Chapter 20 Elijah
Elijah
The car is too small for all of us.
She sits beside me, her head turned to the window, her profile lit in quick flashes by the orange wash of passing streetlights. Her face is pale, her body tight with exhaustion, but her silence is louder than any scream.
I grip the wheel harder than I should, not because I need control of the car but because I need control of myself. Every instinct inside me begs to reach across the space, to catch her hand, to prove she’s still flesh and bone and not the ghost I thought I married.
But I don’t.
I can’t.
Not yet.
Claire’s presence in the backseat is a blade pressed to the base of my skull. I don’t need to look at her to feel it.
The wife of a man who’s buried more enemies than I’ve prayed for forgiveness. Her silence is deliberate, a scare tactic—one wrong move, and I won’t see tomorrow… and it’s working.
But I also don’t care. If the price of sitting in this car with Lottie is my looming death if I even so much as breathe near her wrong, I’ll carry it gladly.
The city thins, buildings bleeding into the coastline, and the air sharpens with salt.
The moon is low over the water, and I remember every fragment of her that was shaped by the ocean.
She used to tell me the waves made her feel small in the best way.
Insignificant, but safe, like the world was vast enough to hold all her hurt.
That’s why I turn the wheel toward the shore.
I don’t ask if she wants to come with me. If she says no, I’ll drive to the ends of the earth in silence.
The café sits squat and tired against the sand, neon buzzing weakly above its windows. I kill the engine.
For a moment, I don’t move. My hands stay glued to the wheel, my chest locked, until I risk a glance at her.
She hasn’t run.
“Come on,” I say softly, opening my door.
She hesitates, but when I step out into the night, I hear hers open too. The slam of it is quiet, but my heart still stutters.
Claire follows, her heels sharp against the asphalt, her presence reminding me this is not a date.
Not a reunion.
This is a test, and if I fail, she’ll end me before Lottie ever gets the chance to decide for herself.
Inside, the café smells like burnt espresso and salt. The linoleum floor squeaks under our shoes. The place is nearly empty, a few stragglers hunched over mugs, the hum of the ocean bleeding through the thin walls.
I let Lottie slide into a booth by the window, her eyes fixed on the dark horizon, and only when she’s settled do I take the seat across from her.
Claire doesn’t sit. She leans against the counter across the room like a guard dog, her gaze never leaving me, but she orders for us.
Lottie’s hands wrap around the mug the waitress sets down. She doesn’t drink. She just holds it like it might anchor her to this moment, like if she lets go, she’ll drift out with the waves again.
My chest aches.
“I need to tell you something,” I say, the words sandpaper in my throat.
Her eyes flicker to mine, exhausted. “What more could there be?”
“I built you a mausoleum.” The words scrape out, heavy.
“Stone. Real stone. Quiet. Somewhere they couldn’t touch you, couldn’t reduce you.
And every Thursday, I go there, well used to before we were sent here, and I would sit on the cold floor and talk to you.
About everything and nothing. About what I wished I could’ve said before you…
before you jumped.” My hands shake against the table, but I don’t hide it.
“I buried your backpack and shoes there. So it wasn’t empty. So you weren’t just… gone.”
Silence. The only sound is the crash of waves outside.
Finally, her voice—raw, broken. “Why would you do that?”
I should look away. I don’t. “Because I didn’t know how else to keep you.”
Her eyes flash, pain cutting through them like lightning.
“I needed you to matter,” I whisper. “Even if you were dead. Especially if you were dead, if I let you disappear, I would disappear too. And I couldn’t—” My hands shake against the table. I ball them into fists. “I couldn’t survive that.”
Her tears glint in the light, but when she speaks, her voice slices. “Apologies aren’t enough. Graves and promises—none of it is enough. You can’t erase it. You can’t make it untrue.”
Her words hit harder than Archer’s fist. I nod anyway, swallowing the iron taste of shame.
“I know,” I rasp. “I know, Mouse. I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t expect you to look at me and forget everything I remind you of. But I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll spend the rest of my life paying for it, even if I never clear the debt.”
She stares at me, like she’s trying to read the shape of my soul and finding nothing but cracked porcelain.
“Why?” she says finally, the single word full of every small, shattered thing she ever was.
“Why all of this, Elijah? Why make a monument when you made my life a nightmare? You bullied me. You made school hell. You were part of it… You told me you liked me broken—why would I believe anything from you now?”
The question lands like a punch. I should have expected it; I deserve it. I look at her, and everything else seems insignificant.
I can feel the heat rise in my throat, the memory-ash of younger, meaner things scraping the inside of me.
I taste bile when I think of the boy I was. I close my eyes because the images come too fast—the blood-soaked clothes, the crowd’s laugh, her on her knees, the way I felt powerful for five seconds before the emptiness came back like a tide.
“We were raised to say yes,” I say, the sentence tasting false even as it leaves my mouth.
“Not in words. In examples. In silence. In the way men around me—my father—took, and no one stopped them. You learn what power looks like by watching it used without consequence. You learn that the world will let you. So you push. You test. You take small things to see if anyone will call you on it.”
I swallow. Her jaw works; she looks like she’s trying to piece something that shouldn’t be whole.
“But there’s more,” I say, because there always is more, and the worst part is the part I have to admit.
“There’s a sick part of me that liked it.
Not the whole time—never the whole time—but sometimes.
I’ll be honest, because you deserve honesty: there were moments when seeing you break under my words felt like power.
It felt like control. It felt like my hands could keep the rest of the world quiet if I could make you small enough.
” I hate the sound of myself saying it. My own voice recoils.
“It was how I made myself feel whole, by stealing pieces of you I never had any right to.”
She flinches, like I struck her, and her tears make her eyes shine like broken glass. “You sound just like him,” she whispers, almost to herself, and I don’t argue.
Because she’s right.
I sounded like him.
I acted like him in ways that haunt me.
“I did,” I admit. “I acted like him. And realizing it… knowing I caused your pain, and sometimes found satisfaction in it… It nearly broke me. It made me the same monster I swore I would never be. And I hate myself for it every day.”
“So now what? I just forgive you? Move on from all of this and act like your perfect little wife?” Her voice holds more venom than I’ve ever heard.
“I’ll thank you for saving Peter… for giving him a chance to finally be sober…
but this? This I’ll never thank you for because it’s just another prison. ”
“I don’t expect forgiveness, Mouse. I never have.
I… I’m telling you all of this because you deserve to know that, while you thought no one cared, I did.
I cared when it was far too late to tell you that I did, but you were always my Mouse.
The girl I protected… until I didn’t,” I finally rasp out, the words trying to lodge in my throat.
“I’m your husband, yes, and you are my wife.
Whatever you decide, that’s what I’ll do, but I only want a chance to prove to you that I’m no longer the monster I was back then. ”
“You will always be that monster, Elijah. The boy who forced me to my knees just to prove he had power over me. It took me a long time to realize that that was never power. You were a coward… You were selfish. You all stole pieces of me for your own reasons, but I won’t let you anymore.
You want me to be your wife? You want any chance of forgiveness?
Then you stay in the shadows until I tell you you can come into the light. ”
“Anything, Lottie. Whatever you need…”
She doesn’t respond at first. Her gaze stays fixed on the waves rolling outside, the rhythm of the surf syncing with her silent evaluation of me.
I feel her measuring every inch of my presence, weighing whether I am a threat or something she can tolerate. Then, ever so slightly, her fingertips hover near mine on the table. Not touching me, but close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off her skin.
I don’t move. I won’t.
I wait.
I wait until she invites me in, until she decides I can exist near her without fear.
Claire shifts finally, stepping closer, but her voice stays low, quiet, deliberate. “I mean what I say, Elijah. One wrong move…”
I incline my head. “I understand.”
Her eyes say more than her words ever could. She watches, and she will act if I fail.
I feel the weight of it pressing against my chest, but I accept it because I don’t deserve anything more than that.
We sit there, side by side, listening to the sea.
I don’t reach for her.
I don’t speak unless she speaks first.
I am her shadow, her guardian.
My presence is silent, heavy with all the apologies and promises I cannot put into words. I don’t want to overwhelm her. I want her to reclaim the space I have longed to fill with stone and apologies, the space that has been hers alone.
Every few minutes, I catch the smallest movements—a shift in her posture, the tightening of her jaw, the flicker of a tear on her cheek. Each one drives the ache in my chest deeper, a combination of longing, shame, and devotion that I cannot shake.
When Lottie finally shifts in her seat, letting out a long exhale that trembles with all the tension she has been holding, I mirror it.
I promise myself, silently, with the roar of the waves pressed against the windows, that I will be her shadow just like she’s asked me to be.
I will protect her.
I will speak only if she calls my name.
I will hold her space, even when she hates me, even when she fears me, even when she wants to disappear again.
And I swear, with everything I have left, that I will not fail her again.