“I promise. I’m being very safe. And I’ve met a lot of people who are extremely nice and doing so much to keep me safe and help us end this. And I met… Tavish, who is… really wonderful and you’ll really like him.” Ellis looks a bit flustered about this, but when he notices me looking at him, he immediately smiles.
“Is that who I’m talking to?”
“It is. He’s like… super nice. And he’s done so much for me. And risked… uh… things… for me?”
His mom hesitates at that. “Were you going to say ‘risked his life’? Because if there is any life risking going on, I’m going to personally break out of here and find your ass, Ellis. Where the hell are you? You’re never getting any Christmas presents ever again. And don’t even think about getting home-cooked meals again. Orlove. I will withhold all the love.”
Ellis is laughing now, and I find it ridiculously sweet. “No! Don’t withhold the love.”
“I’m going to have to if you keep doing this nonsense.”
“I’m not! I promise,” Ellis says.
“Well… maybe I’ll invite you and this Tavish for dinner when this is all over. Or maybe I won’t. Depends on how mad at you I still am.”
“You know you can’t ever stay mad at me for long.”
“That’s because you’re the strangest, most well-behaved child. You never did a single thing to even make me mad. You were eerily good. And then we have Sienna… she found every way to get into everything when she was a teenager.”
“Make sure you let her know I’m the favorite.”
“Ellis!”
“Make sure to tell her.”
“You know I don’t like lying to your sister,” she says, which makes him laugh and makes me realize that I kind of want to meet her. I’ve never wanted to meet any family member of anyone I’ve ever come across before. “I love you so much, Ellis. You can’t even fathom how much I love you. So please… please be careful.”
“I promise.”
She seems choked up as she tells him she loves him again and the call ends.
“Your mom is suspiciously nice,” I inform him.
He’d looked pretty close to tears until I said that and now he’s back to all smiles. “Suspiciously?”
“Very much.”
Ellis laughs as he sets the phone down. “She’s not suspicious. You guys need to work on what you think is suspicious.”
My phone beeps, and I glance down at it as I realize that during the conversation, I must have missed a message from Leland.
Leland: Will you two check this apartment out? Cassel found the address in Nate Stewart’s recent GPS locations. It’s the only place he’s gone to recently that didn’t match up with anything I looked through.
Tavish: Yeah, you think something’s going on there?
Leland: I wonder if maybe it’s where his dad is staying.
After relaying this to Ellis, I say, “While we wander off to check out this apartment, how about you tell me all about how you were the perfect child. Never even got in trouble?”
“No! I got grounded once! I forgot to pick up some stuff my mom asked me to clean up because I waswaytoo invested in this video game. She grounded me until I cleaned things up. Like I literally just had to clean it up and I was ungrounded, and I bawled and begged for her forgiveness.”
“How old were you?”
“Too old, Tavish. Far too old.”
I start laughing. “So you weren’t upset you were grounded, you were devastated that you upset her?”
“One hundred percent. I thought my life was ending just because she was ‘disappointed in me.’ I really don’t think she even cared. She was probably embarrassed.”
