Chapter 144: 144. I Was Back Home Just To Hear The Wife And The Husband Debating

Mike said nothing, because nothing was the right response to that.

Jay was quiet for a moment. He was looking at the pavement, which meant he was thinking rather than performing, and Mike let him.

A car passed at the end of the lane, its headlights sweeping briefly across them, and then the street was quiet again.

"What did you tell her?" Jay said. "About Tyler..."

"What exactly...?"

"I tell her enough," Mike said.

"The six weeks. The avoidance routes. The reason he didn’t report it." He paused. "She needed to grasp the complete picture, not just the footage."

"The footage alone is shocking, but it doesn’t convey the impact of six weeks on a person’s daily life; she needed to understand the full cost it had on him."

Jay was quiet for long enough that Mike genuinely wasn’t sure what was going to come out of it.

"She cried," Jay stated, his tone flat, as if he had made a definitive observation. "Didn’t she?"

Mike looked at him.

"Briefly," he said. "She didn’t let it go on."

"She pulled herself together quickly." He expressed it directly, without softening or sharpening his words. "She’s not someone who performs her feelings."

"What she had was real, and it was short, and then she dealt with it."

"She doesn’t cry easily," Jay said.

"I know."

"So the fact that she did," he paused, then began again. "I caused that."

Mike did not agree or disagree with the statement, because it was not a thing that required his participation. Jay was doing the work that the evening had been designed to start, and the work was his to do.

"You have no right," Jay said, and this time the anger behind it was quieter and more honest than the earlier version.

It was not the defensive anger of someone whose territory had been invaded, but rather something smaller and more genuine. "You’ve known me for two days."

"I’ve known Tyler for four," Mike said. "I’ve known your mother for a couple of hours."

"The length of time isn’t the thing that determines whether it matters."

Jay looked at him. "You’re not a normal person."

"No," Mike said. "I’m not."

"What do you actually want from all of this?" Jay said it without particular hostility.

It was a genuine question, one that arises when someone has ceased their strategic thinking and simply wishes to grasp the reality in front of them. "Forget about Tyler and the footage."

"What is it that you’re truly trying to achieve here?"

Mike looked at him for a moment.

"I want things to work," he said. "Arrangements, situations, people."

"I find disorder to be inefficient, and I view cruelty as wasteful."

"When I have the opportunity to address either of those issues, I usually take action."

He paused. "That’s the full answer."

Jay looked at him for a long moment, exhibiting the specific quality of someone who is deciding whether to believe something and finding it more believable than expected.

"My mom is," he said and then stopped.

"She’s a good person," Mike said. And he meant it, which was the disarming part. "She handled it well."

"Better than most people would."

Something in Jay’s posture changed at this marginally, the way a door shifts slightly when the latch has been moved but not yet opened.

"Jay said, ’She’s always handled things well,’ in a flat tone that people use when stating truths that are also slightly painful."

"I know," Mike said.

They stood in the sodium-orange quiet of Morrison Close for a moment, two people in a street that had not expected either of them that evening, and then Mike adjusted the collar of his jacket and said, "Get home."

"She left the light on."

He started walking.

"Hawk," Jay said from behind him.

Mike glanced back.

Jay was standing in the middle of the lane with his bag over his shoulder, and his expression was doing something that was not exactly gratitude but was in the neighborhood of it, occupying the territory just before gratitude that is harder to name and usually more genuine.

He didn’t say anything further. He didn’t need to.

Mike raised a hand in a loose wave and kept walking.

’What an easy guy to trick...’

’I was expecting something, but I certainly didn’t intend to kill that guy. I still need his mother’s desire to grow until it reaches the maximum bond.’

’But for now... he’ll know that her mother is slowly going to be my bitch, hahaha~!’

...

The Schneider building was lit the way it usually was at this hour: the entry light on, the second-floor hallway dim, and the particular configuration of illuminated and dark windows that told the story of who was in and who wasn’t.

Gerald’s casino nights were Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Tonight was Friday, which meant he was home. Mike had noted this fact some time ago and had arranged his schedule accordingly. It was simply a variable in the building’s rhythm, like the pipe at two AM or Unit 4’s relationship with the laundry agreement.

He came through the entry door, passed the notice board, and started up the stairs.

He was halfway between the first and second floors when he heard them.

The walls in Schneider Apartments were thin in the typical manner of older residential buildings—not so thin that every word could be overheard but thin enough to carry conversations that had developed a certain intensity. What he heard possessed that quality.

Two voices operated at a frequency where each sentence felt like a response to something anticipated rather than something actually spoken.

He stopped on the stairs.

"Gerald, I looked at the account this morning."

Petricia’s voice was not loud. She had the control of someone who had made the decision not to raise her voice before the conversation began and was maintaining it.

"I know what you’re going to say." Gerald’s voice was lower and already in the shape of a defense.

"Do you? Then we can skip the part where you make me say it."

"It was one time—"

"It wasn’t one time." She paused. "I have the statements."

"I’ve been looking at them for three hours, and it’s not one time."

Silence enveloped the room—a specific kind that arises when someone realizes they have been caught and are weighing their options for escape.

"The amount, Gerald." Her voice was steady and exhausted in the same breath. "That’s almost everything we put aside this quarter."

"I was going to put it back."

"You’ve said that before."

"I mean it this time."

"You meant it before, too."

Another silence settled in. Mike could hear the faint sound of Gerald shifting somewhere in the office, the restless movements of someone who had nowhere better to be.

"It’s not as simple as you make it sound," Gerald said. "You think I want to be doing this?"

"You think this is what I planned?"

"I think you go three nights a week, and you use money that isn’t yours to lose, and you come home, and you don’t say anything about it." Her voice was still controlled, but the flatness of it had changed slightly. "That’s what I know."

"I don’t know what you planned."

"Our money," Gerald said. "It’s our money, Petricia."

"When you spend it on the casino, it’s yours," she said. "When we need it to fix the pipes in unit eleven, it’s ours."

"That’s not fair."

"No. It’s not."

Gerald exhaled, a long, slightly defeated sound. "I’ve been under a lot of pressure."

"You don’t know what it’s like to have nothing that’s just yours."

"Everything in this place revolves around the building itself, its issues, or its needs."

"I go there because it’s the one place where nothing is required of me."

"I understand that," Petricia said, and she said it in a way that confirmed she actually did. "I understand that you need somewhere to go and something that’s yours."

"I’ve never asked you to stop entirely."

"Then what are you asking?"

"I’m asking you to stop lying to me about the amount. And I’m asking you to stop treating the savings account like it’s just a backup plan for nights that didn’t turn out as you expected."

"It was a bad run—"

"Gerald."

Just his name. It was spoken with the weight of a woman who had exhausted the kind of patience that replenishes itself overnight and was now relying on a different kind—the kind that leads to decisive action.

A longer silence.

"You’re angry," Gerald said.

"I told you at the beginning of the conversation that I wasn’t angry," Petricia said. "I’m not angry."

"I’m—" She paused, choosing something. "I’m tired of managing things that keep becoming problems I didn’t create."

"You’re saying I’m a problem."

"I’m saying the account is a problem. And the account is connected to Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and some Sundays when I don’t ask because you go in the afternoon and you’re back before dinner."

"I didn’t know you’d noticed the Sundays."

"I notice everything, Gerald." It wasn’t said with accusation—it was just a statement of fact. "That’s how this building stays standing."

Another pause. The defensive energy in Gerald’s voice shifted to something quieter, which was more honest and also harder to argue with.

"I don’t know how to stop," he said, and the admission landed differently from everything else he’d said. It was smaller and more real. "I’ve tried."

"It’s not—it’s not about the money. Or it’s not only about the money."

"I go there because when I’m there, I feel like something could still happen, like things could still change."

"What would you want to change?" Petricia asked.