Page 108 of Kill Your Darlings

“Maybe he worked Dispatch,” Finn drawled.“With that personality, he’d be a natural.”

Christopher snorted.

“He does have a very weird accent,” Adrien remarked.

“His bio says Outer Hebrides.”That was Kyle.

“Outer space maybe.”

“That’s right.Your mother’s English?”

“He’s got the weirdest, coldest eyes,” Christopher commented.

“They’re contacts,” I said.“Opaque color contacts.”

It was like listening to them underwater.I could hear their faraway muffled voices, but the words no longer mattered.

“Excuse me.”I rose.

Finn reached me as I picked my way through the ottomans and side tables.He handed me a drink.“Okay?”

I took the drink, knocked it back in a gulp, and handed him the glass.“I’ll be right back.”

“What do you mean, you’ll be right back?”

I opened the suite door as Finn called, “Keir?”

I stepped into the hall, letting the door close heavily behind me.

Shock is not a plan.

I didn’t have a plan.

I was moving with purpose, but the purpose was simply to get to that door, to knock on that door, to look him in the eyes.

I had no thought beyond that.

I knocked on the door of the Cannery Row Suite.Knocked again.

The floor creaked and I knew he was standing on the other side of the door, eyeing me through the peephole.

I stared stonily back at the at the small glass eye.

The deadbolt clanked, the lock clicked, the door opened, and I saw him as he really was.

A few months older than me, medium height, thicker than he’d been as a boy.That beard.It should have been my first clue: thick and carefully groomed in that trying-too-hard hipster style that suggestedI Know Exactly Who I Amwhile obliterating recognizable features.His hair had thinned a bit, that was real enough.His eyes were the giveaway, though they had not given him away at first.

It wasn’t just contextual blindness.He’d changed a lot.Just as I had.He probably wouldn’t have known me, either, if we’d happened to bump into each other on the streets of Manhattan.

I stared into his too bright, too blue eyes.

“How could you do it?”I asked.“How could you do that to me?”

Milo let out a pained sigh, scrunched up his face in an expression that, despite the beard and the lines, was unexpectedly familiar.

“I knew it.I knew you were going to figure it out.I could feel you starting to analyze in the elevator yesterday.”

Had it only been yesterday?