Chapter 2
2
BEVERLY, 1993
11 years old
Blake’s nightmares lasted for months, each one more agonizing than the last. His screams ripped through the silence, yanking me from sleep with my heart slamming against my ribs. The first few times, I shot out of bed, my feet hitting the floor before I even knew what I was doing.
But I never made it past my door.
Deep down, I knew he wouldn’t want me to.
Over time, the screams faded into strangled cries, muffled before they could escape fully. I would lie there, listening to the rustle of his sheets, the creak of his bed as he shifted, the soft gasps of someone fighting to swallow their panic.
I don’t remember when I first knocked on the wall between our rooms. Maybe I was half-asleep, or maybe it was just something to fill the silence. But I did it—two soft, rhythmic taps. “It’s okay, Blake,” I whispered. “I’m here. It’s just a dream.”
For a long time, nothing. Just his breath, still uneven, still shaky. I wondered if he had even heard me, if he was still tangled up in whatever nightmare had wrapped itself around his mind.
My eyes fluttered shut. Maybe he was already slipping back into sleep. Maybe it had all been in my head.
Then, the faintest creak of his bed. A pause.
And then, a knock.
A breath of relief slipped from my lips.
It was so soft, I almost thought I imagined it.
But then it came again.
I smiled to myself.
From that moment on, it became our ritual. Every time I heard his breathing grow ragged in the middle of the night, the soft sounds of his struggle against the panic creeping in, I would knock. Two taps, just like before. Eventually, he would knock back. No words. No explanations. Just a quiet acknowledgment in the dark. A silent promise: You’re not alone.
It was the only time he let me in, even if just a little.
During the day, Blake moved through the world like someone afraid of being seen, afraid of taking up space. He was the silent observer, always blending into the background wherever he went, slipping in and out of spaces like a ghost that hadn’t quite figured out where it belonged.
Sometimes, I would catch him staring at my father when he thought no one was looking, his expression conflicted, as if he was waiting for something—maybe for the moment when all of this, the house, the safety, the quiet, would be taken away from him.
I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to be afraid. But words didn’t mean much when you’d spent your whole life being failed by them.
Blake rarely spoke unless spoken to, and even then, his responses were clipped, as if words cost him something he couldn’t afford to spend. Smiles were even rarer.
For that reason, he was home-schooled in the beginning. Mom, who worked as an administrative secretary at the police station with Dad, cut back her hours to teach him.
It was slow at first, agonizingly so. He barely knew how to read. Even simple words—cat, dog, sun—stumped him.
Some days, he stared at the book in front of him as if the letters were shifting under his gaze, playing a cruel trick on him. On those days, I’d hear Mom’s voice, softer than usual, whispering, “It’s okay, honey. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
She never pushed too hard, never lost her patience. She sat beside him for hours, her voice always encouraging.
Little by little, Blake started to learn. He read anything he could get his hands on, from Mom’s old college textbooks to the newspaper Dad brought home every evening. He copied words he didn’t understand into a small notebook, asking Mom their meanings in the evenings, absorbing each answer with quiet intensity. It was hunger, Mom told Dad one night after Blake had gone to bed.An insatiable hunger for knowledge. A desire to learn, to catch up, to prove—perhaps to himself more than anyone—that he wasn’t too far gone. It was as if, after years of neglect and inconsistency, his mind had finally been given permission to expand, and he refused to waste a second.
His mind worked like a machine, always churning, always thinking. He devoured books like they were oxygen, disappearing into them for hours at a time. He wrote in the margins, scribbled notes in tiny, precise handwriting, and sometimes, I’d catch him whispering passages under his breath, committing them to memory.
By the time autumn rolled around, Mom had nothing left to teach him at his grade level. Dad was proud. He wore it like a badge, his chest puffing out just a little more every time he talked about Blake. He looked at him the way a father should look at a son. And Blake looked back at him like he finally had a father.
They fit together so easily, as though they were two puzzle pieces that had been waiting for each other all along. It was strange, watching them. They had this way of communicating—silent, subtle. A nod, a glance, a shift in expression. They understood each other in a way I never understood my father. In a way I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t jealous. At first, my life didn’t change drastically—it just had someone else in it. Someone who woke up in the room next to mine, someone who sat beside me at dinner, who walked beside me wherever I went. I had no reason to be jealous, bitter, or feel left out. In some strange way, it almost felt like I had known him all along, even though I hadn’t.
Then came the realization that we’d never know Blake’s real birthday. We didn’t even know if he knew. His files listed one, but Dad said it was just a system guess—about as accurate as those horoscopes in the back of a magazine.
So Mom picked a day—October 17th. It wasn’t too close to the start of school, and it wasn’t so far from Christmas that it would be overshadowed. It fell right in the heart of autumn, when the air smelled of crisp leaves and the nights were just cold enough to pull out extra blankets.
At first, Blake was unimpressed. “It’s just another day,” he said when Mom first brought it up and suggested we celebrate it. But to us, it wasn’t just another day. For us, it was about giving him something no one else had ever given him—a day that was his.
We kept it small. He would’ve hated a big party, so it was just us; Mom, Dad, me, and him. Mom made his favorite dinner (he didn’t say what it was, so Mom just made everything he’d ever asked for). There were decorations, but not too many, because Dad said the last thing he wanted was to make Blake feel like he had to perform some role or live up to some expectation.
And there was cake, of course. A big chocolate one, covered in blue frosting because I swore blue was his favorite color (even though he never said so).
Blake looked confused when Mom brought the cake out. And when we all started singing, his face went blank.
He blinked. Looked at me. Looked at Dad.
I nudged him under the table. “Blow out the candle.”
For a second, I thought he wasn’t going to. Then, with a slow breath, he leaned forward and whoosh —the candle flickered out.
Mom clapped. Dad chuckled. I smiled.
But Blake just sat there, looking lost.
“Did I do it wrong?” he asked.
My smile faltered.
“No, you did it perfectly ,” Mom said. She reached forward, brushing his hair back like she did with me when I was younger. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”
Blake swallowed hard. Nodded once.
But I saw the way his ears turned red.
When it was time for presents, he hesitated. Stared at the small pile on the table like he didn’t know what to do with them. Like it was a potential trap.
“They’re for you, silly,” I said. “You open them.”
His fingers moved carefully as he unwrapped them, like he was afraid of ruining the paper.
The first gift was from Mom—a new set of books filled with history and science. Dad’s gift was more practical, but no less meaningful. He’d gotten him a sturdy leather notebook, the kind that looked old even when it was new, with Blake’s initials carefully engraved on the cover.
“For your thoughts,” Dad said simply.
And from me—an old pocket watch I found in a thrift store one afternoon with Mom, the kind with gears you could see moving inside. I had no idea why, but it reminded me of him.
Blake turned it over in his hands, watching the gears tick. “Oh,” he said, voice soft. Then, even softer, “Thank you, B.”
Mom teared up.
Dad cleared his throat.
I just grinned and said, “You’re welcome, birthday boy.”
Later that night, after the plates were cleared and the house had settled into its familiar quiet, Blake and I sat in the kitchen, eating leftover cake straight from the pan.
I was scraping frosting off the side with my finger, making sure to get the thickest, creamiest part, when I felt eyes on me. I glanced up to find Blake watching, his fork frozen midair, one brow arched in silent judgment.
“What?” I asked, feigning innocence as I licked the frosting off my fingertip.
“That’s against the rules.”
“What rules?” I stopped mid-motion, feeling a pout creep up on my face. “You used to eat spaghetti with your fingers, so now let me have cake with mine.”
He gave me a look—the kind that was one part amusement and two parts condescension.
So I did the only logical thing.
With the subtlest flick of my wrist, I swiped a tiny bit of blue frosting onto his nose. Blake’s eyes widened slightly, and he blinked at me, completely still, as if processing the audacity of it. The silence stretched, and I held my breath, wondering if I had gone too far.
Then—boom.
A flick of his fork, and there was frosting on my cheek.
“Oh, you’re dead,” I gasped, but my heart was pounding with excitement. “You have no idea what you just started!”
“Is that a threat, or a promise?”
The next thing I knew, we were at war. Cake flew across the kitchen. Forks became weapons. Napkins turned into shields. Blake, despite his usual careful nature, proved to have a remarkable talent for sneak attacks.
By the time Mom and Dad walked in, the kitchen was a disaster. There was cake on the counter, on the fridge, on the floor. Even on the ceiling, somehow.
Mom’s eyes scanned the wreckage. Her hands went to her hips in that familiar “I’m disappointed” stance I’d come to recognize.
A deep sigh escaped her lips. “Blake,” she said in her classic disappointed-mom voice. “Not in the kitchen, please.”
Blake stiffened, as if he was expecting to be yelled at.
Without even thinking, I grabbed a handful of frosting from the cake pan and smeared it on Mom’s forehead, a mischievous grin spreading across my face. “It was all me,” I said, my voice dripping with exaggerated seriousness. “Blake is innocent.”
Mom’s eyes widened in shock, and she gasped, “Beverly Price,” in that way she did when she was about to tell me off, but the words dissolved into laughter before she could finish.
“I can’t believe you two.” Her tone was more resigned than angry. “It’s going to take me hours to clean up this mess.”
Dad, standing silently by the doorway, just sighed and muttered something about kids.
As Mom turned to grab a towel from the counter, wiping her face with the kind of grace only she could manage even when covered in cake frosting, I saw it. That tiny, almost imperceptible smile on Blake’s face. It was so quick, so fleeting, that if I hadn’t been watching him so closely, I might’ve missed it entirely.
But there it was, like a little secret he didn’t want anyone to see.
It wasn’t long after that I began to realize Blake even looked like he belonged with us. With his light features that mirrored ours, he fit into the family to the point that strangers believed he was one of us. None of us ever bothered to correct them. Though, sometimes, I itched to. He was family, yes—but not by blood.
He wasn’t my “brother”.
He was my friend. The shadow I chased in the daylight.
It didn’t matter that he barely spoke to me; I filled the silence for both of us. I chattered about school, Tiffany’s latest crush, and how Mrs. Willow always called on me when I didn’t know the answer. Blake never interrupted, never added anything of his own. He just listened. He was there , and somehow, that was enough.
It became routine—our quiet companionship. Walking through the grocery store when Dad took us along, me arguing over which cereal was best while Blake pushed the cart in silence. Sitting under the oak tree in the backyard, me flipping through Mom’s magazines, him reading whatever book Mom had given him that week. Sometimes, I’d fall asleep there, the sun warming my skin, and when I woke up, he’d still be beside me, turning pages like time didn’t exist.
Did he know he was a shadow long before I named him one? That he slipped between the cracks of my life like dusk slipping into night—slow, inevitable, unshakable?
It wasn’t until much later that I realized I wasn’t just chasing him in the daylight—I was trying to hold on to something that would eventually slip away, no matter how tightly I gripped.
Because like all shadows, he was destined to disappear.
It was just a matter of when.