Page 87 of What We Become

I head down into the garage where Odin’s people stacked our plastic tubs in orderly rows. I find the one marked KITCHEN and pop the lid.

Inside is chaos. It’s obvious Odin’s people went room to room and just shoved anything noteworthy in. I dig past a tangle of charging cables, the entire contents of the bowl we keep our mail in, and what appears to be a bag of rice that exploded during transport. My fingers close around a familiar cylinder—fish flakes, thank God—and then knock against something harder.

Two pharmacy bottles. Amber plastic, white caps, my name on the labels.

I pick them up.

Modafinil.

Zolpidem.

How the hell did these get here?

Shoving the pills in my pocket, I go back up to the kitchen and shake a pinch into Frank’s bowl, watching him attack it with all the urgency of a shark finding a wounded seal.

Then I pull the bottles from my pocket and study them.

They shouldn’t be here.

I swallow around the lump in my throat. The tub was marked KITCHEN, which means these came off a shelf in our kitchen. They’ve been in the house the whole time.

“Everything all right?” Holden calls out, because I’ve gone quiet and I never go quiet.

“Um.” I rub a sweaty palm against my leg, torn between asking the question and tossing the pills down the garbage disposal. I go with the former. “Do you know how Odin’s people got these?”

I move over to the table and set the pills in front of Holden. He goes still.

“Your mother gave them to me.”

“My mother,” I repeat, the words landing weird in my mouth. “My mother gave you my pills.”

“The night you crashed. After she sedated you.”

“Of course she did.” I look at the labels again. My stomach gets annoyingly tight. “And what, exactly, did Gloria expect you to do with her pocket pharmacy?”

Holden’s jaw tightens. “She said you wouldn’t take them if you thought you didn’t need them.”

“She’s right. They fuck me up and I hate them.”

“Okay.” He nods. Slowly. “She told me that if you started escalating, I should crush them into your food.”

“Crush them into my food,” I repeat, and the words come out flat, stripped of all their usual decoration. “Like I’m a cat who won’t take his thyroid medication. Like I’m—” I stop. Swallow, my hands shaking. “She told you to drug me. Without my knowledge. My mother told you to secretly drug her adult son.”

Holden’s expression doesn’t change, which is worse than if he’d flinched. “She said you needed the reset. That you’d refuse if asked.”

“She’s right. I would refuse. Because they’re mine.” I gesture at the bottles a little too fast, and my fingers clip one, sending it skidding toward the edge of the table. Holden catches it. “My brain. My pills. My fucking choice whether I want to feel like a zombie for three days while my brain chemistry reboots.”

“I know.”

“You know?” I laugh, and it sounds wrong—brittle, sharp, a noise that belongs to someone else. “You knew and you didn’t tell me. You’ve been sitting on this for—how long? Weeks? You knew my mother was treating you like her personal compliance officer and you just—” I gesture at him, at the monitor, at everything. “You went along with it.”

“No. I put them in the kitchen cabinet that same night and didn’t touch them again. I couldn’t do that to you. Not without your knowledge. Not without your consent. You’re not—you’re not someone I get to manage, Milo. You’re someone I love.”

I stare at him. I want to throw something at him. I want to crawl into his lap and let him hold me until the shaking stops. I want to rewind fifteen minutes and pretend I never found the bottles, never asked the question, never saw the way his face went carefully blank when I set them on the table in front of him.

My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. The jokes are queued up—dozens of them, reflexive, protective, the usual Milo-brand deflection—but they taste like ash. I can’t make the noise. Can’t perform my way out of this one.

Holden watches me. It’s his job and his nature and what I find simultaneously the safest and most suffocating about him. Right now his eyes are doing that thing where they look flat and cold while something underneath runs hot enough to burn.