends on you.”
I can’t hold the eye contact, so I look at the mug on the table.
“Okay.”
“Say it. Say you’ll take them.”
“I’ll take them.”
I won’t take them. I’m a fucking zombie when I take them. No personality. Wasting eight hours every day on sleep.
“When?”
“Tonight. I’ve got them at Holden’s.”
She holds my face a moment longer, reading me the way she reads everyone, except there’s nothing performed in it now—just a mother checking her son for cracks.
Whatever she sees lets her breathe. She presses her lips to my forehead, hard, and sits back down, and the distance she puts between us is deliberate, careful, like she’s stepping back from something that nearly tipped.
“Your father isn’t a story you need,” she says quietly. “There is nothing back there that helps you. Some doors you leave shut because there’s nothing behind them but a long way down. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah.”
I don’t push. I never push, and now I remember why the wall is there even when I can’t remember what it’s walling—because every time I get close, the floor tilts and the carnival starts and my mother’s face goes white like it just did.
We never talk about my father.
Outside, the garden sits in the dark.
I look at it through the glass for a second too long, and my mother says, gently, “I’m going to bed. Take that food home to your girl. Take your meds. And lock up on your way out.”
“I will. Night, Mom.”
She presses a kiss to the top of my head and disappears down the hall, leaving me alone.
The house settles. I sit at the kitchen table with a Tupperware of chicken parm and a Post-it note in Mom’s handwriting:
For my future daughter-in-law. Tell her to eat. She’s too thin. Love, Mom. P.S. Tell the big one I said hello.
I pocket the note. Grab the chicken parm. Let myself out the front door and lock it behind me.
The drive home is quiet. The data runs behind my eyes. Fenrir is hunting. My head hurts.
And we still don’t talk about my father.