My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights

Chapter 112: Cookbook

The watcher’s car was not in front of his mother’s building.

Elara had confirmed at oh-six-hundred. The car belonged to a Furuhashi observation team, not an executive one. Furuhashi had been watching the building for nine days, and had withdrawn the team at twenty-two-hundred last night without notice. The Hacker did not know why.

Caleb went up the stairs alone.

It was ten in the morning.

He had slept four hours.

His ribs were quiet under the harness. The silver had not warmed since the bridge. He had washed his hands twice and the second time he had stopped checking them.

He knocked on the door of 1407.

She opened it on the second knock.

She had been awake. She had coffee on. She was wearing a blue sweater Caleb had not seen before and her hair was pulled back like it had been when he was a child.

She stepped aside. He came in, and she closed the door behind him.

She had set the kitchen for two.

Two cups. Two plates. A small dish of butter. A toast rack with four slices.

She poured the coffee.

He sat down.

She sat down across from him.

She did not ask him why he had come back.

She said: "I made you breakfast. You haven’t sat down and let me feed you without bleeding on something since you were eleven. Eat. We can talk afterward."

He ate. freёweɓnovel.com

She watched him eat like a mother watching a son she had fed too often in emergencies and too rarely in peace. Her own plate stayed untouched. She drank her coffee slowly and refilled his when his cup was half empty.

He finished the toast. She took the plate away. She brought it back washed. She sat down again.

"I knew you were coming back today," she said. "Your father told me on Tuesday."

"He told you."

"He came to the door at three in the morning. He had a key. He has had a key for nineteen years. He let himself in. He sat at this table. He drank a cup of coffee with me. He told me three things and then he left before sunrise. I have not slept since."

"What did he tell you?"

"He told me his real name. He told me his real work. He told me that your brother was awake, truly awake, and that you were going to come back to this apartment on Tuesday morning. I did not believe him when he said the first two. I believed him when he said the third because you came for the coat on the day he said you would come the first time."

She paused.

She drank her coffee.

"The first thing he told me was that he never died in an industrial accident. The second thing he told me was the work he has been doing for forty-six years. The third thing was that the work would end in five days and that he needed me to know before it ended in case he did not survive it. He did not say in case he did not survive it. He said in case the work was not finished. He did not need to translate it for me. I had been the wife of a man who lied to me about everything for the first ten years of our marriage and then walked out of the country. I have known what the words meant since I was twenty-eight."

Caleb’s hand tightened around the coffee cup. "Mom."

"Yes."

"Why didn’t you tell me?"

"Because he asked me not to. And because telling you would not have made you safer. And because I have not been a good enough mother to give you news that big in a phone call. I wanted to be in the room with you when you found out. I am in the room with you now."

"Yes."

"He told me you would need two more things from this apartment. The cookbook on the third shelf. The photograph in the silver frame above the bed. He asked me to give them to you and not to ask what was inside them. I am going to break that part of his request. I want to know what is in them. I want you to tell me before you leave today."

"Mom."

"Caleb, I am done learning what my life was after everyone else has finished deciding how much I can bear."

His eyes moved from the cookbook to the photograph, and he swallowed the answer he wanted to give. "Okay."

She brought him the cookbook.

It was a softcover from a publisher that had stopped existing in 2008. The cover was a photograph of bread on a wooden cutting board. The spine had been repaired with cloth tape twice. She had cooked from it for the first ten years of his life.

The box stayed closed.

She set it on the table in front of him.

She brought him the photograph next.

The photograph was of her and Marcus and Caleb at five years old and his brother at three, standing in a park Caleb did not remember. The frame was tarnished silver, scuffed at the bottom edge from years of sitting on the same shelf. The glass was clean.

She set it down next to the cookbook and sat down.

Caleb opened the cookbook first.

The folder was glued into the inside back cover. The seam had been smoothed and rebound by a hand that knew how to bind books. He worked the seam loose with his thumb. The folder slid free. It was thinner than the one from the coat lining. It held a single sheet of paper.

He read it. He read it twice. He passed it to his mother. She read it. She set it down.

"That’s a list of dates," she said, and her voice had gone flat.

"Yes."

"They’re not random."

"No. They’re the days each of them died, one line for each name."

"Who?"

"The six marked names on the list from the coat. Six dates. Six deaths. The earliest is nineteen eighty-three. The latest is last year."

She studied the dates.

She found her own answer in them before he had to say anything else.

She set the sheet down carefully.

"How many of them did your father know."

"All of them. He marked them. He was the recordkeeper."

She nodded once.

Her eyes stayed dry.

She picked up the photograph.

She opened the back of the frame like someone who had opened it before.

Inside, taped to the back of the photograph itself, was a small brass key.

The key was not labeled.

She held it between thumb and forefinger, then gave it to Caleb.

"This is for the box in the storage unit on Vesper Street. The unit is in my name. The rent has been paid through twenty-thirty by a holding company I do not know the name of. I have not been to the storage unit in fifteen years. I do not know what is in the box. Your father told me on Tuesday that the box was the last thing. He told me that whatever was in it was the only piece of the work he had not been able to handle himself."

"He didn’t tell you what was in it."

"He did not. He said it would be obvious when you opened it. He said it would not be obvious to anyone else. He said the box has been waiting since before you were born."

Caleb put the key in his coat pocket.

He put the cookbook and the photograph in the canvas bag he had brought.

He stood. She stood with him. They walked to the door together. At the door she stopped him.

"Caleb."

"Yeah."

"Your brother. Is he safe."

"Yes. As much as safe means anything in this family."

"Is he going to be in the room on Day Sixteen."

"Yes."

She closed her eyes, then opened them.

"Bring him back to me, if you can. If you cannot, come back yourself. I will take whichever one of you walks out of it. I would prefer both."

"Mom."

"Go," she said, and opened the door before either of them could turn the goodbye into another argument.

He waited until he was in the back of the car with the cookbook on his lap, the photograph on the seat beside him, and the key in his pocket before counting the names on the manifest.

Then he counted.

The third folder’s list. Seven names, six marked. He was the seventh.

Folder Two’s list. Seventeen names, six marked, eleven unmarked. The two redacted ones, Vance and Aris, added back made nineteen.

The six marked names from the third folder were the same six marked names from Folder Two. Six dead operators, six SSS chairs that had emptied since 1983, six dates in the cookbook insert.

The eleven unmarked names from Folder Two were the eleven conspirators who had broken open the Twelfth in 1979.

His mother was one of them. Aris’s mother was one of them.

Marcus’s name was nowhere on either list, because Marcus had not put himself on the list.

He had put himself in the office that built the list.

Caleb studied the cookbook on his lap.

He understood, for the first time, that his father was not finishing a job his father had started.

His father was finishing a job his mother had started.