Miles Lindgren's Arc

Chapter 1 of 13

The drive into Cutter’s Bend hadn’t changed much. Same two-lane road cutting through white nothing, same handful of buildings clustered together like they were trying to keep each other warm. Miles hadn’t seen any of it in ten years, not since he’d left for college at eighteen and never found a reason to come back. Frost Inn sat where it always had, a plain grey building with a row of doors under a covered walkway, its sign hanging slightly crooked. Chase parked the rental in front of it and killed the engine, and for a second neither of them moved. “You want to do the intro out here or inside?” Chase asked. Businesslike. The way he talked to crew, to sources, to anyone who wasn’t Miles. “Out here’s fine.” Miles reached into the back for the case file — the same manila folder he’d carried through four apartments and never once shown Chase, until Chase found it himself three years into their relationship and did something with it Miles had never forgiven him for. He held it against his chest like it might slip if he didn’t. They set up the tripod on the packed snow. Chase checked the framing, adjusted the angle twice, said “good” mostly to himself. “Rolling in three,” he said. “Two. One.” Something in Miles physically changed. His shoulders dropped, his mouth softened, and by the time the red light blinked on he was already grinning like the last ten minutes hadn’t happened. “So this is it,” Miles said to the camera, gesturing behind him. “Cutter’s Bend. Population not many. I grew up about four blocks from here.” Chase stepped into frame beside him, close, easy, his hand finding the small of Miles’s back like it belonged there. “Miles has been dodging questions about this place for five years,” Chase said, warm, teasing, playing to the lens. “Every time a fan asked where he grew up, he’d change the subject.” “I did not dodge,” Miles said, laughing, leaning into Chase’s side. “I was being mysterious. It’s different.” “Sure, husband,” Chase said, and the audience — the imagined one, the real one who’d see this in a few weeks — would eat it up, because they always did. “We’re not married, Chase.” “Yet.” Chase winked. “I’m ready whenever you are, Baby.” They ran it twice more, tightening the wording, and every single time Chase’s hand went back to that same spot on Miles’s back like it had memorized where to land, and every single time Miles let it, leaned into it, made it look like the easiest thing in the world. Then Chase said “got it, we’re good,” and his hand dropped, and the two of them stood there in the snow not looking at each other while the camera light blinked off. Neither of them spoke while they hauled the equipment inside. The room had two beds. Chase set his bag on the one nearest the window, the way he always had on every shoot for the last two years, and Miles took the other without either of them discussing it, because they’d done this enough times now that it didn’t need discussing anymore. What was harder was everything else — the six weeks of it, the fact that this town was the reason they weren’t discussing anything else anymore. “I’ll take the desk for editing,” Chase said, already unzipping his bag. “Fine,” Miles said. He set the case file down on his bed and stood over it for a second too long, still in his coat. “You okay?” Chase asked. Quiet. Careful. It was the only time his voice did that anymore — not on camera, not with witnesses, not with anyone but Miles, and even then only when no one else could hear it. “I’m fine.” “Miles.” “I said I’m fine, Chase.” Sharper than he meant it, and he heard Chase go quiet behind him the way he always did now, absorbing it instead of pushing back, which somehow made it worse than if he’d pushed back at all. Miles opened the folder. Twelve years lived in there. Newspaper clippings gone soft and yellow, police reports he’d paid a records clerk to copy when he was twenty, a timeline he’d rewritten so many times the pages had started to separate from the legal pad’s spiral binding. He’d been sixteen the night Dani disappeared. They’d argued about something that had felt enormous at the time — he genuinely couldn’t remember what anymore, only that it had felt like the end of the world — and she’d stormed off, and he was supposed to meet her later to fix it, and he hadn’t gone. Not because he didn’t want to. Because he’d been angry, and stubborn, and sixteen, and he’d assumed there would be another chance. There hadn’t been. She was never found. A page slid loose from the stack and landed face-up on the bedspread. Her flyer. MISSING — DANIELLE SORBO, the block letters exactly as he remembered them, the paper gone thin and soft at the corners from years of his own hands. Behind him, he heard Chase stop moving. “Is that—” Chase started. “Don’t.” “I wasn’t going to ask anything. I was going to say I remember when you showed me that. First time. You didn’t tell me what it was for a week.” Miles turned around. Chase was sitting on the edge of his own bed now, hands loose between his knees, watching him with an expression Miles hadn’t seen aimed at him in two years — not guarded, not careful, just open, the way he used to look at Miles before all of this. “You remember that,” Miles said. It wasn’t a question. “I remember everything,” Chase said. “That’s kind of the problem.” Miles didn’t have an answer for that. He slid the flyer back between the pages and closed the folder and set it on the nightstand, and neither of them said anything else, and outside the window the light was already starting to go grey and early, the way it did here in winter, the way Miles remembered it doing for eighteen years before he’d left. “Camera’s up at seven,” Chase said finally, standing, businesslike again, like the last thirty seconds hadn’t happened. “I’ll take first shower.” “Fine,” Miles said, and watched him go, and thought — not for the first time since they’d landed — that six weeks was going to feel like a very long time.