Tuesday morning, Salma called Austin. She never called in the morning—she preferred evenings, when she'd had time to think about what she wanted to say.
"Are you sick?" she asked without preamble.
Austin was at his office, sitting at a desk he'd rented in a shared workspace downtown. He'd decided to work somewhere neutral, somewhere that wasn't his apartment or the Dre family compound.
"No, Mom. I'm fine," he said.
"You look tired," Salma said. "Every time I see you, you look more tired. And yesterday at dinner, you barely ate anything."
"I've just been busy," Austin said. "Work stuff."
"You've been busy for years," Salma said. "This is different. Your eyes look different. Hollow, almost."
"I'm fine," Austin repeated, but his voice came out defensive.
"Don't lie to me," Salma said quietly. "I'm your mother. I know when something's wrong."
Austin felt something catch in his throat. For a moment, he considered telling her. Just laying it all out—the diagnosis, the two years, the reason he'd been living differently. But he couldn't do that to her. She'd spend every moment worrying, and he didn't want that.
"I promise you're not," he said carefully. "I'm just adjusting to a new lifestyle. I've been working too hard for too long, and now I'm taking time to actually live. That's all."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"If something was seriously wrong," Salma said slowly, "you'd tell me, right? You wouldn't just... hide it?"
"Of course I would tell you," Austin lied. "But there's nothing to tell."
After he hung up, Austin sat at his desk for twenty minutes without moving. His mother had come too close to the truth. How long could he maintain this fiction before someone figure it out?
His phone buzzed. A text from Lee: "Meeting you at the office in 10. We need to go pick up those contracts from Kosov's firm."
Austin gathered his things and headed to the lobby to meet him.