Page 91 of What We Become

His knee keeps bouncing.

“One of the dads cleaned everything,” he says. “Him. Me. The room. He washed the blood out of my hair and put me in the back seat of his car while the others figured out what story they were going to tell.”

“What story?”

“My father stole from the wrong people and ran. It wasn’t difficult to sell. He’d made enough enemies that everyone had their own theory about where he went and who put him there.”

“And the body was buried in the backyard under the lavender?”

“I don’t know.” His hand moves to rub at the back of his neck. “I never asked.”

I believe him.

Not because I think he doesn’t know. Because I know what it looks like when Milo has found a locked door inside his own head and decided not to test the handle.

“After that, the dads stopped pretending they still worked for him,” he says. “They protected Gloria before, when they could. Once he was gone, there was no one left to stop them from choosing her properly.”

“That’s how the family started.”

“Blood, crime, and shared administrative burdens.” He gives me a fractured smile. “The traditional foundation of every successful polycule.”

“Did your brother and sister know?”

He shakes his head. “They were both at college by then. They got the same story as everyone else.” His eyes come back to mine. “And then we just stopped talking about him.”

Sixteen. Protecting his mother from a man who beat people to teach rooms full of witnesses how to behave.

I’ve sat across from killers in interview rooms who had less reason and more planning. If the system had worked the way it was supposed to, someone should have stopped his father long before Milo had to. Instead, nobody with a badge came.

“Say something,” Milo says, his voice slow and stripped. “You’re doing the processing face, and it’s making me nervous.”

“You want to know what I hear?”

His jaw tics as he shakes his head.

“I hear a sixteen-year-old kid who watched his father beat his mother bloody and did the only thing that was ever going to stop it.” I keep my voice level. “I’ve read a thousand reports that start exactly like that, Milo. Most of them end with a body anyway. The only difference is whose.”

“That’s a comforting reframing⁠—”

“It’s not a reframing. You know what I am.” I lean in a little to make sure he keeps looking at me. “I’ve put rope around the necks of men like your father. Men the law looked at and left standing because the people they hurt weren’t worth the paperwork. I planned it. I felt nothing but certainty—before, during, after. You did at sixteen what I’ve done as a grown man with training and a team behind me, and you’re sitting here wondering if I’ll flinch?”

His eyes come up. The far-end-of-the-hallway look flickers.

“Stop waiting,” I say. “I’m not going to.”

“You didn’t see me at the warehouse. Fourteen men. I don’t even remember their faces⁠—”

“No, but I saw what was left afterward.” I don’t look away. “I knew exactly what had happened in that warehouse, and I saw what it cost you. That was the moment I knew I was in love with you.”

Milo blinks at me.

“That’s—” He stops. Starts again. “That’s the most unhinged declaration of love I’ve ever received. You can’t say things like that. You can’t just look at the worst thing I’ve ever done, at the literal worst version of me, and go ‘yes, that one, I’ll take that one.’ That’s not how people work, Holden.”

“It’s how I work.”

“Because you’re also broken!”

“Yes.”