“My dad,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows at him, glanced at her bare wrist, and clacked her beak together. “And is your ‘dad’ in the building?” she asked.
“I’m looking for him,” Hill said.
He didn’t think it was that convincing. It was good enough for a dead woman with places to be. She visibly marked off her brief concern for him as “resolved” and let herself out.
“Don’t leave any doors open,” she said and slammed the door behind her.
Hill rubbed his chest.
“It’s the walls you should be worried about,” he muttered and poked at the hollow in his chest.
It did nothing.
If Hill felt anything about this—the childhood home his dad’s killer had made for him—he couldn’t get to it. Habit, practice,the shape of his neurodivergence? He didn’t know which to blame or how to get around it.
Except that was a lie. He might be able to bury—or not be able tounbury—his feelings, but he’d never had much luck ignoring logic. Nearly every time he’d used hispoltabilities had been triggered by a taste of the living world.
He slid his hand into his pocket. The cookie he’d taken from Seb’s office was crumbs in a greasy napkin at this point. He pulled it out and tipped its debris into his palm. A few chunks of chocolate and smears of cream fell between his fingers and bounced off the floor. The taste of it, when he licked his palm, was sweetness undercut by the stale texture of the cookie and a burst of breathless, uncomplicated joy that was so pure it nearly gave Hill a headache.
A kid, he realized,happy with her cookie and the taste of her own socks as she pulled one canary-yellow foot up to her mouth. The nappy, dry texture of the wool on her gums and…
It had just happened every other time. This time, Hill clung to the feeling and used it like a lodestone to find something similar in him.
It was socks. That was…vaguely embarrassing in a way Hill couldn’t explain. The memory still felt painfully fresh, almost raw.
It had been a month after his dad’s death that Fraser spent the night for the first time. He’d slept on the couch, his bare feet in expensive socks the first thing that Hill saw when he came downstairs in the morning. At the time, he’d not thought anything of it, other than being glad to see his uncle.
Later…
Now…
When had Fraser first looked at his mom and thought, “She’s smart and she’s got—”
The walls either side of Hill cracked. Plaster dust splattered the floor underfoot as the tiles cracked and crunched to powder. He flinched back as the world shattered white, and he saw the still-familiar hall of the brownstone, dimly lit by the light of the moon through the uncurtained front windows. Frost spread over the pictures hung on the wall, cracking the glass and blistering the ink that chronicled Fraser’s perfectly acceptable life and family. The antique Tiffany light fitting—another addition of his mom’s—swung violently from side to side.
Hill reached up without thinking to try and steady it. If it broke, his mom would be devastated. She’d gotten it at some Virginia swap meet and— The glass clipped through his fingers andpopped.The spray of glass studded the blandly cream wall with fragments of color.
That hurttoomuch. Maybe it had been throwing in that little bit of disgust at the end.
He shouldn’t have brought his mom into it. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that he couldn’t cope with thinking honestly about that.
Heneverthought honestly about that.
Hill didn’t think he could put it back into the bottle now, though.
The stairs creaked as he climbed them. The varnish on the banister bubbled, and the spindles cracked, top to bottom. Under his feet, the fabric of the carpet frayed and stained.
Face it that way, Davy reminded him in memory.
He was downstairs, in Fraser’s office next to the kitchen, as he looked for anything they could use. Hill just had to trust that Davy wouldn’t get him arrested—again—and not look that way.
Hill got to the top of the stairs and headed toward the master bedroom. The closed door stymied him for a second, until he remembered trying it once.
The handle rattled but didn’t open. Hill gave it a shove and, on the other side of it, heard his mom giggle.
“Give me a second,” she said, breathless, and then muttering something he’d not caught to someone else. “I needed a nap.”
