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“What?” Sean asked.
“You’re stuttering again.”
“N-not m-m-much.”
Mike’s smirk spoke volumes.
Sean shrugged it off. “It’s the p-place,” he said. “It gets to me.”
“The basketball court?”
“No, asshole. The town. C-camelot.”
But it wasn’t that simple. He’d been living in Ohio for months, talking to lawyers and court officials and clients of Camelot Security. Talking to Caleb so often, they’d become something like partners. Something like friends.
Until he went to Louisville with Katie, his stutter had been all potential, an infection waiting for his system to weaken. Now it was creeping in.
“It’s not like it’s bad,” Mike offered. “The stutter, I mean. Camelot sucks, same as always.” He walked over and leaned one shoulder against the wall, ball under his free arm.
“No, it’s not bad,” Sean agreed. “B-but it’s getting worse.”
Mike chewed on the inside of his cheek, a sure sign he wanted to say something he knew Sean wouldn’t want to hear.
“What?” Sean asked warily.
“The relapse rate is high, right?”
“Yeah.” The relapse rate was astronomical. It was extremely rare for adults who stuttered to be permanently cured through therapy.
It happened, though. Sean thought it had happened to him. It was starting to look like he’d been kidding himself.
“Do you need to be doing those voice exercises again?”
“No, I need to get my ass out of C-camelot.” If he stayed in San Jose, it would cure him. Not because it was a better place, but because it was his place. In California, Sean had money and power and status, prizes he’d claimed after years of working every shitty part-time job he could get his hands on and eating noodles purchased in ten-packs at the dollar store. Years of trying to figure out how to make a life when he’d thrown away the one he was born with.
In San Jose, he spoke in a voice he had sculpted with a scalpel. A clear, firm, no-nonsense voice that got people’s attention.
Katie was the problem. His infatuation with her tied him to the past. He couldn’t be around her without revisiting all the worst feelings that had dogged him through adolescence.
He needed to escape Camelot all over again.
Mike must have seen the tension in his expression. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Why haven’t you done that yet?”
Sean put his back to the wall and slid to the ground. “I’m wuh-working on it.”
But he wasn’t. He hadn’t so much as moved the Riverside Shakespeare off his mother’s kitchen table.
She’d been reading Hamlet the day the aneurysm killed her. He’d been three thousand miles away. The same three thousand miles that had separated them every day for what turned out to be the last twelve years of her life.
Sean had severed his connection to his mother completely and permanently. He didn’t know how to explain the hold she had on him now, except that she turned out to be as difficult in death as she’d been in life.
That, and the fact that she’d loved him, and he’d discarded her.
“Sean.” Something sober in Mike’s voice made him look up. “Kelly probably didn’t tell you this, but we’ve been talking to the Syntek people. They want to buy us out, make us the core of a revamped in-house security division. I’m not sure we should say no. Not with the bank calling in that loan.”
Anger rose up in a black wave, and Sean had to work hard to push it back down where it belonged. “We’ll come up with something so we don’t have to do that.”
“What kind of something?”
