When Lysander woke up the next morning, he tried to convince himself that the previous night had been nothing more than an especially realistic nightmare. Unfortunately, the truth slapped him in the face as soon as he opened his bedroom door to find his two new houseguests already awake and arguing. Well, it was less arguing and more good natured sniping and teasing, but either way, Lysander had very little patience for them.

Glaring sleepily at them, he trudged past to the kitchen before remembering he had no food here. While he had been living at the estate, Julia had added his code to their household register so they would have enough food for all of them, so he had nothing to eat at home until he ran to the store after work that day. Groaning, he let Bingley out and collected all the food bowls for his pets so he could at least feed someone.

“Morning, Lysander!” Red offered from the nest of mismatched blankets she had created on his couch. Noah chose to ignore his existence in favor of flipping through the book he had propped on his knees. The bottom two shelves of one of his bookcases were empty and all the books were stacked next to Noah.

“Did you read all those?” Lysander asked, even while knowing the impossibility.

“A couple. You have some stuff I haven’t read yet,” Noah replied, his eyes scanning the pages inhumanly fast. At this rate, he would probably make it through both of Lysander’s bookcases before he even got home from work.

“I have some more boxes of books in the crawl space,” he mentioned with a motion to the tiny hatch in the ceiling above where Noah sat. Although his parents had left him everything they owned, he hadn’t been old enough to truly acquire any of it. A six year old hardly needed a house and furniture, but he had kept all the books from his parent’s library. Avianna had insisted on it, and Lysander had complied. Even after leaving the estate, he had lugged around about six cardboard boxes stuffed with books. He had no room in his single bedroom apartment for them, so they gathered dust in his attic space, but he felt inexplicably better knowing they were there.

At this, Noah looked up from the book at last. “Thank you?” he said, tacking on the question mark in confusion. Lysander also had no idea why he was offering more of his collection, but it felt like the right thing to do knowing Noah would be trapped in his apartment for an indefinable space of time.

“Aww, you guys can get along!” Red piped in cheerily. Lysander’s mood instantly soured once more.

“Ugh, whatever,” Noah mumbled, his eyes already back on the book.

“And what are you going to do while I’m gone?” Lysander asked, genuinely worried that she might arbitrarily decide to blow up his apartment or something. He had no real expectations for this arrangement other than his rapidly declining mental state. As much as he wished he could just stay home from work and begin their job of brainstorming ideas to save the suburbs, he had promised Miria that he would help her while she transitioned to company president and city leader.

“Probably read,” she answered with a shrug. Lysander honestly had no clue if that was something she enjoyed doing or if she was bullshitting him again, but he decided it was probably best to just move past that subject for his own sanity.

Having nothing else to contribute, Lysander wandered back into his bedroom and cleaned himself up for work. Dressing in one of his many sweaters and a pair of work slacks, he bid a nervous farewell to the pair of them. Red waved goodbye with one hand, her other ruffing Bingley’s scruff. His dog would probably get the most out of this with all the attention he would get. Rolling his eyes, he closed the door and walked to the train, every step expecting to hear his apartment exploding behind him.

Arriving at work, he found Miria already in her office, pen in hand, going to town on the paperwork they had left. He also saw that she had had someone move Jude’s old desk into the office instead of leaving it by the elevators where it had been previously.

Seeing him looking at it, Miria said, “Oh! I hope you don’t mind. I thought it would be better if we were in the same room so we could talk about stuff without prying ears.”

“Not at all. This works,” he replied. His new desk had been cleared of all of Jude’s personal belongings ages ago, not long after she had stopped showing up for work, but he still felt like an imposter as he sat in the rolling chair, especially as he remembered his responsibility for her death. Springing back up, he made an excuse to Miria about needing to get his things from his old office and escaped.

Punching the down button, he dreaded the return to that space and hoped he could dredge up some mental fortitude while he collected the few personal things he had kept on his old desk. Walking into his former office, he saw Sam and Blair just getting started for the day, pulling out designs and small talking.

Hearing the door open, they looked up to see him. “Lysander! What are you doing here?” Sam exclaimed, rushing up to him and giving him a hug. She had always been strong for her size, and he felt his ribs protesting as she squeezed him. “I meant to give you that last time, but it didn’t feel right, given the atmosphere.”

“Yeah, thanks for that,” he said awkwardly as she moved away.

Blair kept her distance but gave him a small smile. “I’m sorry again for your loss, Lysander.”

“Ah, yeah, thanks.” He felt like a machine that could only offer clumsy gratitude. “It’s been rough for Miria, especially.”

“Yes, the loss of a parent is difficult,” Blair commented, shooting a glance at Sam.

“It sucks,” Sam said roughly. “If either of you need to talk about it, I’m here. I can relate, after losing my dad.”

Lysander had known only ancillary about Sam’s life, so this came as a bit of a surprise to him. “Oh, I didn’t know, Sam. I’m so sorry!”

She waved a dismissive hand. “It’s been years. But thank you.” Seeming to wish to move past the moment, she changed the subject, “Anyways, like I said before, what are you doing down here?”

“Oh right, yeah, I came to grab my stuff,” he answered while moving to his desk to do just that.

“Ahh, man, I was hoping you’d leave it all so I could yell at your empty chair and pretend you were still there to take out my frustration on,” Sam groused jokingly.

“Yes, you will be missed,” Blair added. They had expressed these same sentiments the day before, but it felt more personal now that they were alone, and he realized he would also miss them.

“Well, I’m only one floor away, if you ever want to come up and chat or whatever,” he said, and he genuinely hoped they would.

“Thank you for the offer. I’m sure we will take you up on it,” Blair responded. It was sometimes difficult to tell if Blair was being honest, but he wanted to believe that she was.

“Cool, well, I gotta run. Miria probably needs me.” As much as he wished he could continue to hide out down here, he couldn’t stay forever.

“Yeah, yeah, Mr. Hotshot’s gotta leave us plebeians behind,” Sam teased, pushing him out of the office.

When he arrived back at Miria's office, he heard her chatting with a vaguely familiar female voice before he pushed the door open. On the other side, he found Tessa Fletcher standing in the middle of the room, her outfit just as bright and garish as the previous one, this time decorated with peacocks. Turning her head at his entrance, her face broke out into a what could only be described as the look his cat’s got whenever they spotted a bird outside--a grin truly inspired by the Cheshire cat if he ever saw one. Miria, of course, couldn’t see it from her vantage point behind her desk, and Lysander’s neck broke out into a cold sweat. These people were out to kill him, he could swear it. His heart would probably just give out from stress soon.

“Lys! Perfect timing! Tessa came to look for you. She said she had to talk to you about Dad’s will?” Miria brightly informed him.

At this, Tessa’s face reworked into her professional visage. “Yes, thank you, Miria! As you know, a majority of Joseph’s assets have passed to Miria, but he did leave you a property he owned in Mapleview.”

The words sent his head spinning. The only property he could imagine Joseph owning in his suburb would be his parents’ house, something he had thought long lost to him when he gave control of it over to the Campbells as a child. He hadn’t known what else to do with the immense amount of stuff he had suddenly acquired as a six year old, and Joseph had assured him that he would take care of everything. Being included in Joseph’s will at all was baffling given what he understood of the situation with Red, but then to learn that Joseph had been keeping his childhood home in reserve for him was a truly tumultuous experience.

Again, the resounding question in his mind was a chorus of ‘how’s’.

How could this same man plot his death?

How could he have been so oblivious to Joseph’s apparent hatred?

How did he even begin to bring together the two pieces of his foster father when they so clearly didn’t seem to fit?

How could he believe Red, even now?

And yet, he did believe her. Too much else had happened that lined up with Red’s version of things for him to disbelieve.

“Oh wow, Lys. I didn’t even know about this,” Miria admitted quietly, mistaking his frozen shock for only half of what it really was.

“I can tell that this is big news to you. Perhaps you’d like me to step out for a moment?” Tessa offered cordially.

“Uh, no, that’s okay, thanks though. I’m just a little surprised, I guess,” he added sheepishly.

“I understand. Well, I do have some paperwork for you to sign before it’s all made official and I can give you the keys to the property.”

He couldn’t imagine what state the house was in now. Had Joseph been keeping up with the upkeep and cleaning or would Lysander be walking into a home in shambles? Did he even want to see it now? Or would it just be another painful memory to place onto the considerable stack in his mind?

“Right, okay, sure.” He walked further into the office and sat heavily into his desk chair. Tessa scurried over and placed her patchwork bag onto the desk before pulling out another binder. She had to be the number one consumer of binders.

After signing and initialling a monumental amount of paperwork that he only gave a cursory once over, Tessa collected it all back in the original binder and tucked it away. “I can run you over to the place now, if you’d like?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t just leave when we have so much work to do,” Lysander said, which was largely an excuse to not have to be alone with Tessa and also partly him not wanting to go see the house at all.

He cut a look at Miria, but she must have misunderstood the desperation on his face because she said quickly, “It’s no problem, Lys! This is important for you. Go ahead with Tessa. This will all still be here tomorrow for us.”

Never before had he cursed Miria so thoroughly as Tessa gave him another of those grins. Resigning himself to his fate, he stood and followed Tessa from the office, bidding Miria a goodbye in the process.

“Do you even want to go to the property? You seemed pretty reticent back there, and I just wanted an excuse to talk to you in private,” Tessa said as soon as they were alone in the elevator.

“We might as well,” he muttered in response.

“Fair enough. Now, I’m not going to pry into whatever you were feeling back there, but I do still have some questions about Red and my brother.”

He considered strongly just telling her that they were both currently squatting at his apartment and forcing them to confront each other just to give them even a speck of the misery they had all placed on his head. The only thing that stopped him was the image of Noah being even more grumpy and horrible than he already was afterward.

“Yeah, I figured,” he said as they stepped out of the elevator and waved at Ben, who was flipping through an outdated magazine in a chair by the door.

“My BP guy hasn’t seen anything of them since the Joseph incident, so I thought they might have dipped back to the countryside to lay low. Do you know anything?”

“Nope.” Monosyllabic answers made it easier to lie successfully, though he was becoming unfortunately quite practiced in the art of subterfuge with everything going on.

She eyed him suspiciously from the corner of her eye. “Look, you have no reason to tell me the truth, I get that, but Noah is my brother. Don’t you think I deserve to know how he’s doing?”

“To be honest with you, I would love nothing more than to dump him into your hands and be done with him, but he didn’t seem too pleased at the idea of seeing you, and I don’t think I could deal with the tantrum he would throw if I ignored those wishes.”

This answer excited her for reasons he could not even begin to fathom. “So he’s still a big ol’ grump? That’s great! I was worried he’d have changed.”

“I don’t think you should be that excited to learn that your twin brother is the scourge of the earth.”

“What you don’t understand is that I haven’t seen him in tenish years, so any news is good news to me.”

“Why doesn’t he want anything to do with you anyways?”

Tessa turned her eyes to the ground, watching as their feet moved across the cement and skipping lightly over the cracks. “It’s a long story, but the short version is that he feels like I betrayed him.”

Suddenly Lysander felt a kinship with Noah that he never wanted to feel again. “And did you betray him?”

Scrunching her nose, she flicked her eyes over to him quickly. “I don’t know. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was a kid, y’know?”

This vulnerability from a virtual stranger settled strangely over him, and he didn’t know the correct way to continue the conversation. “Uh, I mean, we all do some dumb stuff as kids,” he said instead. For all he knew, she could have been solely responsible for the ruination of Noah’s life, but he couldn’t exactly accuse her without anything more solid to go on.

“Ain’t that the truth?” she said before physically shrugging off the weight of the conversation. “Anyways, it was more our mom, so I think he’s being pretty unfair.”

Lysander genuinely had no idea what she was talking about still, so he continued to stumble along through the conversation. “I mean, that sounds like the Noah I know, yeah.”

“Right? He’s so stubborn!” she exclaimed, startling the passerby closest to them in the crowd of people at the station. “Piece of shit brother.”

“For sure, for sure,” he placated, mostly for lack of anything better to say.

“Can you kinda see where I’m coming from now?”

Not even a little bit, he thought to himself but said aloud, “Kinda? I’m still not going to lead you right to him, but I guess we can keep working together like this for now.” If given a choice between Tessa and Noah, he would definitely take Tessa even with all her weird quirks, but he was stuck with the brother if he wanted to make any progress on his deal with Red, which would get the pair out of his home faster.

“I’ll win you over yet,” she affirmed, raising a clenched fist.

“Lord save me,” he mumbled, allowing himself to be carried onto the train by the flow of human traffic.

After a peaceful train ride to Mapleview, Tessa began to lead him past his apartment complex and deeper into the residential district. As they continued further, the scenery became more and more familiar in a nostalgic way, the thin dusty curtain over the memories slowly being opened. He had never had any reason to return here after his parents died--had actually specifically avoided it after moving here--so the juxtaposition of his adult body onto his childhood memories caused a discordance in him especially as they stopped in front a long paved drive with a single cherry tree providing sparse shade to the end nearest the house. His last time standing here had been before the Barrier, and he could see himself being carried inside as a piece of pink chalk cracked and rolled to a stop next to a half finished drawing of a daisy, could feel the sturdy build of his father’s shoulder under his ribs, could hear the remnants of his father’s voice drifting, the exact tone and pitch of it forever lost to him.

“You good?” Tessa called, already halfway up the driveway.

Shaking away the thoughts, he forced his feet to move after her. “Yeah, this is just a lot weirder than I thought it would be.”

“I get that,” she responded, unlocking the door to the side of the garage. The dark green paint on the door looked worse for wear as did the beige siding of the house, like both could use a deep clean, but nothing was crumbling from neglect yet so he counted that as a win. After moving through the garage, which was stacked full of cardboard boxes labeled in permanent marker, they entered the house itself, the wooden staircase on this end ascending above their heads. He had slid down those very stairs more times than he could count, had even taken to removing his socks before attempting them just to avoid another spill. Instinctually, he began to remove his shoes, his mother’s voice calling a reminder, but he shook it off and continued after Tessa as she gestured at things he already knew: the big bay window showcasing the front walkway and the small stone birdbath, the long open plan downstairs where his dad would work on their family computer before retreating to the other end where the family room stood, the leather couches and low pine coffee table covered in big white sheets. Moving through it all, he saw reflections of the life once lived here, moving pictures taking the place of the stale emptiness that now settled over everything. Upstairs, the fancy living room, as child Lysander used to call it, showed signs that someone had recently been there. The white sheet over the long patterned white sofa had been thrown off and shoeprints penetrated the layer of dust on the hardwood floor, stopping just in front of the couch.

“Is someone here?” Lysander asked, glancing around him.

“None of the locks showed any tampering, so I doubt it, but the fact that the house has no scanner would probably make it a target for unregistered squatters.” There had probably been no reason to fit the place with a scanner, seeing as it had been abandoned since before the technology became relevant, but nothing else inside looked disturbed enough to suggest a long term occupation. “Maybe Mr. Campbell came here before?”

He wanted to deny the assertion as soon as she made it, but he couldn’t. The rounded tops and smooth soles of the prints had to be from a men’s business loafer, and he remembered very vaguely Joseph lounging in this very room with a glass of wine as his mother regaled him with some story. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can actually continue this,” he admitted, his stomach back to churning. He wished he could be alone for this, but the last thing he wanted was to continue down the hall to his childhood bedroom or his parents room, the personal living spaces of the family more than likely to cause even more painful memories to unearth.

“Really? Alright then, if you’re sure.” Tessa directed him back out of the house, forgoing the proper front door once more to leave the way they came in through the garage. Locking up behind them, she pressed the keyring into his palm. “Welp, it’s your problem now. Though you’ll obviously have to bring it up to code before you could move in.”

“Right,” he murmured, though privately he knew that he would almost certainly never come back here for any appreciable length of time. Overwhelmed, he sat on the concrete steps that led to the front door from the driveway. “If you’re Noah’s sister, how are you even here in the city working for the Council?” he asked to take his mind off the other things swarming around in there.

“Hmm, well, that goes back to the whole reason why Noah hates me,” she answered, sitting next to him, “Oh, gross, it’s too cold to sit out here in the dirt.” She sprung up and wiped the back of her skirt.

“This is hardly the dirt. It even looks like someone has been weeding around here,” he chastised, glancing at the garden beds that were all still as manicured as they were when he was a child.

“Whatever, it’s cold and I hate it,” she complained. “Have you changed your mind about letting me see my brother yet?”

Glaring at her, he replied, “It’s been like an hour. Come back to me in at least three to five business days.”

“I hope you’re serious. I take things extremely literally.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sure, fine. I’ll see you Friday then.”

Shooting him the world’s most awkward finger guns, she started trotting away from him. “Sick, it’s a deal. Bye bye, Lysander Badeaux.”

He watched her until she disappeared around the closest corner down the street, and then he stood and began wandering back toward his apartment.