Page 87 of Resilience

I broke up with my girlfriend recently, Hunter signed, looking appropriately downbeat about it. Captions played across the top of the screen. It was a bad breakup. I tried to be gentle about it. I didn’t want to hurt her, I just needed to move on. But she went crazy, physically attacking me, making wild accusations. I knew there was no way reason would win out, so I left. My friends say I dodged a bullet. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways our society has built up women so they think they are the only ones who get to decide what we can do, what we can say, even what things are. The truth doesn’t matter, only what women say is true. They talk about gaslighting and mansplaining constantly, but it’s all projection. They’re the ones warping reality to suit whatever their agenda is.

Apollo stopped it there and turned to them again. Athena had become so tense Sam thought she might levitate off his lap.

“That sounds like a heap of incel shit,” Sam said and signed.

As far as he knew, Hunter didn’t spew that shit normally. And he couldn’t believe Athena would have tolerated it, even if Hunter had been the only decent-looking ASL-fluent man in the entire state of Oklahoma.

Apollo nodded at Sam’s observation. “That’s what it sounds like. Is that normal for him?” he asked Athena. The expression on his face and disbelief in his voice indicated that he couldn’t believe either that Athena would have given a guy like that even a moment of her life.

Athena didn’t answer. She was still staring at the screen, where Hunter’s face was frozen in that serious, downbeat expression, and his hands were in the middle of the sign for ‘agenda.’

Sam realized she was shaking. It was subtle, but the tremor ran through her whole body. When he brushed his hand down her arm, meaning to offer comfort, she flinched.

The flinch seemed to snap her back into the moment. She looked at Sam, then at her father, then at the screen.

“I’m good with you killing him,” she signed. “Before you do, I want to cut off his dick. Personally. I mean that sincerely.”

If her father was shocked by her vehemence, he didn’t show it.

“This video complicates things, starlight,” Apollo told her. He turned back to the screen and scrolled down. “It’s got fifty thousand likes, and more than two thousand comments.” He scrolled through the comments. “The top comments are mostly women telling him off, but there is a very strong faction of assholes agreeing with him. That’s not important right now. What’s important is how many people know about this video. I can scrub his social media, but this thing got shared thousands of times, in duets and stitches and ... I can’t do anything about those. It’s a link to you, with an accusation that you got violent. We’re already dealing with the need for finesse because of his father’s link to the mayor. That limits our usual ways of keeping work like this under the radar. His social media presence limits us more.”

“Are you saying he gets away with it?” Sam asked because Athena was starting to lose the plot. She’d wrapped her arms around herself and was rocking on his lap.

“Absolutely fucking not,” Apollo said. He leaned over and pulled one of Athena’s arms free so he could take her hand gently, resting it on his palm. With his free hand he told her, “It means it has to look like absolutely nothing more than an accident. He has to die with his parts, Athena. We can hurt him first, but only in ways consistent with the accident we set up.”

That brought Athena enough calm to focus again. “What kind of accident?”

“Car accident is easiest.” He let her go and turned back to his screen. After a few keystrokes, he called up what looked like a GPS map. “He’s at home now. Does he go anywhere routinely that takes him off the beaten path?”

With a clap of her hands, she got her father’s eyes on her again. “When did you start tracking him?”

Her father actually grinned. “Uh ... right before your first date.”

“Dad! Gross! Are you still tracking me?”

“I track everyone, Athena. I don’t look unless I need to—which is why I don’t know his habits already. Don’t start a fight about it. Until I am dead, I am going to know exactly where you are anytime I need to.”

“Awesome. I have a creepy stalker for a father, to go with my disgusting rapist ex-boyfriend.”

“Don’t, Athena,” Apollo rejoined, his expression serious again—and hurt as well. “I do this to try to make sure you’re safe. And I asked a question. Does he go anywhere that isn’t full of eyes?”

She thought about that for a second. “His grandfather lives in a retirement home outside of OKC. He goes to have dinner with him every other Thursday. It’s super rural. It’s near the river, too.”

Apollo smiled again. “That’s perfect. A long drive over country roads. Do you know when his next visit will be?”

Again Athena took a beat to think. “I think it’s this Thursday.” She drew her phone from her jeans pocket and opened her calendar. Sam watched her scroll back a month, then forward again. “Yeah, this Thursday.”

A few days from now.

Leaning back in his chair, Apollo nodded. “Okay. It looks like we have the beginnings of a plan.”

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