Chapter 6 Quiet Hours

Avery's POV

I gave up on sleep at one forty-five and went downstairs to the cottage kitchen, hoping a glass of water would settle whatever was keeping me awake. The house was silent in that heavy way old houses get in the middle of the night, and I moved through the dark without turning on any lights because I didn't want to wake my mother. The cottage had its own small kitchen, but I found myself walking toward the pantry door that connected to the main house instead, and I pushed it open without thinking about why.

Jaxon was already there, sitting at the kitchen island with a bowl of cereal and his phone propped up against a jar of utensils. He looked up when I came in, and for a second neither of us said anything. He had the same careful expression he always wore, but something about the middle of the night made it seem less like armor and more like exhaustion. "Couldn't sleep?" he asked, and I shook my head. He gestured to the stool across from him and went back to his cereal, and I sat down because standing there felt stranger than joining him.

We ate in silence for a while. The kitchen was huge compared to the cottage, all marble counters and professional appliances and windows that looked out onto the dark garden. I could see the fountain from where I sat, and the water caught the moonlight and scattered it across the stone. Jaxon scrolled through something on his phone, and I watched him without meaning to. He moved differently when he thought no one was looking, less guarded and more like someone who was tired of carrying whatever he carried.

"You're still working on that game," he said, and it wasn't a question. I told him I was, and he nodded. "What's wrong with it?" I wasn't sure why I told him the truth, but I did. I told him about the pathfinding algorithm and the crash that kept happening at the final branch and the way I'd re-written the code four times without fixing the problem. He listened without interrupting, which I noticed he only did when something actually mattered to him. "Sometimes you have to walk away from something to solve it," he said. "I hate that that's useful," I said, and he almost smiled.

I opened my laptop on the counter and pulled up the code, and he went back to his phone and watched something with football players running routes. We worked in parallel, each in our own quiet, and I found myself glancing at his screen every few minutes. He was watching game film, pausing and rewinding and making notes on a pad beside his cereal bowl. I noticed he watched the same throw over and over, the ball leaving his hand and falling short of the receiver on what looked like a routine pass.

"That's a bad throw," I said, and he looked up. "It's a consistent bad throw," I said. "I don't know what that means." He said it meant the receiver was open and the throw was short, and I told him that was a physics problem and not a football one. "The trajectory is predictable," I said. "That means there's a mechanical reason." He looked at me for a long moment and then he turned back to his phone and played the film again.

I found the bug at two forty. One misplaced conditional in the pathfinding algorithm, a single line of code that had been breaking everything else. I fixed it and watched the character reach the final branch without crashing, and I sat there staring at the screen because three hours for one line felt like both a victory and a defeat. Jaxon looked up from his film and asked if I'd found it. I told him I had. "Told you," he said. "Walking away works."

At four-thirty there was coffee on the counter and Jaxon was already gone. I hadn't heard him leave, and I hadn't noticed him make the coffee, but there it was in the cracked mug I'd used that first morning. I wrapped my hands around it and stood at the kitchen window and watched the garden come into the first gray light of dawn. My phone buzzed on the counter, and I picked it up to find a new post from the anonymous school account. A photo of me in the main house kitchen, the timestamp matching the time I'd been sitting at the island with Jaxon. The caption read: Getting comfortable, aren't we?

I stared at the photo for a long time. The kitchen had windows that faced the garden, and anyone standing outside could have taken it through the glass. The angle was low, like someone had been crouching in the bushes. I zoomed in on the image and looked for details. The fountain was visible in the corner of the frame. The roses were in the background. Whoever took this had been standing in the exact spot where I'd seen the moonlight on the water.

I put the phone down and walked to the window. The garden was empty, the fountain running, the roses still in bloom. Nothing moved. I stood there for a full minute and then I went back to the counter and took a screenshot of the post and added it to the folder on my laptop. I didn't know who was doing this, but I was going to figure it out. I was going to figure out how they kept getting access to my life.