I tap the trackpad with one knuckle, watching the cursor blink. A suggestion. A pulse.
The easy thing would be to push. Send another line. Press where it hurts.
why so quiet, tallulah?
you were more talkative last time.
I can picture the response. I know what she’d say—something barbed and precise, turning my words back on me, refusing to give me the reaction I asked for and giving me a different one instead. She’s very good at that. She would make an excellent interrogator, which is probably why the sheriff gives her leash to poke at me.
I flex my hand and make myself not type.
The thing most people don’t understand about control is that it isn’t just about what you grab. It’s about what you let go.
Jason never learned that. He wanted everything, all the time. Every impulse followed. Every itch scratched. He ate too fast and then wondered why he choked.
Tallulah choking herself on silence is…interesting.
“Okay,” I murmur to the empty room. “Have it your way.”
I close the chat window on my side, too.
The notifications box shrinks, tucks itself into the corner of the screen. The desktop comes back into focus—folders, notes, captured stills. I have an entire directory labeled LF_NEW with subfolders for SHERIFF, COUSIN, DOC, FARM. I’m nothing if not organized.
I click FARM.
Photos spill up from the bottom of the screen—long-distance shots of the driveway, overhead views from public satellite images, grainy zooms of people on the porch and in the side yard. Cotton, pregnant, hand on her lower back. Brodie, watchful. The little girl with that impossible Irish name no one can pronounce dragging a stuffed animal through the grass.
Her friends. Her people, just a few of them.
She’s always had people orbiting her—family, friends, the sheriff with his guilt. But they saw the utility first. They wanted what she could do with her brain. The affection came later, if at all.
I close the photo and open another—Tallulah in her apartment, alone this time, bare feet tucked under her, the thin strands of a silvery necklace catching the light as she bends over her keyboard.
That’s what I sent the message for, really.
Not to scare her, but to remind her whose game she’s in.
Her ignoring me doesn’t change that. If anything, it sharpens it.
Fine.
If she wants to pretend the digital room is hers, I’ll give it to her. I’ll leave it empty and let her pace in there until the echoes get too loud. She can talk to her sheriff, her cousin, her brute. Shecan walk away from the computer and tell herself that closing a window means closing a door.
While she does, I’ll work on other rooms.
Neighbors. Routes. Schedules.
The toy store event Cotton signed up for next week, where there will be hot chocolate and fake snow and a hundred little distractions for people with children and people with secrets.
You learn more from the way someone relaxes than the way they brace.
I open a different file—one with times and dates and vendor lists pulled from the town’s social media. My irritation thins into something more useful. Anticipation.
She wants to withhold one kind of conversation? That’s all right. The next one won’t require a keyboard.
I let the chat icon sit dormant in the corner of the screen and start mapping.
Silence is only a temporary kind of answer.
