3

Chapter 3

Milo

"Then how do you know about it?" I asked.

Rhett didn't answer right away. He looked past me at the front window, where the rain was coming down on the gravel lot, and rubbed the back of his neck.

"My dad was a climate researcher," he said. "Frank Gallagher. Thirty years with the state weather service. Two years ago, he started saying something was wrong with the jet stream. Said a cold front was going to come down from the Arctic and never leave. He wrote reports. He called newspapers. Everybody laughed at him."

"What happened to him?"

"Heart attack last spring." He said it flat, the way people talk about things they're tired of hurting over. "His last model said early November. No date. I didn't believe him either, honestly. I bought all this stock because it was cheap, and I figured I'd sell it at ski season."

He tapped the counter with one finger.

"Then three strangers walk in here in one week, and every one of them says the same date. You get why that bothers me?"

"Yeah. I get it."

"So who told you?"

I didn't have an answer he would believe. He watched me try to come up with one, and something in his face eased.

"Okay," he said. "You don't have to tell me today."

He reached under the counter, flipped his order pad back a few pages, and turned it toward me.

"One of the other two was a contractor from Danbury. The other one called Monday." He put his finger on the line. "Same last name as on your card."

Denise Bennett. 14 Larkin Street. Six propane heaters, four sleeping bags rated minus sixty, two cases of hand warmers. Deliver before November 10.

My mother had never bought a pair of snow boots in her life.

"She gave me a card number over the phone," Rhett said. "I charge it on delivery."

"That card won't work," I said. "It's my money she's been spending."

He looked at me for a long second. Then he tore the top sheet off a fresh pad, wrote a number on it, and held it out.

"If you need your order before the eighth, call me," he said. "And go eat something. You're white as a sheet."

I took the paper. He didn't let go right away.

"I mean it, Milo Bennett," he said. "Eat something."

The Hollis Community Bank was a little brick building on Main Street. The branch manager, Dwayne Porter, was a bald, heavy man in his sixties who went to high school with my father. He sat me down in his office, pulled up the account, and his smile went away as he scrolled.

"Son," he said, "every deposit on here is yours. Scholarship from Westbrook, payroll from the university, payroll from Ridgeway Labs. Nine years, and your dad never put in a dime."

"I know."

"This was a custodial account. It should have turned over to you when you were eighteen. Nobody ever filed the paperwork." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Your father's had access he had no right to for five years."

"How much is left?"

He turned the screen around. Forty-one thousand dollars.

There should have been over a hundred and thirty.

Mr. Porter scrolled through it with me, line by line. Trent's truck payments. My mother's spa membership. A ten-day cruise my parents took in June while I was working doubles at the lab. A new laptop, a new phone, and two thousand dollars in clothes, all bought in the last three weeks, all for Owen.

"I can fix it right now," Mr. Porter said. "Your dad's going to be upset when he finds out."

"Are you going to tell him?"

He put his glasses back on. "This is your account, son. Not his. I don't discuss a customer's business with anybody, and that includes old friends."

Twenty minutes later, every dollar was in a new account with only my name on it.

I sat in my car in the bank parking lot and called Professor Harold Kim.

He ran the cold-climate agriculture lab at Westbrook. In September, he offered me a research position at the university's field station up in Northfield. It came with a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus and housing on site, a concrete building with geothermal heat, its own well, and greenhouses dug six feet into the ground.

In my last life, I turned it down because my mother said Owen needed me close to home. That field station was the only place within a hundred miles where nobody froze to death the first winter. By December, the government had taken it over. I never got near it.

"Milo!" Professor Kim sounded surprised. "I was about to give that spot to someone else on Monday."

"I want it," I said. "Can I move in this week?"

"This week? Well, the house is ready. Come by tomorrow and sign the papers. I'll have the keys."

I hung up and sat there with the rain on the windshield. Ninety-one thousand dollars, a building that would stay warm when the whole state froze, and nine days.

There was one more thing I needed before I could leave this town for good.

My research files were still in my bedroom on Larkin Street. Two years of notes on cold-resistant crops, hard drives, seed samples in the mini fridge under my desk. Everything Professor Kim had hired me for. I couldn't start over without them.

I waited until one o'clock, when I knew Dad and Trent would be at work and Mom would be at her Thursday hair appointment. She'd never missed one in eleven years. Then I drove back.

The house was quiet. I let myself in with my key and went up the stairs fast.

My bedroom door was open.

Owen was sitting on my bed.

He was thinner than I remembered, pale, with soft brown hair still damp from the rain. He was wearing my gray Westbrook sweater, the one I'd left on the chair this morning, and he was holding the framed photo from my bookshelf, the one from the county fair, the last picture of all three of us kids together.

He looked up when I came in, and his whole face lit up.

"Milo," he said. "Hi."

I didn't move from the doorway.

"Mom went to get her hair done," he said. "I said I was too tired to go. The bus ride was really long." He set the picture down carefully on the nightstand. "You weren't at the station. Trent came instead. I waited for you, though. I thought you'd come."

"I was busy."

"That's okay." He smiled at me, small and shy, exactly the way he had smiled at the dinner table in my last life while my mother cried happy tears over him. "I know this is weird for you. I don't blame you for the fair. I never did. I just want us to be brothers."

His eyes went to my hand. To the ring.

I put my hand in my pocket.

I walked past him to my desk, pulled the hard drives out of the drawer, and started putting them in my backpack. Then the notebooks. Then the seed samples from the mini fridge. He watched me the whole time without saying anything.

"Are you moving out?" he finally asked.

"Yes."

"Mom's going to be really sad." He pulled his knees up onto my bed and wrapped his arms around them. "But I'm happy for you. I really am."

I zipped the backpack.

"The field station up in Northfield sounds beautiful," Owen said softly. "You'll love it there."

My hand stopped on the zipper.

I turned around. He was still smiling at me, sweet and open, sitting on my bed in my sweater.

I had accepted that job an hour ago, alone in a locked car.

I hadn't told a single person.