The Boy Who Looks Like Yesterday
The espresso machine hissed like a wounded animal. Cassidy Waverly wiped the same spot on the counter for the third time, watching the clock above the pastry case tick toward three-fifteen. The afternoon rush had dissolved into the lull between school pickup and the after-work crowd, leaving her alone with the smell of burnt coffee grounds and the weight of an email she’d been ignoring since Tuesday.
Her phone buzzed against the ceramic tile.
She checked the caller ID. *Lincoln Elementary.*
The espresso machine’s pressure gauge flickered. Cassidy grabbed the phone and stepped into the back hallway, where the fluorescent lights hummed with a frequency that always made her teeth ache.
“This is Cassidy Waverly.”
“Ms. Waverly, this is Principal Hartwell. We need you to come to the school. Toby’s been in an incident.”
“An incident.” She pressed her palm flat against the wall. “What kind of incident?”
“There was a physical altercation during art class. Toby is uninjured, but the other student’s parents have been notified. I’d prefer to discuss the details in person.”
Physical altercation. The words didn’t fit. Toby was the kid who apologized to furniture when he bumped into it. He cried during nature documentaries. Last week he’d spent forty-five minutes trying to reattach a beetle’s leg with school glue.
“I’m on my way.”
—
The principal’s office smelled of lemon polish and old paper. Toby sat in a chair against the wall, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the seat cushion. A thin scratch ran from his right temple to his jaw—not deep, but the kind that would bloom purple by morning. His eyes were dry, which worried Cassidy more than tears would have.
Principal Hartwell was a broad woman with silver hair cut sharp as a blade. She slid a piece of paper across her desk. Cassidy picked it up.
The drawing was meticulous. Detailed. Wrong.
A man’s face rendered in charcoal pencil, every line placed with the obsessive precision of a child who’d erased and redrawn until the paper had begun to thin. High cheekbones. A jaw that carried more weight than it should have. Eyes that were almost too pale, even in graphite—the kind of eyes that looked at you like they were calculating the distance between where you stood and where they wanted you to be.
Cassidy’s blood went quiet.
She knew that face.
“Toby drew this during free period,” Hartwell said. “James Whitmore, the other student, grabbed it out of his hands. He… made some comments about the subject matter. Toby reacted physically.”
“What comments?”
“He called the man in the drawing ‘a deadbeat.’ Among other things.” Hartwell’s voice softened a fraction. “Ms. Waverly, I need to ask you directly: has your son had any contact with this person? Has anyone matching this description been in contact with Toby outside of school?”
“No.” The word came out too fast. Cassidy folded the drawing carefully, crease by crease, and slid it into her bag. “He’s never met him.”
Hartwell’s pause stretched like wire. “Then perhaps you can explain why Toby told the art teacher that this man visits him in his dreams. He said the man is trying to find his way home.”
—
Cassidy drove with her hands at ten and two, the way her father had taught her, even though he’d been dead for twelve years. Toby stared out the passenger window, his shoulder blades sharp against his t-shirt. He was too thin. She needed to buy him real food, not the frozen dinners that stacked like bricks in her freezer.
“I’m not in trouble?”
“You’re not in trouble.”
“James said my dad left because he didn’t want me.”
The car drifted half a foot before Cassidy corrected. The tires found the seam of the road and hummed a low note. “James doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Do you know where my dad is?”
She thought about lying. She’d gotten good at it over the years—the small, necessary fabrications that kept the world from cracking open. *He’s far away. He’s busy. He’s not ready.*
But Toby had drawn a face he’d never seen with the accuracy of a witness sketch.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
—
The Daily Grind was quiet when she returned. Her shift ended at eight, and she worked through the dinner rush with the drawing burning a hole in her messenger bag behind the counter. She took orders. She steamed milk. She smiled at customers who didn’t look at her face.
At 8:47, the bell above the door chimed.
Cassidy didn’t look up. She was wiping down the espresso machine again, her thumb tracing the same circular path across the steel. The motion had become a ritual, a prayer without words.
“I’ll be with you in just a moment,” she said.
The silence that followed was the wrong shape.
She looked up.
Sebastian Harlow stood at the counter with rain darkening the shoulders of his jacket. He looked thinner than she remembered. Harder. His left hand was bandaged, the white wrapping stained with something that wasn’t water, and his eyes—those too-pale eyes from Toby’s drawing—were ringed with the kind of exhaustion that settles into bone.
He didn’t smile.
She couldn’t move.
“Cassidy.”
His voice was the same. Rougher, maybe. Older. But the shape of it fit exactly where she’d stored it, in the locked drawer at the back of her chest that she’d told herself she’d thrown away years ago.
“Sebastian.” Her body moved before her mind caught up—a half-step back, her hip connecting with the edge of the counter. “What are you doing here?”
“I didn’t know where else to go.” He looked around the empty café, at the mismatched chairs and the chalkboard menu and the single string of fairy lights that Toby had insisted on hanging above the door last Christmas. “I didn’t know you were still in Seattle.”
“I never left.”
Something flickered across his face. Pain, maybe. Or guilt. It was hard to tell with him—it always had been.
“I need your help.” He said it flatly, like a man who’d rehearsed the words until they lost their meaning. “I know I have no right to ask. I know I left, and I know I didn’t call, and I know I’m the last person you want to see standing in your doorway at nine o’clock on a Thursday night.”
“Then why are you here?”
He looked down at his bandaged hand. Rain dripped from his sleeve onto the floor, dark spots on the worn linoleum.
“The Blackthorns burned my apartment to the ground this morning.”
The name landed like a stone in still water. *Blackthorn.* She hadn’t heard it in seven years, not since Sebastian had disappeared with nothing but a voicemail—*I can’t explain, but I have to go. Don’t look for me.*—and the name had been buried under every other thing she’d needed to survive.
“Grant Blackthorn?” she asked.
“He’s dead. His son, Owen, took over.” Sebastian’s jaw shifted, a muscle jumping beneath the skin. “Owen is worse. He’s been tracking me for two years. He found me last week. I thought I could get ahead of him, but I was wrong.”
Cassidy’s fingers found the edge of the counter and held on. The wood was worn smooth from years of the same grip, from a thousand other moments of holding herself together.
“Why would he burn your apartment?”
“Because he wanted to send a message. And because he didn’t find what he was looking for inside.” Sebastian’s eyes met hers, and for a moment, he looked like the boy she’d known at seventeen—the one who’d kissed her in the back of his car and promised her a future he’d never delivered. “I have something he wants, Cass. Something I should have destroyed years ago. And now I’ve brought it to your door.”
The espresso machine clicked as it depressurized. A car splashed through the street outside. Somewhere in the back, the refrigerator hummed its low, steady note.
Cassidy thought of Toby’s drawing. The face that had appeared in his dreams. The man trying to find his way home.
She thought of all the lies she’d told herself about being fine.
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “I have a son. He’s eight years old. I can’t—whatever you’ve brought into this city, you can’t bring it into my house.”
Sebastian nodded. His shoulders dropped, just slightly, like he’d expected the answer and had been bracing for its weight.
“I understand.” He pushed away from the counter. “I shouldn’t have come. I just—I didn’t know who else to trust. It’s been so long since I trusted anyone.”
He turned toward the door.
The bell chimed as his hand closed around the handle.
“Sebastian.”
He stopped.
The rain had picked up outside, hammering against the glass. The streetlights cast long shadows across the sidewalk, and Cassidy saw the shape of a man who had once been everything to her, now reduced to bandages and borrowed time and the desperate hope that someone might still take him in.
She shouldn’t. Every rational part of her brain screamed the words. She had a child. She had a life. She had carefully constructed walls that had kept her standing for eight years.
But Toby had drawn his face.
“My shift ends in ten minutes,” she said. “There’s a motel on Aurora. I know the owner. He’ll give you a room off the books if I ask him to. And in the morning, I want to know what you’re carrying. I want to know why it’s worth burning a building down to get it back.”
Sebastian turned. The light caught his face, and she saw the lines that hadn’t been there before, the hollows beneath his cheekbones, the way his hands stayed fisted at his sides like he was holding himself back from reaching for her.
“Cassidy, I know I have no right to ask anything—but if there’s a place I can stay… just for a night. The Blackthorns burned my apartment to the ground this morning.”