Page 73 of Ugly Beautiful Scars

SEAN

SILENCE HAS A WEIGHT.

It settles across my shoulders like a jacket made of lead. The apartment's emptiness pulses around me. Regrets multiplying in the stillness. Each creak of the pipes, every distant horn from traffic, is just a punctuation mark in a conversation I'm having with my failures.

I'm getting too familiar with these noises. The way the refrigerator stutters before its cooling cycle, like it's struggling to find words. That spot near the bathroom that groans when stepped on. Voices and laughter from a TV that highlight how fucking alone I am in this room. The ebb and flow of the building settling into night reminds me of how some things, like guilt, only get heavier in darkness.

My eyes dart around the security feeds of Londyn's place like I'm searching for something to fix. Her living room. Her windows. The hallway. All secure. All quiet. All impossibly distant now that she's pulled away after I pushed too much in the kitchen.

Mike went to bed about an hour ago. He was exhausted from another day of fruitless surveillance. He'll be up at 2:00 AM to relieve me, and then I'll crash for a few hours before we do it all again tomorrow. The routine has become its own kind of cage.

My phone vibrates, so I check it and find a new email notification. It's from Torres, my old Marine buddy who went FBI after his discharge:

Sean. Ran your boy Alan Miller through every database I could access. Clean. No criminal record, no flags, no associations with known criminals. Not worth pursuing. Torres

That's… odd. Not worth pursuing? Torres has never responded like that. Also, Torres and I are solid. He usually cracks a joke or tells me I owe him a beer for the effort. This feels too careful, like he's afraid someone is monitoring his communications.

Before I can think on it further, another email appears. The sender is a jumble of random characters and numbers. It's from someone who definitely doesn't want to be traced.

The message is completely blank except for a single attachment that's another string of random letters and numbers. I run it through every virus scanner I have before opening it.

The document loads, and my exhales come rapidly. It's an official police report, dated two years ago, but half the text is blacked out with heavy redaction bars. Through the gaps, I piece together fragments:

RAID CONDUCTED ON PROPERTY BELONGING TO [REDACTED] MILLER [REDACTED]

ADDRESS: [REDACTED] MALIBU, CA [REDACTED]

SEIZED: APPROXIMATELY 15 KG COCAINE, 8 KG HEROIN [REDACTED]

WITNESSES REPORT [REDACTED] HUMAN TRAFFICKING AT [REDACTED]

CHARGES FILED: [REDACTED]

CASE STATUS: DISMISSED - INSUFFICIENT [REDACTED]

My jaw clenches as I read between the redacted lines. Torres risked his career sending me this. The fact that none ofthis showed up in Miller's official record means someone with serious influence made it disappear. Money, connections, corruption—the holy trinity of making problems vanish.

But the Navy Caps still don't fit. If Miller is running drugs and trafficking, why would he be interested in Londyn? She said she never had a drug addiction, and I trust her word. But she did say she got involved with 'bad people.' Even if that's Miller, that doesn't explain exactly why he'd send men to watch her.

Why have these men silently observed her routine for weeks? They could've kidnapped her before I arrived, if that's the end goal.

My gut is telling me this isn't about wanting to kidnap her. So what's the plan? Are they trying to extract money? Blackmail her for something?

The questions multiply without answers, and I hate it. Open loops make my skin crawl. Without proof linking Miller to the surveillance on Londyn, the cops won't touch this. And if Miller is skilled enough to erase a raid from his permanent record, he's probably skilled enough to stay ten steps ahead of any investigation.

I set my phone on the table and glance at the new security feeds Mike and I installed the day we confirmed the Navy Caps exist. The property manager specifically saidnoexterior cameras, but some rules are there to be broken. We found the smallest devices we could and tucked them onto building ledges. One faces thestreet and one covers the alley. If our Navy Cap friends show up again, we'll have them on video this time.

Both feeds show empty pavement under the glow of street lights. Nothing moves except the occasional taxi or late-night pedestrian hurrying home.

It's frustrating as hell, but there's nothing more I can do tonight. My job right now is surveillance, keeping watch while Londyn sleeps.

I try to relax into this hard metal chair as I grab the poetry book Londyn loaned me. I flip to the middle. I've read it cover to cover five times already. This is my sixth, and soon I'll have every poem memorized. My favorite is about stars being the memories of light: beauty that travels across impossible distances only to be seen long after its source is gone. Just like Londyn's smile—rare now, and vanishing so quickly I wonder if I imagined it.

Would she smile if I recited the poem to her? Or would she add another brick to the wall between us?

It's been three days since we confirmed the stalkers, three days since I tried to talk to her about her past, three days since something shifted. I keep replaying that moment in her kitchen: me pressing for answers, her shutting down. The walls came up so fast I could practically hear the clang of steel.

Our conversations since then have been stilted. The easy flow we'd found has dried up, leaving awkward silences. No more beautiful smiles. No book club because she bumped our meetingto next week, saying she was too exhausted from work. Even her glances at the camera have stopped, like she wants to forget I'm watching.

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