Chapter 39
Have you ever wondered how many seconds are in a full week?
I had never stared so many hours at a clock until this week. Kaito got a message through the Bishop to me about my deadline.
“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”
His words weighed heavily on me.
This entire week, I dodged Gloria while trying to do my duties.
Bishop Matthews had taken over duties for the “Illness that ravaged our priest.”
Gloria peppered me with questions every single morning, but luckily, Bishop’s hatred of me allowed me to hide in a corner until the day’s end. Jedidiah stayed at the parish and waited for me. I told him I would stay with him and forgo my hours at the church, but he insisted that I go.
“Just because my life has spun off its axis, doesn’t mean the world followed. You have to continue living, Sayuri. Dodging work will not help you get your son returned.”
I couldn’t argue with him.
He was right.
He may not know why he was right, but I would never get Jujiro back if I didn’t pretend life kept moving.
The kitchen smelled like garlic and rice.
I tried to make the parish the safe kind of domestic lie, and I’d been clinging to this illusion all week.
I stirred the pot slowly, listening to the house breathe with me.
The old pipes ticked when I turned on the water, and the faint creak of floorboards created a type of song.
Whooooosh.
The muted sound of water starting upstairs startled me.
The shower?
I froze for half a second, my spoon hovering, and my heart lifting and dropping all at once.
He’d done it.
“Good job, ōkami. I am so proud of you.”
He is trying.
Jed hadn’t gone near the bathroom since the night of the attack. Too many echoes awakened and taunted him from the tile and steam.
There were too many memories that couldn’t be scrubbed away, and so he had asked me to help tend to his wounds without stripping off his clothes again.
I’d been bathing him with cloths like he was made of glass, careful not to look surprised when he flinched from shame or when he apologized for needing me.
I turned the stove down and waited, counting my breaths.
One.
This is good for him. It means he is trying. There is still a part of him that wants to survive.
Two.
He will call for you if he needs you.
Three.
Do not rush up those stairs and ruin his progress.
Four.
Breathe. He is okay.
Five.
He still needs you.
When the water settled into a steady rhythm, and I didn’t feel a smash on the ground from him falling, I told myself this was good. This is progress. He deserved to feel clean without feeling coddled.
So why do I want him to call me so badly?
The food finished quicker than I expected, and habit took over. I wiped my hands on a towel and climbed the stairs carefully, but in a way that allowed him to know I was coming. It was the way I’d learned to move around him—no sudden noises, and making my presence known.
The bathroom door was fogged over, steam slipping through the cracks and tickling my bare toes.
I knocked once, softly.
“Jed?” My voice stayed gentle. “Dinner’s ready, ōkami. It’s your favorite.”
No answer.
I hesitated. He sometimes went still like this, lost somewhere inside himself. I knew disassociation like it was a part of me.
“Jedidiah?”
Staying at the door, I inhaled and counted again.
Crash.
I reached for the door without thinking, afraid he slipped or something scared him. The door slid open, and I walked forward, trying to understand what the sound was.
Everything shattered in that moment.
It was the mirror. I stood frozen, staring at my broken reflection and the blood coating the glass.
I didn’t see him coming.
He came at me like a cornered animal.
It all happened so fast.
His body came from behind me, and his hands were around my throat in an instant. The shattered mirror slammed into my face, and the air knocked clean out of my lungs in a sharp, useless gasp.
“Jed—!”
The towel slipped from my hands and hit the floor, but I didn’t hear it over the roaring in my ears.
His eyes weren’t his…
He looked lost, looking not at me but through me.
They were empty and wild, and in his haunted mind, he saw something else entirely.
Not me.
Not his Mortifera.
Water dripped down his body in the reflection, highlighting his healing injuries.
I clawed at his wrists, my instincts screaming, while my vision tunneled to pure survival. Pain flared in my throat, and my eyes swelled, hot and bright, where his grip tightened even further. My feet barely touched the ground, and panic exploded in my chest, raw and blinding.
“Please—Stop!” My voice came out broken.
That word.
Stop.
It brought him back to me.
My ōkami’s face changed in an instant—horror crashing through whatever had possessed him to fight.
His hands released me like he’d touched an open flame, and he fell backward, smashing into the shower floor.
I slid down the wall, coughing violently, trying to drag air into lungs that burned like they’d been scorched.
He stayed where he was, naked and shaking, his eyes wide and wet and already ruined.
“Oh God…Sayuri—fuck…” He reached out in front of me, his hands hovering, afraid to touch. “I-I didn’t…I swear. I didn’t know what I was—I didn’t know you. I-I’m a monster. I-I…”
I couldn’t speak yet.
My throat screamed every time I tried, just to assure him I was alive. I pressed my palm to my chest and focused on breathing even if it was ragged.
He started crying silently, and the tears matched the blood leaking from a gash in my head from the glass.
“I hurt you,” he whispered. “I fucking hurt you. I don’t want to be me. I don’t know who I am. I fucking can’t!”
I shook my head slowly, even as my body trembled. When my voice finally came back, it was hoarse but steady.
“You didn’t mean to,” I said. “I am alive, Jedidiah.”
He stayed silent, his eyes following the blood droplets falling to the floor.
I reached up and touched the wound, dizziness settling in as the adrenaline wore off slowly.
“But this—” I swallowed, gathering courage. “This can’t happen again, ōkami. I agreed to care for you here and not a hospital, and I will not leave you…”
My words broke him, but it was the truth he needed to hear.
He folded in on himself, his forehead resting on his knees, with his hands digging into his hair like he wanted to tear the memories out by force.
“I’m not safe,” he said. “I’m not fucking safe to be around. I thought I was getting better. I am so sorry, baby. I can’t have you be around me when I can’t trust myself.”
“You are safe,” I said immediately. “But healing alone isn’t working anymore for either of us.”
He looked up at me then, his wild eyes red and terrified, like a child who finally realized the monster was inside the house.
And that monster was in his own reflection.
“What if I hurt you again?” he said. “What if next time I don’t stop? I can’t even look at myself, Sayuri. That’s why I broke the mirror. I. Can’t. See. Myself.”
I reached out slowly, deliberately, letting him see every movement before my fingers brushed his cheek.
He flinched, but he didn’t pull away.
“That’s why we get help,” I said softly, scooting forward to him, and allowing myself to feel his warmth so he could feel mine.
We were just pieces of glass with so many cracks, neither of us knowing what would finally cause the entire mirror to shatter.
“Real help. Not hiding. Not pretending and not letting the church bury this.”
His jaw clenched at the word church.
“Gloria keeps calling,” he muttered. “The Bishop’s pissed that I won’t give him answers. I’m supposed to be strong. I’m supposed to—”
“You’re supposed to be alive,” I cut in, sharper than I meant to be. Then I tried again, softer. “You’re supposed to be human and give yourself the grace you’ve given for so long to others. You can’t do this by yourself anymore.”
“I have you.”
I smiled, softly, turned my bloody hand over for him to view.
“I am not enough, my ōkami.”
He nodded once in defeat, holding my hand and kissing my palm.
“I’m sorry. I will get us help,” he said, and then repeated himself like he was convincing not only me but his own will.
“I’ll call Jerry,” he said quietly. “If anyone…if anyone can help me not lose my fucking mind—it’s him. He’s seen me like this before.”
Before?
Has he been…?
I let him cradle my head. His hands were so soft and gentle, yet the marks blooming around my throat showed he was not weak, and that gentleness was a choice. “I’ll stay right here. I told you. I will not leave you.”
“Anata no sonzai no yorokobi o kanjirareru no nara, itami ga atte mo kamawanai. Anata no yorokobi ga nakereba, soko ni wa itami shika nai kara.”
“I would rather feel pain and have the joy of your presence, because without your joy, there is only pain.”
He reached for his cell phone with shaking hands, retrieving it from the discarded pants pocket on the ground.
For the first time since Kaito and his men broke him, Jed didn’t try to carry the weight and pain alone.
There were a few moments of silence, and he sighed.
I could physically see his shoulders, lower, that weight lessening with the voice on the phone.
“Hey Jer…I need to talk to you.”