Miles Lindgren's Arc

Chapter 9 of 13

Chapter Nine By the time they got back to Frost Inn, the sky had gone fully dark, streetlights buzzing faint yellow over packed snow. Miles felt wrung out in a way that had nothing to do with the cold, his eyes swollen, his chest still tight from crying harder than he had in years. Chase unlocked the door and flipped on the lamp. Miles sat heavily on the edge of his bed, working his boots off without much energy behind it. "I'll get us something from the diner," Chase said, already reaching for his phone. "Same as always?" "Yeah." Miles looked up briefly. "Thanks." Chase called it in, and while they waited, he moved around the room with quiet purpose, refilling the coffee maker for the morning, checking the thermostat, gathering the case notes into a neater stack on the desk without asking if Miles wanted them touched. A few days ago, maybe even earlier that same day, Miles probably would have said something about it. Tonight he was too tired. The food arrived, and they ate sitting across from each other. The silence between them wasn't entirely comfortable, but it wasn't sharp either, for once. It didn't feel like they were both waiting for the next thing that would hurt. "She used to sit in that same booth at Bertie's," Miles said eventually, the words surprising him even as he said them. "Dani. Bertie mentioned it today, and I kept thinking about it. She always ordered the same thing. Burger, chocolate milkshake, no cherry, and we'd split a plate of fries." Chase tilted his head. "No cherry?" "Absolutely not. She hated them. Said cherries ruined perfectly good desserts by pretending they belonged there." Miles smiled faintly. "She used to steal mine anyway. My cherries, I mean." "You said she hated them." "She did. Claimed I needed to hate them too, for emotional support." Miles picked at a fry, something loosening in his chest. "That was Dani. If she cared about something, she cared all the way. There was no halfway with her." Chase leaned back slightly, listening, and Miles found himself continuing without really deciding to. "She helped with the town fair one year. Wasn't even supposed to be doing anything complicated, just volunteering, but she ended up practically running the money table because she noticed the totals weren't adding up right. Caught it before anyone else even looked twice. She was fifteen and already acting like she was auditing the place." Miles shook his head, something fond in it. "She liked that kind of thing. Everyone else thought it was boring, finding the mistake in a stack of receipts, but Dani loved it. Said numbers told the truth even when people didn't." "That's a good detail," Chase said, already half-reaching for the notepad on the desk. "For the episode, I mean. Gives people something specific to hold onto instead of just a photo and a name." Something in Miles's chest went cold and fast. "That's not why I was telling you that." Chase's hand stilled over the notepad. "I know. Sorry." He set it back down, quiet for a second. "Old habit. I hear something good and my brain goes straight to how it fits the show before it goes anywhere else. I didn't mean it like that." "I know you didn't." Miles exhaled, some of the sharpness draining out of him as fast as it had come, too tired tonight to hold onto it properly. "Just, not tonight. Can we not turn her into content for five minutes." "Yeah. Of course." Chase pushed the notepad further away, an apology in the gesture itself. "Tell me more. Just for us." Miles studied him a moment, then let it go, the moment smaller than it had been but not broken. "The word onward was our thing," he said. "If one of us said it, it meant we dropped whatever conversation we were having. No questions." "Why onward specifically?" "I needed an escape once. Ninth grade. I was trying to avoid talking about a boy I liked, and I panicked." Chase's mouth twitched. "That was your whole escape plan?" "I panicked." "And she just accepted onward as a legitimate exit?" "Unfortunately, yes. Then she waited about six months and brought it up again completely unprompted, just to watch me panic a second time." "That seems fair." "It was not fair." "Sounds fair to me." Miles laughed, surprised by the sound of it, and Chase grinned back, and for a second it was the first real smile Miles had seen from him in longer than he could easily place. Not the tired ones. Not the small ones that showed up out of habit and vanished just as fast. This one reached his eyes. Miles looked back down at his food before he could think too hard about why he'd noticed. "She was the first person I told," he said after a moment. "About the boy. About me." Chase's expression softened. "What'd she say?" "Nothing, really. That was the thing." Miles smiled, small and real. "She just looked at me and said 'okay,' and then asked if I still wanted fries. Didn't make it a whole production. Didn't need me to explain myself." He looked down, the smile settling into something quieter. "I was terrified, going in. Not of her. Never of her. I just didn't know what would happen if it got out, small town like this. But she never once made me feel like I was something she had to accept. I was just me, and that was already fine with her." For a while neither of them said anything. Miles stared up at the ceiling, and Chase watched him, quiet, careful. "Sometimes I wonder what she'd think of me now," Miles said eventually. "Who I turned into. The last twelve years. Some days I feel like I'm not even the same person she knew." "She'd still love you." Chase said it easily, no hesitation in it at all. "You think so?" "Yeah." He was quiet a second. "What's not to love?" The words landed harder than Miles expected, and not because he thought Chase was wrong. Some part of him understood, sitting there in the low lamplight, that Chase hadn't only been talking about Dani. Miles didn't know what to do with that, so he didn't do anything with it at all. "I haven't talked about her like this in a long time," he said instead. "Not the case. Not what happened to her. Just her." "I'm glad you did." They finished eating, and eventually Chase gathered the containers and threw them away, dimming the lamp between their beds without asking. This time, Miles let him. He lay back, staring at the ceiling, letting the memories come without bracing against them for once. Dani's laugh. Dani's stubbornness. Dani stealing cherries she hated because she'd decided he needed to hate them too. Dani sitting beside him on the roof of an old grain silo, talking about impossible futures like they were already waiting for them. He hadn't thought about that place in years. But tonight, for the first time in a long while, the memory didn't only hurt. It reminded him that she had been real. That she had been happy. That before everything else, she had just been Dani. For the first time since they'd arrived in Cutter's Bend, Miles fell asleep without the weight of the case pressing down on him at all.