To Protect My Honor

Hard Choices III

"This is literally the end of the world," I thought to myself as June 17 dawned.

 Okay. It wasn't literally the end of the world. It just felt like the end of the world. It had been nearly four weeks since Clay and I had entered into contact, and he hadn't found anything to lead me back to her.

It was just a series of endless clues, clues that led only to more clues.

By noon that day, the heat was making it hard to comprehend anything about the situation. I vaguely thought of how we were stifled by the heat in Michigan on the only day I spent with Victoria, but I had spent many hot days since.

What was it about me that related everything to her?

That afternoon, I found myself home alone. We were now well into summer break, and I had nothing to do. So I just decided to wait. Maybe something amazing would happen.

It was 93 degrees, and even that number seemed conservative. I didn't even want to go outside for fear of proverbially melting. So I just waited in the living room (for something amazing to happen).

Something amazing did happen, and faster than I thought. I received a message on Facebook, and opened the Messenger app to see.

It was Alexis.

She had written, "Milton, I need you to help me with something."

"I need you to help me with something too," I wrote back. "But you first."

"You first. Mine is very short."

I told her about my new strategy for finding Victoria.

"And I told Nancy that I would have a strategy, but no details," I said.

"Based on what you have told me about Nancy, she'd go ballistic if she found out you were taking things to this extent."

"You're right," I said. "That's the problem."

Not to mention that I was anxious about Clay's silence. I wondered if he knew my full agenda and didn't want to entertain it.

On Tuesday, one day before I left on a portion of a road trip my dad and Kacie were taking with Kacie's sister and her husband, I had an idea.

If I were to send an envoy, an ambassador, to find Victoria and talk to her in person, I could use that information, as it would have been given without Victoria's knowledge of the person's ties to me, to obtain some kind of closure.

It wouldn't work, though. I don't think anyone could convince her that he had no tie to me if he asked all the questions that I wanted answers to.

I received an email from Clay that afternoon. He told me that Irving has nearly 250,000 people; it was impossible to find one of them, as he was "by no means a private investigator." He said that he could find no one with her name in standard people search engines.

I told him, "Then look for Jonathan Mason. That's her dad."

After that, the trip precluded me from checking my email for six days. As evening finally fell across the Los Angeles area, I thought about how today, June 20, was the summer solstice, the longest day of 2017. I did not know the exact duration, but that was the kind of thing I liked to look up.

The days felt long at this point in my life. They always did over school breaks, as I had nothing interesting going on during those times. The heat wave continued, and it certainly did not help.

I tried writing a short story, but drifted off to sleep around ten-fifty, when I had not even written half of it.

Three days later, I was in my dad's car, leaving Yosemite National Park from the west, as the eastern exit over the high mountains was closed. We had to make a massive detour to another pass and then down south, where we would pick up the route across Nevada to our next destination. It was an expected nine hours of driving in total.