Page 53 of Into the Fire

The Orphan Program had sent a recruiter sniffing around the Pride House Group Home to check out its wares for a variety of reasons. But the most important was that the kids who lived there were expendable.

He felt an urge now to gloss over Max’s grief, to point out the nearly two dozen electrical shocks that Grant had endured before giving up his name. The crime-scene report had been stomach-churning. Grant hadn’t wanted to put Max’s life at risk.

But he’d been willing to.

And Evan wanted Max to shove the thought away because of how painfully that same reality lived inside him—how little he was wanted, how little his life had been valued. Max’s recognizing it meant that Evan had to recognize it, too, the anguish resonating in his bones like a deep-struck note. But Max was owed more than another voice giving him false assurances, so Evan kept his mouth shut and sat in it with him.

Max dug his thumbnail into a Styrofoam lid. “‘No one would ever think of you.’ That’s what Grant told me. That’s the thing. I don’t really matter. I’m not really family.”

Evan breathed in the dark space. “Maybe they’re still mad at you for moving on from Violet.”

“Moving on?” Max raised his head, the amber light catching half of his face, the other lost in eclipse. “When you love someone like that? You never move on. They get into your cells. They live inside you even when they’re not living with you.” He lowered his gaze again. “This whole mess with Grant, it took me right out of life. But that gives me a better view of it, you know? My life. Like I’m outside looking down at it. And I guess my fear is…” His lips bunched. “My fear is that maybe Grant was right.”

“If you don’t like what you see,” Evan said, “change it.”

Max’s laugh died quickly in the small room. “I wish it was that easy.”

“It is. It’s everything else that’s complicated.”

Max didn’t seem to like the sound of that.

“Maybe this will give you a chance to do something different.” Evan noticed that his enunciation was loose, slightly slurred from the concussion, and that once again he was talking to himself as much as to Max.

Max went back to picking at the take-out container. He did not look convinced.

Evan fought to speak more clearly: “You know the two best words in the English language?”

Max shook his head.

“‘Next time.’”

Max blew out a breath. He leaned on the counter, his elbow trembling.

Evan picked up Max’s disposable phone from the counter, dropped it down the disposal, and let it run until the pieces rattled vigorously. Then he took a fresh phone from the duffel bag, peeled it out of the packaging, and tossed it to Max.

“Just to be safe,” Evan said. “Use this now. Same rules. I’ll have 1-855-2-NOWHERE up and running again as soon as I get home. I’ll be in touch.”

“When?”

“When I take care of the second thing.”

Max chewed at the edge of a thumb, his shoulders curled inward. Wrecked with worry. “What should I do in the meantime?”

“In the meantime?” Evan considered for a moment. “Figure out what you want to do with your life when we get it back for you.”

Detectives Nuñez and Brust sat on the overstuffed couches in the front room of the Beverly Hills house, sipping black coffee out of bone-china teacups. Grant Merriweather’s widow sat opposite them, a frail woman with an expensive haircut and toned rich-wife muscles.

“So Max Merriweather stopped by here on Monday,” Nuñez said. “What did he want?”

“I don’t know.” Jill shook her head, her layered chestnut locks swaying. “He’d heard that Grant was killed. He said he wanted to offer his condolences, but it seemed like he was nosing around.”

“For what?”

She raised her head with a kind of affected dignity, the lines of her neck pronounced. “To see if Grant had left him anything.”

The detectives looked at each other.

“Like what?” Brust asked.