Page 132 of What We Burn

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.