He looked down. Pulled the sleeve back into place. “Hives. They happen any time I go outside. My nervous system doesn’t distinguish between real threats and perceived ones, so it stages a protest. Hives are the main event. Tremors also like to join the act whenever possible. Nausea is the understudy.”
He obviously wasn’t looking for sympathy.
“Does it happen every time?”
“Every time.”
“The drive to Spokane.”
“Was about what you’d expect.”
I looked at his forearm where the sleeve now covered the welts. Then at his jaw, where the bruise I’d first noticed this morning had deepened and spread, greenish yellow at the edges.
The hives made sense. Agoraphobia could absolutely produce a physical stress response that severe. The body and the brain waging a real, visible war against each other.
The bruises didn’t track at all. A man whose body erupted in welts every time he walked out the door didn’t come home at three in the morning with a bruised jaw. That sort of injury came from contact. From force.
The hives said he was telling the truth. The bruises said there was another truth he was hiding.
He’d told me what he was willing to tell me. I wasn’t going to push.
I could wait.
I changed the subject. “I need to get an inhaler. The one we got at the drugstore was enough to get me through this morning’s event but it’s not what I’ll need long term.”
He visibly relaxed at not being the topic of conversation any longer.
“Unfortunately, I can’t call my pharmacy without flagging where I am. So unless you have a pulmonologist hidden behind one of those locked doors, I have a problem.”
“Maude,” Travis said.
“Already on it.” A brief pause. “Albuterol sulfate, ninety micrograms per actuation, standard rescue inhaler. I’ll have it delivered within thirty-six hours.”
I looked at the ceiling. “How do you know my prescription?”
“Your medical records are in a database that I accessed while you were talking. I also took the liberty of noting your prescription history, your last refill date, and the name of yourprescribing physician, Dr. Lisa Manfredini in Spokane, who has a four-point-two rating on three different review platforms and who I’m sure is a very nice woman.”
I turned to Travis. “Your computer friend accessed my medical records.”
He rolled his eyes. “Friendis a strong word. More like bane of my existence. But yes, Maude has access to certain databases that are better left unexamined.”
“That’s a felony.”
“Several, technically,” Maude said. “If it helps, I also ordered you three sets of clothes in what I estimate to be your size based on available data, basic toiletries, and a phone with a clean SIM that can’t be traced. Everything will arrive through a delivery chain that routes through four intermediary addresses before reaching this compound. No single point in the chain knows the origin or the destination.”
I stood in the corridor of an underground facility in Montana, listening to a computer system calmly describe how it had committed multiple federal crimes on my behalf and was now arranging untraceable deliveries through a logistics network that would impress a cartel.
“Thank you, Maude,” I said, because what else did you say to that?
“You’re welcome. It’s refreshing to have someone in this house who acknowledges when I’ve been helpful. Travis tends to respond to my efforts with silence, ingratitude, or threats to donate me to a household appliance.”
He let out a sigh. “Like I said,friendisn’t the right word.”
Maude was the thing Travis had built to fill the space where a person would go, and he’d given her the ability to notice what someone needed and provide it without being asked, and the fact that she’d turned all of that toward me within hours of my arrival said something.
It said Maude took care of people even if the man who’d built her wouldn’t let anyone take care of him.
The rest of the afternoon passed in the strange limbo of a day that had involved almost dying but was ending in domesticity. Travis gave me a spare laptop from one of his storage rooms, clean and unregistered, and set up a temporary workstation at the kitchen table while he worked on something downstairs.
