Page 32 of Restored By You

I close the distance and get my hands around her, steadying, ducking to catch her eyes. “Breathe. We’re gonna find him. Where did he say he was going?”

She nods fast. “The arcade, the pool, he mentioned a-a racing thing, there’s these kids, their parents work here.”

“They work here?” I latch onto it. “Then they’ve got the run of this place. Staff kids know every service hall, every storage room. If a door that doesn’t lock right, they’ll know about it.” I’m already scanning the dark corridor, the EMPLOYEES ONLY signs, the seams in the building. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“Kid probably found somewhere warm and out of the way to hang with his new friends. Somewhere no adults would bother them.” I try a door marked STAFF. Locked. I try the next. “If I were fifteen in this building, I know exactly where I’d go.”

I find it on the third try.

Down a service corridor off the rec level, past the pool’s mechanical room, there’s a door propped with a folded matchbook—courtesy of the lounge, the oldest trick there is—and behind it a break room the size of a shoebox, a vending machine hums in the corner throwing blue light over four teenagers sprawled across mismatched chairs around a card table.

Tyler’s mid-laugh when the door swings wide. I watch the laugh die on his face.

“Shea,” he starts.

But she’s already past me.

She doesn’t yell, even though I brace for it. She crosses that little room and pulls him half out of the chair into a hug he’s far ‘too cool’ to want, but she’s too shaken to let him refuse. I hear her say into his hair, low and wrecked, “I couldn’t find you.”

The three other kids look at me. I look at them. “Your parents know you’re down here?”

A chorus of guilty shrugs. Staff kids, all right—one of them I half-recognize, a housekeeper’s daughter. “Go home,” I tell them firmly. “Back doors, not the lobby. And find a better spot next time.”

They scatter like quail.

Tyler pulls back from Shea, ears red, doing the fifteen-year-old thing of trying to reassemble his cool out of the wreckage. “My phone died,” he mumbles. “It’s not a big deal, we were just—”

“It is a big deal,” Shea states. “What were you thinking?”

Tyler looks between us, and his brow furrows in defense. “No, it’s not a big deal. God, you’re not my mom, okay? You don’t get to freak out like you actually care.”

Her gaze widens at his outburst. “Ty.”

“No, this is so stupid.” He backs up now, chair scraping as he bumps into it. All that teenage fury bubbling to the surface. “You didn’t even want me here, remember? You got stuck with me ‘cause my mom would rather be in Italy with your dad than deal with her own kid, and now you’re gonna stand here and pretend you were scared?” His voice cracks on the last word, ruining the whole tough-guy performance. Emotion seeping in. “You’re just like the rest of them. Counting down the days until you can dump me on somebody else like your dad did to you.”

Shea flinches like she’s been struck.

“That’s enough,” I snap, taking a step between them.

Tyler whips toward me, his chest heaving.

I hold his glare. “You want to be mad at somebody for leaving? Be mad at the ones who left. But don’t be mad at the one person who hasn’t.”

His jaw works. His eyes furious and wet, and for a second, he looks less like a mouthy teenager and more like a kid who’s been handed the wrong end of every deal he’s ever gotten. I wait for a comeback, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he shoves past me, out the door, and down the corridor.

Shea starts after him, but I catch her arm. “Let him go,” I say. “He’s not going far. Kid’s got nowhere to go but up.” I nod at the elevator down the hall. “Give him five minutes and go talk to him.”

She looks up at me, wrecked all over again for a completely different reason.

“Come on.” I put a hand at the small of her back and steer her out of that shoebox of a break room, down the dim service corridor, back toward the elevator. The elevator doors slide shut and then it’s just us.

Shea sags back against the nearest wall. “I lost him,” she says softly. “First week and I fell asleep drunk on a couch and I lost him.”

“You didn’t lose him. He wandered off. Kids tend to do that.”

“My father called and I lied to him.” Her words come out fast, spilling, like she’s been holding them for too long. “I looked at an empty bed and I lied so I wouldn’t look like I couldn’t handle it, and then I couldn’t call the front desk because they’d tell him, and—god, listen to me!” A broken laugh. “I’m more scared of my father finding out I’m not perfect than I was of not finding Tyler. What is wrong with me?”