Things We Can't Say

9: I don't care about your weird uncle.

The next day, I send Jamie to the corner grocery store to comb the the newspaper stands for our mom's name (though, now that I think about it, sending him to a place with such an abundance of food was probably not my best idea), while I split the other direction, heading towards an internet cafe at the edge of town.

The place is narrow, cramped, the overhead lights yellow with age. The slow, calming melody of a Latin song suffuses through the air like tea into a mug of hot water. I settle in in front of one of the blocky, dated computers by the door; the chair's hard as stone, and so wobbly I almost fall over when I sit down. Even more reason not to stay here for very long.

The necklace Alonso gave me rests like a cool blade against my throat as I open a search engine and type in two words: Claire Donahue.

I come up empty-handed. Nothing but an array of pointless Facebook profiles and an arbitrary LinkedIn account, but nothing about my mother. I chew at my bottom lip, exhaling. Who am I kidding? As if I expected it to be that easy.

I highlight Claire Donahue, hit delete, type in two more words in their place: Ghost Wolf.

My finger hovers above the enter key.

It doesn't mean I believe him. It doesn't mean I believe anyone who's spoken that name to me. It's just confirmation—confirmation that nothing, really, has changed, that even if a hateful bunch of werewolf hunters tore us away from each other, we can still come back together as if we never spent a second apart.

I'm about to lower my finger when the chair next to mine squeaks across the wood floors. A voice says from beside me, "Doing some personal research, I see."

I jump, scooting back. "Luciano. What are you doing here?"

He smiles at me, amused. "You act as though I just stormed into your house."

"Well, I—" Carefully, I click out of the search engine, returning to the home screen. "I guess I'm just finding it a little odd that you just happen to be here at the same time I am."

"Well, you're right, in that case. I was looking for you."

My eyes slide away from the screen and towards his face, instead. Outside of the glamour of his back lounge, he seems...friendlier, the soft light highlighting the halo of small frizzy curls around each of his locs, his tapered suit traded for a T-shirt and a cardigan. I frown at him, trying to figure out how, in fact, he's wearing a cardigan without looking like a depressed widow out of a low-budget TV film. But I don't ask him that. Instead, I say, "Our conversation ended last night. You have no reason to look for me."

"But I do," says Luciano, "because there's something I didn't tell you or your brother last night. Oh—where is he, by the way?"

"Jamie?" I say. "He's busy."

"Busy? Or you just didn't want him to know what you were really coming here to search up?"

I hold Luciano's gaze. "I said he's busy."

He pauses, and in that pause the air hums with a thousand words left unspoken. Not that they need to be spoken; he has this look on his face that makes me think he has me all figured out.

To my relief, he clears his throat. "Someone very dear to me went missing a while back," he says, leaning back in his chair. "My uncle, to be exact. My parents used to travel a lot when I was a kid, and a lot of times I couldn't come with them because I was still in school. So my Uncle Tomás took care of me. He was a very intelligent man. Taught me to read and to love reading. I owe a lot of my intellect to him."