--IX--

I guess maybe I didn't know how to stay near someone I loved.

And no matter how much you may love someone, or how much someone may love you... you can't be with them all the time.

I slowed my run when I arrived at the Lowdown.

It was just as bad as I remembered it- drugs everywhere and prostitution and pollution. A fourteen-year-old was murdered. Just four years ago, that fourteen-year-old very well could have been me.

I checked the sticky note Belinda gave me.

#67 DIRTWATER AVENUE LOWDOWN 1216.

Dirtwater Avenue.

The part Dirtwater made sense, but it wasn't even an avenue. I hugged a sidewalk, looked down with my hands folded, and among other things, prayed that Caleb would forgive me. I don't stay put when I can help. I don't stay put when there is a murderer and rapist on the loose. I don't care for a name, but I do care for a difference. I had been broken and damaged and hurt and completely destroyed; I had both the power, as well as the opportunity, to keep it from happening to others. So I left Caleb a note, texted Scott, and walked.

"Working on a Sunday?" Connor said.

His voice was groggy and maybe a little bit slurred. Possibly exhaustion, possibly alcohol.

Reception in the Lowdown was awful; I had to listen like a bat, and really press the phone to my ear. I hopped over a broken manhole and then a pile of vomit and then another pile of vomit and then a pile of both vomit and dismembered rats.

"It's a Saturday," I said.

"Right."

"Sorry, Connor," I said. "Just forward to me whatever Belinda had on our guy."

She had to have something; she wouldn't have acted the way she did otherwise. I just needed to get it.

"I thought you chose not to read minds," said Connor. "You're that telepath. Read minds only if it's survival or death. How do you know she's got anything?"

"I read her minus the mind reading," I replied.

I heard him yawn, and the squeaking of a bed.

"People are dead, Connor," I said.

Behind me, some skinny brown-skinned men sniffing chemicals started yelling, loudly and unintelligibly. I didn't glance back more than once because that only would have made things worse.

"Maybe to some it's just a statistic," I said. What I loved about Connor Meadows was that he was steady. What I didn't necessarily always love was that apparently, his years looking at dead bodies had robbed him of human emotions. "It's a little different to me." I casually sped up my walking pace. "If you don't do it, I can do mind reading on her anyway."

Not that I can point my finger there- didn't I lose many of my own emotions for a while? I just trained and taught myself to get them back early; it's not about what other people do. Who you are doesn't depend on another person's behavior.

"And if you do force me to read her mind, then I can learn whatever the two of you may or may not have had together," I said. "And I can tell your wife."

The skinny brown-skinned men who were sniffing chemicals and yelling got bored of following me and found interest in a pile of garbage.

"You're a piece of shit," said Connor.

"I love you, Connor," I said. "Bye."