Page 27 of Plain Sight

Zeus would say that this was troublesome. Most of the time, he and his brothers talk like everybody else, but sometimes those guys sound like they walked out of a different decade. Like they learned English from somebody who had clawed his way into the bourgeoisie but wasn’t born there, so it’s not quite right.

I’m not being judgemental. I’m sure my family sounds weird to people who aren’t in it, with Gabriel’s singing and Mason’s relentless confidence and Remy constantly talking about dirt.

And me, being the class fucking clown.

See? This is all a joke. A bit of fun to pass the time, or whatever.

In a way, I am turning over a new leaf. I’m a married man with a pregnant wife. Anybody would settle down under those circumstances.

In my case, I don’t think it’s possible to settle down, just like it’s never been possible to keep my mind from wandering in class or stay focused during long meetings. I’m at the mercy of whatever my brain finds interesting. If I’m lucky, those things will coincide with a degree program, and then I look like an educated criminal instead of a bored one.

There’s a lot about this that’s really, too. I love Lily with every heartbeat. I genuinely can’t get enough of the way she looks at me when I wake her up, a mug of tea already in my hand. My favorite part of the day is curling up in bed with her. Knowing that she’s going to be at Mason’s when we get home is one of the nicest sensations I’ve ever experienced.

But there’s a split in the middle of my brain, and on the other side of all that happiness…

I’m terrified.

I’ve been terrified for a long time. The only thing worse than losing my parents was the threat of losing all my siblings along with them. Having Lily—here, alive, in love with me—is like trying to breathe in air that’s on fire.

If I lost her, I wouldn’t make it.

If my family lost me, they’d have each other. They’d only have lost the least of them. And in the end, if the truth came out—how much of a criminal I really was, how uncontrollable I’d been—it would soften the blow. It wouldn’t be like losing our mom or our dad. It wouldn’t be like losing Mason.

Things would be easier.

That sounds like I want to die, but I don’t.

What I want to do, more than anything, is keep Lily safe.

Lily is never going to be safe until Malcolm Walsh is dead.

And until Malcolm Walsh is dead, it’s between the two of us. If anything happens to Lily, it’s over for me.

I’ve done this routine a million times. Go to school—now it’s work, with Mason and Gabriel—and spend half my day scouring paperwork for leads. Come home—still home, with Gabriel and Elise and Nate and Lydia living in the guest apartment for safety reasons—and tease Remy and make out with Lily and hold Robin and tell jokes to make Sunshine laugh and annoy the shit out of my brother.

Wait for everyone to fall asleep.

Keep working on paperwork.

The business records aren’t infinite, and it’s not very long until I reach the end. Eight days, I think. Not much longer than a week.

I haven’t found Malcolm Walsh, but I’ve found several shell companies to chase down and a group of people I didn’t expect. Not another consortium. A ring around the consortium, like the rings around Saturn. These people are nothing by themselves. They weren’t victims of the consortium. The opposite, actually. They made plenty of money by staying close, but not too close.

I start paying them visits.

It’s the time of year when we all start to feel it—the inevitable drag of the anniversary. Before Charlotte, Mason would either work too hard as the summer burned through the city or he’d start phoning it in, leaving most of the day-to-day at Phoenix to Dev. Before Elise, Gabriel kept his schedule packed. He was somewhere different every night. I did my best to be there for Remy. I don’t know if she feels it less than Gabriel and Mason and I because she was so young when they died or if she’s just good at pretending, but usually she seems fine. Hangs out with her friends. Comes home and studies more archeology stuff. Sits out by the pool with big sunglasses on and reads books that make her gasp and fan herself.

I did my best to be there for Remy, but that’s easy when your baby sister is a normal human who sleeps only slightly less than the rest of humanity. I still had lots of time to do my crime scene stuff.

The more things change, the more things stay the same, am I right?

That heavy, half-drowned feeling in my chest only gets heavier as the anniversary gets closer. There’s a lot of bullshit grief advice out there, but one thing that does take my mind off it is staying busy, so I stay busy.

It gets harder and harder to breathe, but I stay busy.

“There was a second guy,” Lily says dreamily. It’s the middle of the night. She seemed restless, so I decided not to sneak out. “At the warehouse.”

“In your dream?”