Some man in a dark room at two in the morning. Subscription paid. Seven months of her schedule memorised. Sitting in the specific aftermath of wanting a girl he's never met, who streams behind a filter because she's smart enough to know the internet is full of exactly these sorts of creeps and thinks the wall she's built is enough.
I run a security firm. I have spent eleven years knowing where people are and what they're doing and how to get to them when it matters. I think about what that knowledge looks like pointed at one man in one room.
I think about how little time it would take.
I think about it quietly, with the particular calm of a man who is not making a threat but stating a fact about himself, and then I sit with the fact that I am that man, in that room, and I don't look away from it.
The stream ends while I'm sitting there.
And I am left in the silence and the thought of what sort of creep that I’m becoming.
3
Billie
My dad makes a pot roast that should honestly be on the cover of magazines. He's been vague about the process for years, the way people get when they know they have one good thing and intend to take it to the grave. Sunday dinners have always been worth showing up for, and the pot roast is a significant part of why.
Even though I have my own place now, I always show up for Sunday dinner. It’s tradition.
I take a serving and pass the dish to my brother Cian without comment.
"You're doing the thing," Cian says.
"I'm eating."
"You're eating and doing the thing. They're not mutually exclusive." He takes a generous portion because he is twenty-four and has never once in his life left food on the table. "The thing where you're somewhere else."
"I'm right here."
"Mm." He lets it go, which is somehow worse than if he'd pushed it.
My dad looks up from where he's standing at the counter, fussing with the gravy. "Leave her alone, Cian." He says this to the gravy, not to either of us.
Declan is sitting across the table from me. He reaches for the bread basket and his forearm crosses my sightline and I develop a sudden, passionate interest in the tablecloth weave. Riveting stuff. Cotton blend, probably. Very sturdy.
"Billie," Cian says, and his voice has that pitch that means he's about to say something I'm going to need a face ready for. "Have you slept this week?"
"I sleep."
"You've said 'I sleep' with that exact defensive energy twice now in the last three Sundays." He points his fork at me with the easy precision of a brother who has been keeping track of my tells since birth. "You only get defensive about sleep when you're not doing it." He means well, but he’s been on my case since I moved out. Big brother energy and all that.
"I've been busy."
"You work from home."
"That doesn't mean—"
“Cian," my dad says from the counter, still not looking, warm and absent in that way parents get when they've had a version of this conversation a hundred times. "Let her be."
Cian considers this and pivots without friction. "Ronan," he says, "did you know that a guy from your old neighborhood back home was on the news last week?"
My dad looks up from the gravy. "Who?"
"Some guy who went into local politics. Don't worry about it. I only brought it up because I figured you'd know his family." He pauses. "Do you know his family?"
My dad says a surname. Cian says yes. My dad makes a sound that is half recognition and half something more complicated. He starts talking about the family, then about the street, then about a pizza place that apparently closed down years ago, and Cian follows the whole thread with the patient attention of someone who wanted to know all of this. I watch my brother and think: that's it. That's what he does. He wanted to know if Dad knew the family, so he found the facts and the angle that would get Dad talking, and he's going to sit there and learn things while everyone thinks the conversation happened by accident.
I have lived with Cian for most of my life and I am still not entirely comfortable with how quietly he operates. If he ever turned that skill on me properly I'd be cooked inside thirty seconds, which is a thought I choose not to dwell on while sitting at this table with my current secret portfolio.
