From the cage, Markie gave another click.
“That’s him agreeing,” I said.
Bobbi saluted him. Mei mouthed her thanks again. They headed down the path together, Bobbi talking, Mei listening with rapt attention.
I closed the door and rested my forehead against it for one second.
Well. That was weird.
Shrugging it off, I went back to unpacking.
Moving had not been about space. It had been about exit velocity. This place gave me distance from my mother, who loved me deeply and wildly and without brakes.
She also took rent money from me with tears in her throat and panic in her tone, then booked an extravagant cruise by splitting the payment across enough credit cards to qualify as performance art.
I had found out by accident. An open confirmation email. A printed itinerary. Something stupid and glossy and impossible to mistake. I’d found it all days after I’d rearranged my own budget to keep her housed.
Even now I could still remember the feeling of looking at it and understanding, all at once, that I had not been helping stabilize a crisis. I had been financing the illusion that there would always be someone there to absorb the consequences for her.
That was the part that broke something. Not just the money, but the assumption that I would panic responsibly while she escaped beautifully.
She had cried when I confronted her. Said I was making her feel disgusting. Said I never wanted her to have one nice thing. Said it was always just us, like that explained why I was supposed to keep handing over pieces of my life every time hers caught fire.
That was when I understood distance was not dramatic. It was necessary.
I set a box on the counter and opened it. Books. Too many. A personal failing that I liked to pretend was a virtue.
I reached for the stepladder.
My ankle twinged.
I ignored it and climbed anyway. One rung. Two. Three.
I lifted the stack and stretched.
My ankle twisted.
The ladder tipped.
The room tilted.
Then everything went dark.
Chapter 7
Liam
My phone rangwhile I was restacking the last of the firewood.
I recognized the number. City area code. Hospital. The kind of call that never comes with good news.
“Liam Beltane,” I said.
There was a pause. Papers shifting. The clacking of a keyboard.
“This is St. Mary’s Medical Center,” the woman said. “You’re listed as the emergency contact for Zoey Yates? It was recently entered into our system by the nurse practitioner Marlene Smith, who has rights here and at her Pine Hollow practice.”
My eyes widened in shock. Iknewshe’d put me down on the form, but that was supposed to be temporary. On-site. Just in case.
