Maybe I couldn’t undo what we did. But I could make damn suresomeone elsepaid the price.
Bubba’s message popped up like a fire alarm.
Bubba:
On my way. Fueling up with courage and nachos.
Jake followed it, less poetic, more violent.
Jake:
in the car. bringing a bat. not kidding.
Coop remained radio silent. The absence of his name felt heavy, like someone had cut the music mid-song.
I thumbed back a reply—short, sharp, efficient.
Me:
Be here in twenty. Stay calm-ish.
Then I headed downstairs via the back stairway which would let me out closer to the kitchen.
Jeremy was in the butler’s pantry that opened next to the stairs polishing a pair of shoes the way some people pray—methodical, focused, steady. He looked up when I came into the doorway, set the brush down and gave me that look that usually translated as permission to be immature if I promised not to implode anything valuable.
“They’re coming?” he said.
“Bubba and Jake. Coop’s MIA.” I left it unsaid that Coop had been the one to make the worst of the footage. No need to add gasoline to a campfire that was already a four-alarm.
Jeremy nodded. “Make no sudden decisions or moves. No speeches. No stunts.”
“I’m a professional at stunts,” I said, because reflex.
He didn’t smile. “Then be a professional afterward.”
That got me. He always had a way of taking my sarcasm apart and leaving the parts in a neat little pile for me to sweep up later.
At that moment Muriel—my mother—glided into the foyer like she owned the light. Perfect hair, perfectly cut coat, the kind of shoes that made a statement without shouting. She never made a scene; she was the scene.
“Archibald,” she said, voice like dry champagne—cool, effervescent, a little dangerous if you stirred it too hard. She had a couple of leather cases lined up by the door, and I noticed the way she moved toward them with an effortless economy. Therewere more bags than she ever took for a standard weekend. More than I’d seen since the summer before sophomore year when she left for Milan and came back closer to Christmas than my birthday.
“Where are you going?” I asked the question softer than I meant.
“Business,” she said, slipping a glove on with a single practiced motion. “And I’m waiting on my driver. I told him to be prompt.” She smiled the kind of smile that made everyone else feel like they’d skipped a beat in the choreography. “There’s a dinner in Geneva. Some meetings in Zurich. I may not be back for a few days.”
It was a lot of days. The bags confirmed it.
“And you're leaving now?” I asked, because if I didn’t ask I’d never know whether to plan my own exodus.
“Yes.” She glanced at Jeremy the way someone checks the weather. “Jeremy, the house will be in your excellent hands.”
He inclined his head, deferential, but I could see the tiny shift in his shoulders—acknowledgement that he would also be the first responder when the neighborhood implosion started.
Muriel turned to me then. Up close, her perfume smelled expensive and reassuring. She reached up, gave my cheek a quick, polite kiss—no lingering affection, no maternal softness, more a seal of approval, like she was stamping some formality into place.
“Take care of yourself,” she said, not looking at me in the way a mother does but in the way a well-briefed executive returns a subordinate’s glance. “Phone on. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t,” I said, because the lie would buy me five minutes of internal peace.
