Chapter 219

#86

Elias doesn’t sleep.

He hangs up the phone, sits on the edge of his bed for exactly as long as it takes to register that his mother’s breathing down the hall is even and slow, and then he’s up, digging through the bottom drawer of his desk for the spiral notebook he hasn’t opened in months. The cover’s soft at the corners now, worn from being carried around during the months he spent building a version of himself specifically designed to be useful to Carver. He’d told himself he was done with it. Apparently done doesn’t mean thrown away.

He flips past pages of shorthand he barely remembers writing, names and numbers and half codes that made sense to him once, until he lands on the section he’s looking for. Contacts of people who owe him something, whether they’d admit it or not.

He calls Alvin first, because Alvin is the kind o