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“You keep that stuff in the shower?”

“I did today because I was thinking that Maël-Michael might come back and he would never look in a place he never stepped into. At least I still have this, but the nice coats for running are gone.”

“We can get other ones.”

But Oliver had given them to me, so they were important. I sank down to sit on the toilet lid. “This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened.”

“Your mother stole from you before?”

“No, she doesn’t do the stealing. She doesn’t seem to mind if other people do, though, and not just from me. She believes that material possessions are only ephemeral and that we can’t value ourselves based on what we have.”

“Yes, that’s an easy thing to say for a woman who burned through a few million dollars without thinking about it. It’s probably harder to believe it now, when she doesn’t have a pot to piss in.”

“Oh, my pots!” I ran to the kitchen and found that I didn’t have one of those either. Maël-Michael had stolen all my cookware and dishes. “This must have taken a while to carry out. He probably came back right after I left.”

“He probably never went anywhere. He stuck around, watching, until the coast was clear.”

It suddenly felt like he was still here. I whirled around to look over my shoulder.

“We should go. We can call the police from my house,” Oliver said immediately. “You can sleep over tonight.”

“I don’t want them looking for my mom. I know it may sound crazy,” I said apologetically. “But I don’t want her to get in trouble.”

“Then we’ll say that it was all Maël, or Michael, or whatever other names he uses. They already have the case against him for the gun theft today, so they can add on to that. Do you have a bag?”

I didn’t because they had stolen my suitcases, most likely packed with my stuff. I ended up filling a garbage bag with some of the clothes that remained and with my toiletries, including a toothbrush because I definitely used one, myself. “My mom let him in,” I mentioned. “I know that she doesn’t care about possessions, but she knew that he had a gun and she still let him into my house.”

Oliver didn’t answer that; instead, he put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get going,” he told me.

On the way over to his house, I tried the number of the new phone I’d gotten for her but it only rang and rang. “I don’t think that anyone is going to accept the money we found,” I said. “I guess that it’s still legal tender, but if you tried to use it in a motel? The clerk would think it was counterfeit, for sure.”

“I’m not very concerned about where they go tonight.”

I had thought that my mom could take care of herself but now I wasn’t so sure. “Did she do this because she thinks that asshole will help her? Or is it something else? I know she was mad about how I left her and went to boarding school, but that was more than ten years ago,” I told him.

“It doesn’t seem like she’s mad at you. It’s more like she’s enthralled by that weirdo. I don’t get that at all, but people can definitely make bad choices in their partners.”

The words “I did” went unspoken, but I was thinking them. “That’s not a crime in itself. You just have to learn from it.”

“Do you think your mom will?”

No. I rubbed my temples because the headache was back. No, I didn’t think she would learn anything at all.

Chapter 13

“Wow,” I told Vera when she walked into the lobby. “You look great!”

“Do you think so?” She patted her hair, which was shorter now. “I went for something different.”

“It’s not just that,” I said. “You look really relaxed.”

“It was a fun Christmas,” she answered. But rather than talking about that, she wanted to hear all the gossip that she’d missed here at our building. Most of that surrounded me, my unusual mom, and her age-inappropriate boyfriend. “Did he really steal everything you own?”

I clarified that he had only stolen part of what I owned and had broken most of the rest, but that the situation was perfectly safe now. Mrs. McGlothen had hired someone to change out the lock on my door and had installed an extra sliding chain, informing me that the costs were coming out of whatever was left of my security deposit but that she wouldn’t hesitate to sue if I was short. She was very, very mad about the damage to the wall.

Vera wanted to know more about the safe and its contents, about a rumor that the man in 4D was holding seances, and about the mailman shirking his duties again. She strongly disliked him. Then she also asked how I had spent the holidays. “It was good after the robbery part was over?” she prompted.

It had been great. I had also enjoyed myself a whole lot more than I had expected to. Since my mom had absconded and Gramps was on his trip, Oliver had invited me to spend both Christmas Eve and Day with his parents (his sister was at her in-laws’ place). I had expected not to like them, especially his dad, because I was Team Gramps.