Page 41 of What We Burn

Eli shifts in the cargo area behind me. He lost the coin toss for seating—or more accurately, nobody offered him a seat and he didn’t ask for one. I can hear him back there every time Milo takes a corner, sliding on the flat carpet, bracing himself against the wheel well. Something more than a meeting about that text happened last night. Because when I went to bed, Eli was fine. But this morning he’s moving carefully. One cheekbone is split, his mouth bruised. Nobody explains it, and I’m too tired to ask.

I wonder if he knows I heard him talking this morning. After Knox showed me the phone, after the others filtered downstairs one by one looking like men who’d had three hours of sleep and a lifetime of bad news, I went out to the porch to breathe. The back door was open. Eli was in the kitchen, and Micah was with him, and their voices carried in that way voices do when people think they’re being quiet but aren’t.

“She knows,” Micah had said.

“Knox told her?”

“Yeah. She’s out on the porch.”

A pause. Then Eli’s voice, scraped down to nothing, “How is she?”

“She threw up. Then she asked for the details.” Another pause. “She’s tougher than you give her credit for.”

“I know she’s tough, Micah. That’s not—” A thumping sound cut him off. A cabinet closing, or maybe a fist against a counter. “I feel guilty, okay? She’s in this situation because of decisions that I made—ever since that night on the beach. And I’d like one morning where she wakes up and nothing’s trying to kill her. Is that too much to ask?”

I’d walked back inside before Micah could respond. Made eye contact with Eli across the kitchen. Watched him freeze with a dish towel in his hands, caught between wanting to come closer and knowing he’d lost the right.

“I’m fine,” I told him. Same lie I tell everyone.

He nodded. Didn’t believe me. Didn’t push. That’s the dance we do now—him hovering at the edge of my orbit, close enough to catch me, far enough that I never have to acknowledge he’s there. It should make me angry. Some days it does. Today it makes me tired.

But I’d rather be tired with him near than rested with him gone. And that’s the part I can’t say out loud yet—that even after everything, even after easy and fun and passing you around, some stupid, stubborn part of me would panic if he left again. I haven’t forgiven him. I don’t have that in me yet. But love doesn’t wait for forgiveness. It sits there, inconvenient and unkillable, like a weed growing through concrete and attempting to bloom into a flower.

Milo takes another pointless left turn, and Eli thuds against the side panel.

“Fucking hell,” Eli groans, shifting around in an effort to wedge himself in the space more securely.

“Aww, is diddums having a hard time back there?” Milo mocks.

“If I die in a rollover, I want it noted that I protested this seating arrangement.”

“Noted and ignored,” Milo says, checking his mirrors for the millionth time.

I lean forward between the seats. “Milo. Are we actually getting closer to wherever we’re going, or are you driving in circles?”

“We’re getting closer via a carefully designed countersurveillance route that happens to resemble a circular shape to the untrained eye.” He slows at a four-way stop, scans every direction, and pulls through. “Nobody’s following us.”

“Nobody was following us when we left,” Holden says.

“You don’t know that. That’s the whole point. This guy spoofed a dead man’s phone number and sent our girlfriend a message about her throat. While she was sleeping. In your bed. In your house.” Milo doesn’t look at Holden, but the words land anyway. “So forgive me if I’m being a little extra today.”

The car goes quiet. He’s not wrong.

Knox’s thumb moves on my knee. Small circles. Steady.

When Milo finally seems satisfied that we’ve shaken whatever phantom tail he was worried about, he straightens in his seat, signals properly for the first time in twenty minutes, and turns onto a quiet residential street. Ranch-style houses. Mowed lawns. A kid on a bicycle. A sprinkler going chk-chk-chk-chk in someone’s front yard.

“Your server room is here?” Holden says.

“It’s in the basement of my mom’s house. So, yeah.”

“Wait,” Eli says from the back. “You’re taking us to your mom’s house?”

“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?”