Logan rocks gently under my arm and I move with him, understanding his need for that most basic of comforts: the feeling of being rocked in another’s arms.
I’ve managed to get some food into him, in an attempt to soak up the alcohol in his guts, by the time Austin arrives. But as the EMT shines his phone’s light into Logan’s eyes, I’m worried it’s nowhere near enough.
Logan hasn’t said much since dropping the bombshell about Miranda. He’s barely moved from the couch, sitting up when the food arrived, then slumping back down after we ate. I put the news on for him, but I think he’s been looking at his phone and the life-changing letter still displayed there more than my TV. Although he accepted my comfort and ate what I gave him, I can feel him sinking.
Into silence. Into despair.
I know what it looks like, because I’ve been there more than once.
Austin leaves after reassuring me that Logan’s drunk but not in danger. When the news changes over to a sitcom and I realize Logan hasn’t spoken in over an hour, I call in reinforcements.
Emily arrives without fanfare. A notification on my phone to say she’s outside. A soft knock after I tap the screen to buzz her in. But when I open the door, everything changes. All the gray misery that was wrapping tighter and tighter around Logan flees under the bright flurry that is Emily.
She throws herself across the room in a tumble of dark curls and a pale pink dress. Logan’s breath hitches as he rouses himself from the daze he’s fallen into.
“Baby doll?—”
“Sh, Daddy,” she croons, flipping his phone over so the screen’s face-down and crawling into his lap. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.”
“It’ll never be okay again,” he murmurs, but he lets her draw his head down to her small, soft breasts. He collapses there like a building falling, his spine crumbling, muscles slumping. She curls around him, one hand cradling his head, the other rubbing his back.
I meet her eyes over the top of his head, nod, and withdraw into the loft to give them what privacy I can. It doesn’t stop me from hearing him crying, even when I put in my earbuds and put on some music.
Listening to Logan’s pain sparks a deep fury in me that I thought I’d mostly put away. I’ve had counseling. I’ve done the work so my anger over being neglected as a kid doesn’t consume me. But seeing the wreckage yet another mother’s selfishness has created reignites all that old ugliness.
I pick up my phone and check my message string with Cynnie. Still nothing. Angrily, I type,
I’m coming to see you tomorrow. If you don’t want to see me, tell me now.
As soon as I hit send, I regret it. I’m taking my anger at Logan’s pain out on Cynnie. But I don’t take it back. Yes, I’m displacing, but I’m also angry at Cynnie. Why has she ghosted me? Did I do anything so terrible? And if I did, why doesn’t she just tell me?
When the gray bubbles don’t immediately bounce, I flick over to a search engine and start digging. It doesn’t take me long to find out the basics about Miranda Iris Porter. She has almost no social media presence, maybe because she works for England’s public health care system. My facial recognition program tags her in a few pictures of what look like girls’ days out in trendy London suburbs. I make note of her friends’ names for later digging. Her hospital has a basic bio on their site for her and that gets me the schools she attended. When I start working my way into the student records of her high school, I need more than my phone.
I lift out my earbud cautiously.
It’s quiet downstairs. I steal out of my bedroom and down the stairs, ready to turn back if they still need privacy.
The living room’s dark, but there’s a light on in my kitchen and in its dim glow, I see Logan and Emily twined together on the couch. She’s cradling his head to her breast. He’s clutching her slender body to him like Rose should have held on to Jack if she loved him so damn much. They’re both asleep.
I unfold one of the blankets from my abandoned nest and spread it over them gently. Emily draws up an edge of the blanket and tucks it around Logan’s shoulders. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t even wake up as she does it. I swallow hard against a lump in my throat.
Whatever Logan needs to get custody of his daughter, I’m going to make sure he has it. No matter the cost.
I pad silently into my office and start up my server with its custom cores that I’ll need for a deep hack.
Sometime after the morning commute’s started to buzz on the streets outside but before Emily and Logan wake, I fall asleep in my chair.
I still have several programs running as my eyes drift closed, but I’m happy with what I’ve unearthed so far. Miranda’s family covered up Nicholas’s death, as Logan said. The only public record was a two-line obituary in the local paper saying the baby died after a short illness. But after just a few hours of digging, I’m already finding things to corroborate Logan’s story.
Miranda took a long leave of absence from school when she was sixteen—at a time when British kids are preparing for an important series of exams—and didn’t return for a year. Her transcript includes a couple of strange credits from “Ecole d’anglais,” no address, indicating she passed a class in French. She’d had decent grades before her leave but had been pursuing subjects that I’d consider frivolous: art, dance, and two languages. She dropped those subjects when she returned. She switched into science classes and then went into the pre-med program.
Was the sudden interest in saving lives to atone for letting her baby brother die?
She got a medical degree, graduating without distinction but from a good school in London, and again there was a leave of absence, during her third year. There’s no explanation on her transcript; it’s just marked medical leave. I’m still digging for her full employment records—the centralized British national health service dbase has better information security than Miranda deserves—but I can already see from a hack of the records held on the server at her hospital that she’s had several medical leaves of absence, including one that would have occurred shortly before she met Logan. Is she just injury-prone, or is there something that makes her withdraw from the worldperiodically? I have a list of questions for Logan when he wakes, and that’s at the top of my list.
fourteen
When I wake,it’s to a clatter of pans. I smile before I even open my eyes, knowing it’s Emily in my kitchen.
