"You two have been in here too long," she says. "He's stable. I'll keep an eye on him. Go eat something. The cafeteria on the second floor has decent coffee, if you don't set your expectations too high."
We both start to protest but Amy looks at both of us with the expression of someone who has had this conversation a thousand times and always wins it.
We go.
The cafeteria is bright in a way the room wasn't, fluorescent, cheerful, aggressively normal. People eating sandwiches. A television on the wall telling the latest news. The coffee is bad but hot and I wrap both hands around the cup because the warmth is grounding.
My mother sits across from me. She eats a few bites of a sandwich. I eat nothing. The coffee is enough.
"I don't understand it," The words come out slowly, like I'm pulling them through something thick. "Dad has always been so careful. His diet. The walking. The annual checkups. He was the healthiest person I knew."
My mother's hands still on the sandwich. She doesn't look up.
"The doctor said it could be stress-related," she adds carefully.
"Stress from what? He's retired. He reads. He gardens. He plays piano at the community center on Thursdays."
She doesn't answer.
"Mom, what aren't you telling me?"
She sets the sandwich down. Wipes her fingers on a napkin, slowly, the deliberate movements of a woman buying time. She folds the napkin. Sets it aside.
"Mom."
"There have been some... incidents." She says the word like she's testing whether it can carry the weight. "At the house."
"What kind of incidents?"
She looks at me, and what I see in her eyes is exhaustion. Deep, structural, the kind that sleep doesn't fix because the thing causing it doesn't stop when you close your eyes.
"Men," she says. "Coming to the house. Calling. Showing up at the door at odd hours." She pauses. Swallows. "Those... sites. The ones from before. They've been updated. With our address."
The cafeteria noise folds away.
I hear her. I process the words.
Daniel.
He couldn't find me. So he changed the target. He updated the profiles with my parents' address.
And men came. Strangers, following the breadcrumbs Daniel left, expecting what was advertised, showing up at the door of a sixty-one-year-old retired music teacher and his wife.
Time and time again. The violation and the slow, grinding stress of it and he didn't tell me because he knew I would blame myself. He had a heart attack because he was protecting me.
The same way I thought I was protecting them with my absence.
Everyone suffering in silence. And the only person who benefits from the silence is Daniel Hargrove, who is free, who is untouched, who is living his life in Los Angeles while the people I love absorb the cost of what he did.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"Because you'd already been through enough." She says it simply.
I feel blinding rage invade me.
But then, and I can’t explain why, something I read on a poster on the Wolf Rescue Center comes to my mind. Wolves fight, bleed and die for their pack. For those who have proven worthy of loyalty.
And with a strange certainty, that I don’t really know where it came from I say, "I'm going to fix this."
