Chapter 6 - MIA’S SIDE OF THE STREET
Emma met Mia at the public library that afternoon.
They sat at a corner table in the teen section between a shelf of fantasy paperbacks and a sad plastic ficus tree. Emma slid the clipping across to her.
Mia read it, frowned, then looked up. “My dad never told me this happened.”
“He probably wouldn’t.”
Mia kept reading. “Young witness? Was that your mom?”
Emma nodded.
Mia stared at the page so long Emma could almost hear her thoughts shifting.
“My dad always says people lie when they can’t get what they want,” Mia said quietly. “He says women especially like to ‘rewrite history.’”
Emma felt anger flash through her. “That sounds like him protecting himself.”
“Maybe.” Mia’s jaw tightened. “Or maybe I don’t know him as well as I think.”
For a while neither of them spoke.
Then Mia said, “There are cameras everywhere in our house.”
Emma looked up.
“Not just the normal ones. My dad added indoor ones after my mom left. He says it’s for safety, but he checks them constantly.” Mia twisted the silver ring on her finger. “He also hates closed doors. He says secrets turn people stupid.”
Emma thought about the way Adrian must have watched Laura years ago, before apps and smart homes gave people new ways to control other people.
“What happened when your mom left?” Emma asked.
Mia hesitated. “She said my dad needed help and he refused to get it. That’s all she told me. She cried when she moved out, but she still left me there because of school and because…” Her voice thinned. “Because he isn’t violent. He’s just… intense. That’s what everybody says.”
Just.
Emma hated that word.
They made a plan without really meaning to. Mia would look through the home office and see if there was anything old—letters, files, anything with Laura’s name. Emma would keep pressing her mother for the full truth.
Before they left, Mia caught Emma’s wrist. “If your mom was telling the truth,” she said, “I need to know.”
Emma nodded.
But as she walked home, another thought gnawed at her.
If Laura had spent three years watching a digital circle around Hawthorn Court, what had that surveillance done to her? To them?
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And if Adrian had always needed to know where people were, then maybe this wasn’t only a story about the past.
Maybe he had never stopped.
