But something made me reach for it. Some instinct, some pull I couldn't explain.
The notification was simple. Just three words beneath the event header, a status update for all attendees:
Miles Cameron is attending.
I stared at the screen until the letters blurred.
Then I set the phone down, pressed my hand against my chest to lessen the ache blooming fresh within my heart, and wondered what the hell I'd just agreed to walk into.
It's just one night, I told myself.
But even as I thought it, I knew I was lying.
2.Miles
Ihadn't held a pen in three weeks. Not because I didn't need to write anything, I had a legal pad full of notes that needed transcribing, a stack of forms requiring signatures, and an entire life that demanded documentation. I just couldn't trust my own hand not to betray me.
Today, apparently, I decided to test that theory.
"Come on," I muttered, positioning the pen over the yellow legal pad. "It's one word. Just write one word."
The pen trembled. Not dramatically, not yet, but enough. A faint vibration that started in my thumb and rippled outward, turning what should have been a simple downstroke into something that looked like a seismograph reading during a minor earthquake.
I tried anyway. The letter 'A' came out looking like it had been written during a car accident.
"Fantastic," I muttered. "I’m a lawyer who can’t write, what a joke."
The pen slipped from my fingers, clattering against my father's mahogany desk and rolling off the edge onto the floor. I watched it go without reaching for it. What was the point? My hand was already shaking visibly now, agitated by my sluggishattempt at fine motor control, doing its little involuntary dance against the leather blotter.
I stared at it, the hand I used to draft contracts, shake the hands of judges, and hold a woman's face while I kissed her. It looked alien now. Like a faulty machine someone had attached to my body without my permission.
"It’s just stress, one day it’ll be back to normal," I muttered. It was more like wishing, instead of stating it as fact. I knew the truth.
The silence of my parents' house absorbed the lie without comment. It was just empty silence, the kind that seemed to swallow sound whole, leaving only the hum of the refrigerator and the distant, accusing tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway. My father had wound that clock every Sunday morning without fail, a ritual as precise and predictable as everything else in his life. Now it was running down, losing minutes each day, and I couldn't bring myself to touch it.
Three months.
I'd been back in Riverside for three months, and the house looked exactly the same as the day I'd arrived: frozen in time, a museum dedicated to people who were never coming back. The living room had become a cardboard skyline, boxes from the attic and the study and closets I hadn't opened since high school forming towers that cast long shadows in the afternoon light. I'd pulled them all down in a burst of productive energy during my first week there, arranged them in neat rows, and then... stopped. The boxes remained sealed, their contents unknown, their presence silent but constant.
The realtor's email had chirped three weeks ago.
Estate sale,
A good weekend event, with the right staging! But you'll need to sort through the personal items first, Mr. Cameron. Donate, keep, discard. The faster you do it, the faster we can list!
She'd included a smiley face emoji. I'd closed the email without responding.
My phone buzzed on the desk, pulling me from the spiral. I glanced at the screen.
Amanda Chen - Sterling and Steele Law
I considered letting it go to voicemail. I'd been letting most calls go to voicemail lately, a strategy that was working beautifully if "working" meant "avoiding all human contact while slowly losing my mind in my dead parents' house."
But Amanda had covered for me for three months. She deserved better than my avoidance.
I picked up with my left hand, keeping my right pressed flat against my thigh. "Amanda."
"Miles! Oh, thank God, you're alive." Her voice was warm, slightly breathless. She always sounded like she was running between meetings, which she probably was. "I was starting to think you'd been eaten by whatever wildlife lives in small-town Connecticut."
