Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mom slumped against me. I staggered and grabbed for the chair—kicking the last tooth across the room. Hadrian’s arms wound between us, wrestling my mother away from me with a firm grasp. The remnants of shattered teeth crunched under my heel, stuck to my shoe.
“Let me go!” Mom screeched. Her words slurred, the sudden, narrow-minded focus she’d been grasping starting to slip. Outside, the distant sound of police sirens grew louder.
“Stop fighting,” Hadrian growled, mouth curved in a pained frown. The veins in his arms protruded the longer he held her still.
“You,” Mom snapped. She flung her head back. Narrowly missed Hadrian’s nose. He jutted his chin up, keeping the fragile parts of his face away. “You’re why she ain’t with Ivan, aren’t you?”
Hadrian’s jaw feathered but he didn’t speak.
She mumbled under her breath, limbs calming, only to shove and claw again.
My hands shook. I picked up a few of the sharper items she’d tried to pocket, careful where I stepped, while Mom struggled against Hadrian. He ground his teeth and held fast while she kicked and scratched, but nothing broke his composure.
I couldn’t tell if it was me, the room, or if it was Mom’s screaming, but my blood sizzled in my veins. We’d found the teeth. And here Mom was, in the house, falling apart.
This was everything I’d never wanted.
Everything had just been perfect.
Tears welled in my eyes. I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood and gathered the trinkets into my shirt, then picked up the broken teeth parts and the box and stuffed them into my pocket. I trembled from head to foot. Where was the last one?
Mom groaned, slumped out of my peripheral. She used her weight against Hadrian, dropping limp, but he held her up anyway. Her shirt road higher, higher, until a sliver of skin shown around her midriff. Her hipbones poked out over her belt loops.
I stilled. The skin was bruised, almost translucent. Little marks all over her skin.
It hit me, then. She wasn’t just my mother. She was struggling. She was human, and she’d made choices, and those choices were wrong, sure. But she was no different from me or Hadrian or Emma or Sayer.
Her choices were bad choices, and they had consequences. But seeing her, as an outsider, slowly inhaling the whole picture instead of just the section of life where she’d failed me—she’d probably been failed somewhere, too. And she was hurting.
It wasn’t just people that hurt people.
Hurt people hurt people.
Dad was right. She needed to help herself. I couldn’t expect someone that couldn’t take care of themselves to feel sorry for never taking care of me. As a child, I was failed, but as an adult, I knew Mom was broken, and I couldn’t change that.
She’d have to.
Sharp, firm voices from the front door. “Colleton County Police Department.”
“Mom, they’re here to help you,” I said, low. Hadrian grunted when she slapped a heel on his foot.
“No!” she spat. “You just wanna get rid of me! That’s all you’ve ever wanted, Landry, is everything for yourself!”
Her words bounced off me, one by one, and sunk into the floor.
The next thirty minutes were a blur.
One of the officers removed my mom from the house with Hadrian’s help while Emma and Sayer’s voices murmured from the front.
Once the officers documented the items Mom tried to take, one of them spoke to me.
One of them took pictures of my injuries while another took notes, another mentioned a restraining order—or maybe it was Emma, because she floated in and out a few times—another asked about us coming down to the station in the morning.
And still, like a gnat circling my head, all I could think about was the tooth. Here, in the room, on the floor, somewhere.
By the time everyone was questioned, statements given, and contact information collected, it was pitch black outside, not a star in sight.
All the lights on the first floor were on.
Sayer’s nose was crusted with blood. My cheek was swollen.
The lone remaining officer scribbled in a notepad, forehead creased.
“I’m going to go get a pizza. We need it,” Emma murmured.
I wilted. It felt so long ago that I’d come home to the three of them in the living room.
Emma pointed to Sayer, then Hadrian. “Cheese? Pepperoni?”
“I’ll go with you. We’ll get a few, so it’ll be a surprise,” Sayer said. His glasses sat crooked, the frames cracked. A red welt had spread over the side of his neck where he’d been elbowed. “You good here?”
I hugged myself, closest to where the teeth had dropped. “I’m good.”
Sayer pointed to Hadrian. His only answer was a nod.
“All right, we’ll return.” Sayer gave a two-finger salute and followed Emma out into the hallway, leaving Hadrian and I with the officer. Their voices faded like a lantern in the night, followed by the click of the front door.
“Good people,” the last cop murmured. He scratched something else on his notepad.
Hadrian rubbed his palm over his chin while the officer jotted down the last of his notes.
He was my height, stocky, with kind eyes.
I tried not to think about the little piece of history in my possession, burning a hole in my pocket.
“Think that should be all, for right now.” He gave a soft smile.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“Much thanks,” Hadrian said at the same time.
The officer turned to leave and rounded one of the covered end tables that I’d set to the side maybe a week ago. “I’ll get out of y’all’s hair, then. Just holler if you need anything, all right? We’ll keep you in the loop if she posts bail and—”
A crunch.
My hand covered my mouth.
The pit in my stomach turned into an open maw, unhinging wide, and dropped straight to my toes.
The officer paused, bent down. “Shoot. Done stepped on something. Sorry ’bout that.”
I wiped my hand down my neck. Glanced to Hadrian, who had turned still. He didn’t so much as inhale as the officer excused himself and left the room.
No one spoke. The front door opened with a light gust of wind. It rustled the strewn items in the foyer before a heavy click came, and the officer’s footsteps echoed down the front steps.
“Hadrian,” I whispered, hesitant. “We found the teeth.”
He grunted—again. A pained noise. I turned when the first chime came—as if the grandfather clock was ready and waiting. Midnight already.
I slipped around the furniture and bent to the floor. Sure enough, right by the floor-to- ceiling bookcase, was a broken tooth. A fully developed adult molar, all four points crushed and ground into the wide floorboards.
Tears welled again, but this time, they slid down my cheeks. Dripped from my chin. Pressure built from the base of my spine, all the way up and around my lungs. Something was wrong—I knew it, just like I knew it when I followed Mom into the house—
“Landry,” Hadrian choked.
I stood and whirled. He grabbed the back of the closest chair with one hand, the other grabbing at his chest. Right over his heart.
“Wait—No, sit down. What’s wrong? What hurts?” Heart attack, my first thought blared, just like Aunt Denny, but I knew better.
The blood around his chest bloomed like an opening morning glory.
It was thick, soaked through the fabric before I scrambled over to him, that’s how much there was.
It painted his shirt, turned the ivory cotton to a thick maroon.
I started with the buttons at his neck, ripped the tail of his shirt from his trousers. A few buttons popped away.
“What a time to undress me,” he said, pained. Both hands grasped the back of the chair.
“This isn’t funny.” My voice wavered. This wasn’t funny at all.
It was happening—I knew it. The air turned heady, sharp with the scent of blood as I yanked the shirt off his arms, down his back. Earth tangled with it, soil, musk. Dust.
The smell of an old house.
“It hurts,” he choked.
I balled up the shirt and tried to turn him. Blood streaked his skin, my fingers, seeped into the beds of my nails and the crevices of my palms. It trickled down to his trousers, soaked into the heavy fabric of his pants.
“Sit,” I whispered. My words grew soggy, like I was drowning. Maybe I was drowning. “Let me try and stop it—I can use your shirt—”
“There’s no point, Landry, and you know it,” he urged.
He didn’t sit, no matter how I pushed at his shoulders.
He just stood there, bent over the back of the chair as if it pained him to straighten.
He was too tall, and my hands shook too much.
I was like a fluttering moth around a dying animal, a mere nuisance and nothing more.
I was a faint blip in his decades of existence—because it was ending. The remains were here, broken, in my pockets.
A moth couldn’t save a beast. All it could do was watch.
I wedged myself between him and the chair, shirt balled at the ready anyway.
The scar that had looked so healed before, purpled and raised, had flattened—but the center of his scar had changed.
It hung open, revealing the thickest sliver of heart beneath.
And so, so much blood. It poured in streams, and any other time I might have balked, might have stepped away when I saw it drip to the floor, but I didn’t.
Because the blood wasn’t evaporating like it had before.
It hit the floor in rhythmic splats. A sink left on, dripping into the basin. Tap, tap, tap.
The last of the grandfather clock chimes echoed through the house. That urgency I’d felt the night I’d heard him crying, like a pressure on my sternum, filled the room, like water rising in a flood. Soon, it would reach my neck, my mouth, cover my nose and my ears. It would wash everything away.
“At least let me try,” I muttered. Tears trickled over my mouth. Salt coated my tongue. “Please. The blood is—”
“Real,” he gasped. Hot air rushed over my cheek. “It’s real. I cannot—there is a pain—” He twitched. His shoulder hiked to his ear, his head bent in. He hissed. “Don’t. Don’t touch me.”
I hesitated a moment too long.