Frankie stopped him before he hung up. He put the phone back up to his ear.
“How often do we talk or keep in touch?”
“On average, we talk on the phone every thirty-four days and text every six. We haven’t emailed for eight years and two months.”
“We text everysix days?” she repeated, her tone indicating her disbelief.
“The average was skewed during the pandemic when you were binge-watchingTiger King,Schitt’s Creek,The Queen’s Gambit,Squid Game, andTed Lasso,” he explained. “Bye, Frankie.”
“I love you, AJ. Bye.”
AJ ended the call and sat for a moment in his car, letting the silence pool around him like evening shade. The name Davies spun in the back of his brain, catching and sparking off old memories like a flint. For someone who made his living solving puzzles, this should have felt invigorating, another thread to tug at until the whole tapestry gave way. But this was something different. Something personal, and sticky, and more complicated than the encrypted code or tangled logic he usually parsed. The personal stuff always was.
He thumbed the steering wheel once, twice, three times, something his mom used to do when she put the car in park, a nervous tic she'd passed down the way other mothers hand down old jewelry or photographs. Then he pulled out of the parking lot, the sun slanting hard through his windshield, fracturing his vision with lines of gold and glare. He took the usual route back to his home off base, a predictable twenty-seven-minute drive, but today the landscape went by in a trail of color, the edges blurred by the work his mind was doing in the background.
Six. Six. Six. Six. Six. Six.
Davies. Davies. Davies.Where had Frankie heard that name, what did it have to do with Liam, and why was Frankie calling him out of the blue to ask about it? Out of Tristan and Liam Sterling, AJ had always liked Liam more. That was not the general consensus, unless you were a female. Girls had crushes on the eldest Sterling, but most guys at school and in their neighborhood thought Liam was an asshole and Tristan wasn’t. AJ had the opposite opinion. Which is why when Frankie and Tristan got engaged seven years ago, AJ hadnotbeen happy about it, everyone else was.
He didn’t care that Tristan was rich or a lawyer. He thought his sister could do better. No, heknewhis sister could do better. But she’d never asked him for his opinion, so he never gave it.
The drive home ended, as it always did, with the sudden shock of returning to the present and out of the matrix that was his mind. He pulled up into his driveway and was immediately suspicious. Not because of the house, which was exactly as he’d left it, a nondescript mid-century ranch with a burnt orange door, but because of the SUV parked on the curb in front of it. The only people who ever surprised him were Niko, who was about to play the Red Sox, and Frankie, who he’d just gotten off the phone with.
He killed the engine and waited, watching for any movement. He didn’t see any, but that just made him more uneasy. It was only when he stepped out and locked his car with his fob that he saw that something shifted inside the SUV—a shadow in the passenger seat, a door handle flexing, and then the slow swing of the door itself. His mom stepped out, pivoting with a fluidity of a woman half her age. She wore a long, flowing dress the color of marigolds, which perfectly complemented her. She looked ten years younger than when he’d last seen her, which was impossible but also somehow in keeping with the day.
Behind her, the driver’s door opened, and Dr. Sterling emerged. His tailored suit, navy, crisp, probably Italian, and expensive haircut. AJ had never been particularly fond of the man, but he couldn’t deny he had a presence. He was six foot two, broad in the shoulders, with a smile designed to set people at ease and a voice that could hush a room without ever needing to rise above a conversational volume.
“Hi, Sweetie!” his mom called, arms outstretched, and AJ was surprised to feel himself moving toward her, his body responding to her voice before his mind could catch up.
AJ looped his arms stiffly around his mother’s waist and let her squeeze him like a childhood rag doll. He detected the scent of her perfume, something subtle, expensive, and faintly floral, which meant Dr. Sterling must have been funding her taste these days. She hummed against his shoulder, and he tapped her twice on the back, their well-established signal for “hug complete.”
When she released him, her smile was radiant but nervous, as though she’d been rehearsing this greeting in the car for miles. Dr. Sterling, meanwhile, hovered beside them. He extended his hand, palm dry and steady, and AJ shook it, a perfunctory, two-pump gesture, neither affectionate nor adversarial.
“It’s good to see you, son,” Dr. Sterling boomed, using the same measured baritone that once diffused arguments in the Sterling household.
“Sorry to show up like this, I know you don’t like surprises.” His mother’s hand rose to his cheek in a flutter of French-manicured fingers.
“No, I don’t,” he agreed. He hated surprises. They broke the equilibrium of his day, and made his chest constrict. There were more polite ways to say it, but the truth was best. Not only did his mom live in San Francisco, so she’d never just shown up on his doorstep, but she wasn’t even supposed to be in the country.
“Why aren’t you in Italy?” His mother had saved up for a European vacation basically her entire life, and according to her itinerary she was scheduled to be in Rome.
“We have some news. We were in New York,” she began, glancing at Dr. Sterling for confirmation, as if the timeline might slip her mind. “We went to tell your sister and Tristan in person, but she’s not in New York, so we couldn’t.”
“She’s not?” AJ asked.
“No, she’s in California visiting Yaya,” his mother explained, her voice a little higher than usual, meaning she was concerned, which meant she had no idea Frankie was going out to visit Yaya.
That could explain Frankie’s abrupt phone call. Pine Ridge General, the hospital where Liam worked, was thirty miles from Hope Falls, where Yaya lived. AJ mentally put the puzzle pieces together. Frankie went to Hope Falls. For some reason she ran into Liam, or someone told her that he was working at the hospital. Now she was on some fact-finding mission because Liam hadn’t spoken to his father, Dr. Sterling, or his brother, Tristan, since his mother’s funeral over a decade earlier. If he was right, why hadn’t she simply spoken to him directly instead of relaying cryptic questions through AJ?
He found these social workarounds and interaction gymnastics mentally exhausting.
“Anyway,” his mom pressed on, “we wanted to tell them both in person that…” her words trailed off as her eyes darted up at Dr. Sterling, who offered a supportive nod.
“Can we talk inside?” Dr. Sterling asked, his hand gesturing toward AJ’s front door with a kind of practiced gentleness.
“No.” AJ stated it flatly. He didn’t want anyone in his house. He needed the familiar smells, the controlled lighting, and the predictable hum of his own machinery. The very idea of their unpredictable footsteps on his floors made his spine itch.
A tense silence fell. His mother’s mouth pinched at the corners, and Dr. Sterling’s eyebrows inched together, but neither seemed surprised by the rebuff.
