Chapter 120: 120. Her Husband Has Been Away For Eight Months, And I’m Here To Pleasure Her!

He waited.

Footsteps echoed inside, unhurried. The gate opened on the right, revealing a woman who was not a staff member.

She was tall, not as tall as Aveline but close, with dark hair worn loose to her shoulders in the way that looks effortless when it isn’t. Late thirties, possibly just beyond them, with the particular poise of someone who has spent years in a house and a life that was more organized around other people’s schedules than her own.

She wore a light shirt tucked into trousers and appeared to have been engaged in some task around the house before the bell rang, which was evident. She also looked mildly surprised to see the person standing at her gate, which was equally clear.

She looked at Mike the way a person looks at someone they do not recognize but who presents no immediate alarm.

"Yes?" she said. "Who is it?"

"Hello there, ma’am," Mike said, with the effortless warmth of someone who has nothing complicated to explain. "I’m sorry to bother you at home."

"I’m Mike Hawk. I’m a friend of Jay’s from the university."

"My co— I-I mean! Mike Hawk..." Marielle Vaughn looked at him for a moment. "Jay’s mentioned you...?"

"We’re in overlapping circles," Mike said. "He doesn’t know I’m here, actually."

’I wasn’t planning to stop, but then I was in this part of the district." He paused with exactly the right amount of hesitation. "There’s something I’ve been thinking about."

"Something involving Jay that I thought you should probably know... As his mother." He let that land gently, without pushing. "If this is a bad time, I can leave contact details and come back."

She looked at him for another moment, the kind of measured reading that a person does when they are deciding whether to be cautious or available, and then she stepped back from the gate.

"Oh, no, no, I’m free," she said. Come in."

The front garden was small and well-kept, reflecting the kind of care that comes from habit rather than a one-time project. The path leading to the front door was straight, and the door itself was a dark green that matched the gate—a detail that could be either a coincidence or a sign of someone with a consistent vision for their space.

Mike took note of this without comment.

Inside, the house was meticulously tidy, a result of daily effort that was clearly evident. The hallway featured a coat rack with a single jacket hanging from it, and beneath it were a pair of shoes that were not Jay’s size.

A light glowed in a room at the back of the house, indicating she had been there prior to the doorbell ringing. She guided him to the sitting room without inquiring whether he wanted tea or water, a gesture that suggested she had been living alone long enough for her hosting instincts to diminish somewhat.

The front room of the Vaughn house was smaller than the Schmith residence but carried its own quiet quality, the kind of house that had been arranged for a family and was currently occupied by less of one than it was built for. She gestured toward the sitting room, and Mike followed her in and took the seat she indicated.

She sat across from him with the particular alertness of a parent who has been told there is something she should probably know.

"What is it you want to talk about?" she said.

"It’s about your son’s behavior..."

Mike reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He located the footage: twelve seconds long, filmed in an alley near the east campus boundary at two in the morning, featuring three figures and one person lying on the ground. He turned the screen toward her.

He watched her face as it played, because her face was what mattered.

The color went out of it first. Then her hand came up, slowly, and her fingers pressed against her mouth.

She watched the twelve seconds play out until the end, and Mike kept the screen still without pulling it back, knowing she needed a moment longer with it.

"T-that’s... Jay," she said. It came out as barely more than breath. "There’s no way... my son..."

"Yes," Mike said.

"He’s..." She stopped. Started again. "That’s Jay, in that video, he’s—"

"Hitting a student," Mike said. "A student named Tyler Schmith."

"He’s been doing it for six weeks. That video is from yesterday night, and thank god, I was passing by." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

"If not for his intervention... that innocent student named Tyler would have died at the hands of him and his friends."

She looked up from the phone, her expression shifting through various emotions in quick succession. It settled into a mix of horror and the weariness of someone who has been trying to keep the possibility of something like this at bay for a long time, only to find that they can no longer do so.

"Oh no," she said softly. "Oh, Jay, what are you doing son...?"

Mike said nothing. He gave her a moment, because it needed to be hers rather than something he moved her through.

She sat with it longer than most people would have. She glanced at the phone, then at her hands, and finally at nothing in particular.

Mike could see her processing it in the way that parents often do when trying to reconcile the child they know with the one who has just emerged before them.

"Six weeks," she said finally.

"Yup, six weeks of suffering from Tyler that was caused by your son, and now he’s safe with me."

She pressed her lips together. "The boy, Tyler. How bad was it?"

"He was hurt, but not seriously."

"For most of that time, he had been managing on his own, creating alternate routes across campus to avoid crossing paths with them."

"He knew their schedules and had been navigating this alone because he had tried formal reporting at another institution, which only made things worse."

"So this time, he just..." Mike paused. "He just absorbed it and rerouted around it."

Something crossed Marielle’s face, a look more complex than the straightforward horror she had shown earlier. It was the expression of someone who had just received information that brought clarity to the situation—not just the reality of Jay’s involvement, but the toll it had taken on another person. It illustrated the specific strain of six weeks during which a teenager had to navigate his life around the challenges posed by her son.

"He’s from the Schmith family, I know him..." she said, mostly to herself.

"They’re one of those rich families in Erosyne, yes," Mike said. "But I already met with his mother to promise Tyler’s safety."

She stood up. It was a sudden movement, not agitated, more like someone who needed to be upright to think properly.

She walked to the window and stood with her back to Mike for a moment, looking at the front garden, and Mike watched the set of her shoulders and waited.

"I’ve been away," she said. "Not physically."

"I’ve been here. But Jay has been." She turned back, and her expression transformed into a more composed demeanor, reflecting the calm of someone who has decided that losing control will not be helpful. "His father’s been away since January..."

"Eight months, and I thought... Jay was handling it better than I was."

"People handle things in the directions that are available to them," Mike said.

She looked at him. "That’s a generous way to put it."

"It’s not meant to be generous," Mike said. "It’s just accurate."

"Jay is twenty, his father is gone, he’s in a city at a university surrounded by people who haven’t figured themselves out yet."

"The energy goes somewhere." He held her gaze. "That doesn’t mean it went somewhere acceptable."

"No," she said. "It doesn’t."

She came back to her seat and sat down, more deliberately this time. "Have you talked to him about it?"

"Indirectly," Mike said. "He knows that I know."

"He knows the footage exists, and he’s not going to continue with Tyler." He stated this clearly and without elaboration, and she refrained from asking for more information, indicating that she recognized there were aspects of the situation she likely preferred not to know in detail.

Then he said, carefully, "The reason I chose to come here instead of going through the university is that if this footage reaches the faculty board or certain staff members, there could be scholarship implications that would be difficult to reverse." He paused. "I don’t want that."

"Jay is, for all that may be true, someone with options."

"I want to ensure those options remain available to him."

She looked at him. Her hands were pressed together in her lap now.

"But I also think," he continued, quietly, "that you should know."

"Because someone should, and it should probably be the person who can actually do something about it." He looked at her directly. "Does that make sense?"

She nodded once, slowly. Her eyes went back to the phone, which was still showing the still frame from the end of the footage, and something in her expression shifted again, settling into the long-faced recognition of a parent who is seeing their child clearly and finding the picture more complicated than they hoped.

"I’m going to need..." she said, and then did not finish the sentence for several seconds. "I’m going to need to think about how to handle this."

"Of course," Mike said.

She looked at him again. "You came here on your own, and Jay doesn’t know."

"No."

"Why?" she asked, her tone devoid of accusation and filled with sincerity.