I’ll wait anyway.
She’s going to answer. Tallulah Gentry is not built for leaving things unfinished. She has a compulsion to tie off loose threads, finish equations, close loops. When people don’t respond to her messages, she pings them again. And again. And again. Little digital nudges until they give her something.
So.
I give her a nudge instead.
A second ago, she was there. I felt the tiny shift in the backend, the way you feel a floorboard dip when someone crosses the room behind you. Her handle flared briefly. Then the screenshots went out. Then she clipped the connection like a child slamming a door.
I drum my fingers lightly on the table. This is new.
Last time, she couldn’t help herself. She engaged. Questions, deflections, arguments. She talked to me like I was a puzzle with sharp edges, and I let her work the pieces as long as it amused me.
Now it’s like someone else is teaching her tricks. I can almost hear them over her shoulder.
Walk away. Starve the monster. Don’t feed the fire.
They tell people that in those little community meetings, the ones where a cop and a therapist stand in front of a PowerPoint and talk about “boundaries” and “digital safety.”
Don’t respond to taunts. Don’t reply to threats. Don’t give the predator the reinforcement he wants.
They say it like predators are dogs, and attention is table scraps.
They forget that not all hunger looks the same. That was Jason’s brand of hunger. Mine is a little different.
I stare at the blank input field under my two lines and imagine her in that office on the horse farm. Cotton Bishop’s house—Bishop, now Gallagher. Magnolia money. Gambling money. Horse money. Whatever flavor of money they call it, it smells the same.
They moved her there like a chess piece they’re trying to tuck behind a more valuable one.
A fortress, they think.
For the first time since I returned, something like doubt chews at me. Tallulah Gentry is connected. Friends with money, family in the fucking Irishmob. She may have been a little more of a project than I bargained for.
Maybe I should just…leave?
I straighten in my chair. No. Never. Money or the mob, they all bleed the same. And Tallulah Gentry has it coming.
I’ve been on the road leading up to the Bishop farm. I remember the front gate and the stone pillars and the long drive curving out of sight. I remember Beatrice Thurston’s place on the hill too. Different architecture, same logic: distance as armor.
It didn’t work then either.
I roll my shoulders, easing the tightness between them. The motel chair isn’t made for sitting this long, but I’ve been more uncomfortable in nicer rooms.
On the screen, nothing changes.
She’s still there. I know she is. I can feel her like a static charge on the line. She’s got the window closed, not the account. That’s important. She didn’t delete. She didn’t run. She’s just…choosing not to speak.
I shouldn’t like that as much as I do.
It’s inconvenient. Annoying. It interrupts the script I have laid out in my head—her poking, me answering, the two of us circling in a tighter and tighter loop until the space between us disappears…until I have her exactly where I want her.
Instead, she cuts the scene short.
That means one of two things—or maybe both.
One: someone else is in the room with her.
Two: she’s decided silence makes her powerful.
