Jonathan's presence considerably worsened things. Elena didn't seem to regret the added weight—perhaps she'd been drowning too much to feel a difference—but Tomás did. In the days that followed Eddie's father's unexpected and unwelcome arrival, the atmosphere in the Flores house tightened; what now hung in the rooms, in the hallway and at the doors and windows were discomfort and anxiety unlinked to Eddie's disappearance, and though it took Tomás a moment to figure out what exactly it was about Jonathan that caused the imbalance, he realized at length that it was his mother's animosity toward the man. The teen had never known much about his little brother's sperm donor, seen him only a couple of times back before Eddie had been born and heard only the snippets of meaningless information his mother had shared with him. But the way Elena now moved about her own house like a caged animal, the way she held back her utterly appropriate grief in front of Jonathan, the way she reserved herself even when speaking with her elder boy—well, Tomás recognized the change, and he deeply resented her for allowing this veritable stranger to disrupt their lives.

Here they were, the wound of Eduardo's absence raw as ever, and along came an unwanted remnant of the past to push Elena further into a downward spiral. That was how Tomás saw it, anyway, and for someone used to being the eldest male presence in the house all of his life, the teen resented Jonathan on that level, too.

Elena's first and most egregious mistake had been in letting her former lover stay with them. She should've told him to get a room somewhere. Tomás had tried arguing as much, but his mother had been adamant. At least, though, she'd insisted their houseguest sleep on the couch; he'd asked to take Eddie's room, but Elena had drawn a hard line at that. Still, the easy dynamic Tomás enjoyed with his mother (a dynamic that'd definitely been tested as of late) was gone. Jonathan slept late and light, so the boy had to be quiet preparing for school. Jonathan needed to shower and use the restroom, so the boy had to sacrifice time and comfort to share with him. Jonathan had nowhere to go and nothing to do, so the boy found himself in the man's presence every moment he was at home. The several days they'd spent within the same walls had been nothing but tedious, and yet Tomás's mother went about trying to ignore that this person had constrained their already terrible environment.

In order to avoid Jonathan, Tomás kept to his bedroom when he wasn't at school. He hated to leave his mother alone so much, but Elena had given him no choice. Her older son was beginning to perceive he was more a burden than a boon in their stifled atmosphere. He knew Jonathan didn't like him, and he didn't like Jonathan. The silent, evasive tension between the two of them had begun to balloon. Tomás no longer felt comfortable in his own home.

The one bright spot in his life at the moment was Maggie.

Prior to Eddie's disappearance, Tomás had found the young woman on various socials; he'd been watching her public feeds for some time. He appreciated people who kept their posts and reels public, especially people like Maggie, who had no shame posing smilingly in all manner of revealing clothing. She was stunning, with her thick curls of chestnut hair, her impeccable trendiness, and that mouth that curved ever so slightly up at one end, as if she held a perpetual joke at the corner of her lips. He wanted to kiss those lips, to feel her with his hands. Being with her when they'd found that dead sheep had only inflamed his desire, once the adrenaline rush of that afternoon had receded into his thoughts. Tomás wasn't entirely proud of his fixation on the woman, only because he knew his attention should be on his family's suffering, and yet the mind was a stubborn thing, finding ways to occupy itself in even the most stringent of situations.

He and Maggie had been casually messaging since he'd shown up at her house in the rain unannounced and with no clear vision of what he was supposed to do. He'd been in a terrible state, crawling out of his skin with frustration and impotence. And to pique his nerves even more he'd been coming down off the harrowing experience of believing he'd hit some phantom child on the road. Even now, the memory of that shimmer of white, that fleeting skull-of-a-face in the mist . . . but of course, he hadn't actually seen anything at all.

"Can we talk?"

Tomás looked up from his phone, pulled from his scrolling. He was seated at the kitchen table, and Jonathan stood over him, casting his unwelcome shadow. It was Saturday, just over two weeks since Eddie's disappearance, and Tomás was in no mood to chat with anyone at all, let alone this stranger. But he didn't want to outright refuse Jonathan's request and could only hope his silence and expression were dissuasive enough.

They weren't.

"Your mother is sleeping."

No shit, the boy wanted to say. Instead he offered a raise of his eyebrows. He'd been perfectly content eating his breakfast, thinking of Maggie and the conversation they'd had late into the night before.

"A little early for Chinese, you think?"

Tomás lifted his face to look at Jonathan, took in the utter Whiteness of the man, from his ill-managed facial hair to his unnecessarily logoed athletic wear. What his mother had ever seen in him was beyond her son's capacity to comprehend. Admittedly, though, Jonathan was in impressive shape for a man in his mid-fifties, and his full head of hair had retained its dark sheen, the strands of gray noticeable only upon close inspection. "Food is food."

"It smells."

Jonathan's tone was matter-of-fact, not sneering, and yet the comment sat ill with Tomás, who said nothing in reply.

Interpreting the boy's silence as consent, Jonathan pulled out a chair and joined him at the table. "I know you're wondering why I'm here, after all these years."

"I thought it was because you care about Eddie."

One of Jonathan's eyes pinched a bit, just at the corner above his cheekbone. His shoulders rose slightly as he studied the boy, who looked up from his fried rice as innocently as a lamb. After a moment of thought, the man sat back in his chair "You know, my family was from here. My grandparents."

Tomás showed only mild surprise. "Okay. So?"

"Why did your mother move you here?"

"You'd have to ask her."

"I did."

"And . . . ?"

"She wouldn't exactly say."

Shrugging, Tomás scooped another bite of rice into his mouth, spoke through the chew. "Well there's your answer, then."

"Look," Jonathan shifted his tone, keeping his left arm loose on his lap but placing the closed fist of his right on the tabletop, "I know you don't want me here, and I don't blame you for it. You don't know me. I've never been in your lives; I don't even want to be in your life."

"And I don't want you in it."

The screen of Tomás's cell lit up, a bright rectangle in the dim kitchen. He could see the message was from Maggie, and a thrill moved through him, but he didn't want to read it until he was alone again. Why couldn't Jonathan just go away?

"That's entirely reasonable. I'm not here to change things with you and your mother. I only want to understand what's happened with Eduardo."

Unpredictably, Tomás slapped both hands flat on the tabletop, causing his bowl to shake and resettle. "What happened is he's gone, that's what. And nobody knows where. But that shouldn't matter much because he was invisible to you, anyway! So you don't need to be here, all right? You're only making things worse for my mother." He caught himself before he said too much, swallowed hard and pulled back the heat flushing his face.

Jonathan held his composure as if he'd expected an eventual outburst. "Let's put aside our dislike of one another for just a minute, all right? I want to talk about my son."

His son? Some kernel within Tomás vibrated darkly. "There's no information. Nothing. You can't help."

"I told you I'm not exactly a stranger, here. When I was a kid, I visited from time to time. My own family moved before I was born because they understood that there's something wrong with this place. Surette. This town. They call it the grisgris or little curse, like it's some light thing, but it's not. It's much more serious than that. It's why I'm curious to know the reason your mother chose to move here, of all places. If I'd known before you all moved, I would've tried to stop her, but—"

"You literally ghosted her and Eddie for ten years."

"I—" Jonathan faltered. He licked his lips, considered his words. "Is that what your mother told you?"

Tomás met his eye.

Disinclined to elaborate on his question, Jonathan shook his head. "What I really need to tell you is something I don't think your mother is in a place to hear, all right? It's why I'm saying it to you, instead."

In spite of his frustration with the man, Tomás's curiosity was roused. He loathed the person before him, was tired of having to tiptoe about to avoid disturbing him, of having to watch his mother guard her words and feelings, of pretending Jonathan in any way cared about them. It was some perverse form of playing house, and no matter how easily Jonathan might have convinced Elena of his good intentions, Tomás was not so quickly swayed. Nevertheless, he was all ears.

All seriousness, Jonathan admitted, "This isn't the first time a child has gone missing from Surette."

Tomás digested those words.

"There was a child just about twenty years ago, a little girl, and then there were two children about twenty years before that. Twins—they were twins. A boy and a girl. All about Eddie's age. And if you look back even further, you'll find it's a pattern. Nearly every twenty or so years, a child goes missing from Surette."

"Were they ever—"

"Found?"

Tomás nodded eagerly.

Jonathan frowned in earnest. "No. I'm afraid not."

"None of them? Not even one?"

"Not as far back as I can tell."

For a moment, Tomás sat with this new information. Jonathan wouldn't likely be lying, not about this. What reason would he have to lie? And yet if Eddie's disappearance wasn't a tragic one-off crime but part of some pattern . . .

He snapped up his chin, leaned over the table. "But if this is something that's happened before, wouldn't people be looking out for it? I mean, the police? If this happens every twenty years—"

"You'd think they'd care," Jonathan agreed before the boy could finish his thought. He sighed deeply. "I don't know. I don't know folks here, not really, and so I don't know what they're thinking. But like I told you, it's why I wanted to know the reason your mother moved here."

Tomás rubbed his face with his hands. Whatever acrimony he'd felt toward Jonathan hadn't vanished, but it'd waned for the sake of information. "I don't know, really. She said she dreamt about it. She has these feelings, sometimes."

"About a girl with an axe?"

"What?" That was so oddly specific. Tomás scrunched his face. "No, no. I mean, I don't know, but—" He sucked in a breath.

Jonathan recognized the excitement in that strangled gasp, and his mild disappointment turned to agitation. "What? What is it?"

"Shit," Tomás muttered to himself. "Shit! A girl with an axe? In a white dress?"

"Yes!"

The boy was rocking a bit in his chair. "It's what Eddie dreamed about, the night before he . . ."

"Before he disappeared."

Rather than add to that, Tomás could only nod. He held eye contact with the man for several seconds, then turned away and descended into thought. "What does it mean?" he asked himself more than Jonathan. "Does it mean anything at all? Can it help us find Eddie?"

Rising from the table, the man indicated his exit. "I don't know," he said. "I have no idea what happened when the others went missing except that I was told their whole families fell apart. It's another reason I came."

Tomás looked up from his swirling thoughts. "What?"

"Another reason I came. Maybe the real one, actually. Eddie might be gone, but hopefully you and your mother can get out of here before anything else happens. I didn't want to scare Elena. So maybe you can convince her." With those ominous words, Jonathan headed down the hall to the bathroom, where he shut the doorin and started the shower.

Left to himself, Tomás ran circles through the bits of new information the man had given him. He had no reason to trust Jonathan, who out of nowhere had shown up and was now apparently concerned for them. That alone made little sense, but if what he said was true—if Eddie's disappearance was no kind of surprise to a town that'd come to expect the same every two decades—then what kind of help could he hope for from law enforcement? If this were the work of some child predator or serial killer or sex trafficker, how old would that person have to be by now? Or how organized the group? Was it even possible for any person or people to keep at it over all the years Jonathan had implied? Someone somewhere knew more than they were letting on. Maybe Tomás needed to find a resident of Surette who'd been there a long time, someone who could give him a bit of understanding about these missing kids. Time might have run out for those other children, but it hadn't been too long, yet, for Eduardo. Maybe there was hope.

Tomás's phone buzzed against the table, startling him. He'd forgotten Maggie had messaged him. Grabbing his cell, he swiped open the messages.

You up? was what the first had said.

He'd not answered; Jonathan's presence had prevented that.

I have something to tell you. That was the new message.

Something to tell him? His thoughts of Eddie dimmed ever so slightly as he thought of Maggie, her coils of shimmering hair, those dimples when she smiled (he'd only seen those at school, when she'd talked to students, and in her photos), her curves . . . she hadn't cared that he was five years younger. Hadn't cared at all, not in the messaging anyway. And, well, ok—Tomás knew there wasn't anything explicit or even close to explicit happening yet . . . but that didn't mean it wouldn't! Since that weird incident at the St. James house, they'd been DM'ing. Cordial, friendly, basic stuff. A little flirty, maybe? Tomás thought he read a hint of sex in her messages. He was hoping to get them to go further.

What? he returned.

The moments of waiting, watching those coming and going ellipses, were tense. What was it she had to say? She wanted to stop talking to him? (No!) She wanted him in some way more than just messaging? (Yes!) He wanted to punch himself when he realized his thoughts. How selfish he was! He needed to think about Eddie, about everything Jonathan had told him. Fortunately for Tomás's conscience, Maggie's reply was anything but sexy. In fact, it altogether confused him:

This might sound weird, but I think you need to meet my sister.