She nods, like she remembers. She probably does—we were at their house less that week.
“Then his dad… your dad… found out too,” I continue. “I was waiting for him to kick me out. To tell me I wasn’t welcome in his house, around you. Instead he dragged me down to the precinct?—”
Her eyes widen. “He what?”
“—and sat me in front of a detective he’d worked cases with. Guy read me the riot act. Laid out exactly how fast I’d end up in juvie or worse if I kept freelancing for criminals. Then he told me if I wanted to be useful, I could start by helping them instead.”
A corner of my mouth lifts, remembering.
“He made me run through my scripts. Showed me the back end on how real investigations work. It was the first time an adult looked at what I could do and didn’t immediately treat me like a walking problem. Just… a tool that could be pointed somewhere better.”
I clear my throat.
“I cleaned up my act after that,” I say. “Mostly. Not all at once. Still relapsed into stupid shit sometimes. But your living roomwas the first place I stayed that felt like… not just a pit stop. So I tried to be someone who wouldn’t get banned from it.”
Lark’s eyes shine.
“Knight,” she says, voice soft, “why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
I shrug, uncomfortable. “Kids don’t need to hear about the shitty parts of the adults in their orbit. I wasn’t going to unload that on you at fourteen.”
“I wasn’t a kid,” she argues.
“You were to me.”
“I still am to you,” she mutters. “Apparently.”
I wince. Deserved.
“Anyway,” I say. “Patch applied. Mostly.”
She stares at me like she’s seeing an entirely different person layered over the one she’s known.
Part of me wants to tell her to stop. To go back to the cartoon version where I’m all clean edges and no bugs.
“I had this whole narrative,” she says slowly, “where you were just… born cool. Broody kid genius with tragic cheekbones, emerging fully formed to brood on our sofa and ignore my jokes.”
I snort. “Tragic cheekbones?”
“Shut up.” Her mouth twitches. “I didn’t realize how hard you fought not to go the other way.”
“It wasn’t some noble crusade,” I say. “I just didn’t want your dad to stop letting me in the house.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “That’s what you think.”
Her tone makes something in my chest twist.
I deflect.
“Your turn,” I say gruffly. “Patch note.”
She taps the pen against her lip, thinking.
“Okay,” she says after a moment. “Lark v3.5 bug fix: three years ago, I started going to therapy, and I didn’t tell anyone.”
That… I didnotknow.
Not even a little.
