41. Cali
CALI
The kids don't want to go to bed.
I should have known they wouldn't. They can always tell when something's wrong with me. I put on my brightest voice and I made spaghetti, which is Isabella's favorite, and I let Hayden talk about hydrothermal vents for thirty-five straight minutes, but none of it was enough to fool them.
"You seem sad, Mommy," Isabella observes as I tuck her in.
"I'm just tired, baby."
She's not buying it. She looks up at me with those big brown eyes that are so much like mine.
"When can we see Mr. Ronan again?"
I have to look away. I pretend to fix the corner of her blanket so she can't see my face.
"I don't know, sweetheart," I say. "Maybe soon."
It's a clean, easy lie, and it comes out of my mouth without a hitch, which makes my self-loathing reach a whole new level. I promised I would never do to my kids what was done to me, that I would never look them in the eye and tell them something I knew wasn't true.
And here I am, doing exactly that.
"But he said he'd stay forever," she says. "He promised."
"I know he did, baby."
"Is he coming to say goodnight tonight?"
"Not tonight," I say. "Go to sleep now. I love you."
She frowns, but her eyes are already getting heavy. I kiss her forehead, turn off the lamp, and leave the seashell nightlight on. Then I go across the hall to Hayden's room.
Hayden is harder. He's nine, which means he's old enough to know that something big is happening and I'm not telling him what it is.
"Did you and Ronan have a fight?" he asks.
"Something like that."
"Was it a big fight or a little fight?"
I sit on the edge of his bed. "A big one, bud."
He thinks about that. "But you'll make up, right? You always tell me and Bella to make up when we fight."
"That's different, honey."
"How?"
I don't have an answer for him. Nor for any of it, really. So I just brush his hair back off his forehead and tell him it's late and he needs to sleep, and soccer camp is tomorrow, and he has to be rested.
"Goodnight, Mom," he says. He's already turning over, burrowing into his pillow.
"Goodnight, my whole heart."
I retreat to stand in the doorway for a minute and watch him breathe. Then I pull the door most of the way shut, leaving the crack of hallway light he still likes even though he'd never admit it.
From there, I don't make it very far.
I get exactly as far as the top of the stairs, the little landing between the two bedroom doors, before my legs give out and I drop down hard on the top step.
And I cry.
It comes all at once. But this is worse than my last cry, because this time I'm not crying about a spreadsheet or a company or a lie on a screen.
I'm crying about a man who got down on his knees on the floor of my daughter's bedroom and said goodnight to a caterpillar.
A man who read to my son about tube worms and asked thoughtful questions.
A man who made pancakes. A man who told me I was beautiful every single morning for weeks on end.
A man who was lying the whole time.
I cry for my kids, who asked about him tonight and will ask about him tomorrow and the day after, and I'll have to keep lying until they stop asking, until he becomes another man who was in their lives for a season and then wasn't, until they learn what I learned young, which is that people leave and there's usually nothing you could've done to make them stay.
I cry for myself, for the version of me that let herself believe it. The version that stripped off her dress in a tank hanging over the ocean because she finally felt weightless. The version that stopped looking for mirrors. The version that said I love you, too, Ronan Akov, and meant it.
That version is dead now.
I killed her in an elevator this afternoon and shut my eyes so I wouldn't have to watch her die.
I sit there on the top step with my face in my hands and I let it all come out, because the kids are asleep and there's no one to perform for, and I think, in some distant part of me, that this is the last of it.
I'll cry it out here on the stairs and then I'll get up and I'll be New Cali again, the one who fights, the one who builds the spreadsheet and salts the earth.
Just get it out. Just let it go. Then get up.
That's when my phone pings.
It's on the step beside me, screen-down. A soft little chime. Under any other circumstances, it wouldn't mean anything at all. A text. An email. A calendar reminder that the kids have camp tomorrow.
I turn it over and wipe my eyes so I can read it.
BioInfo Smart Scale — new weigh-in registered.
I stop breathing.
The world goes very quiet and very sharp, the way it did in a hotel room in Phoenix a lifetime ago, the way it did standing in my own bedroom looking at hospital corners folded at a forty-five-degree angle.
I know this feeling. And I know what it means.
It means someone stood on the scale in my bathroom.
The bathroom is at the end of the hall. Twenty feet from where I'm sitting.
I open the app with hands that don't feel like mine. The last entry blinks at the top of the list, fresh, the timestamp less than a minute old.
228.1 lbs.
I stare at the number.
I weigh what I weigh, and it isn't that. My mother is at her own house tonight. Todd is holed up somewhere amidst the ruins of his life. The kids don't weigh anything close to that, even combined, and both of them are asleep behind their doors, I just left them, I heard them breathing.
Two hundred and twenty eight pounds belongs to nobody who should be in my house.
The same notification of dread that opened this whole terrible story is opening it again, except this time there's not three thousand miles between me and the scale. It's right there. I'm right here.
And a stranger is standing in my house in the dark.
I don't call the police. By the time anyone arrives, whatever is about to happen will be long over.
I check the cameras instead. Todd's cameras, the ones he installed a lifetime ago so he could keep an eye on the babysitter and, I now understand, on me. The app takes forever to load. I watch the little spinning wheel and I feel my pulse in my teeth.
When it finally loads, every single feed is a black rectangle.
Camera 1 — offline.
Camera 2 — offline.
Camera 3 — offline.
Front Door — offline.
This isn't Ronan being romantic and insane.
This is someone who came to my house and turned off the eyes before they came inside.
I set the phone down on the step, very gently, so it doesn't make a sound. Then I get up.
I don't know how I'm this calm. Part of me is screaming, a terrified wail trapped in my throat, but my hands are steady and my feet are sneaky, and I think that must be the same cold, fanged thing that showed up the day I smelled Paula's perfume in the car line taking back over.
I go down the stairs, one at a time, hugging the wall where the boards don't creak, because I've lived in this house long enough to know every squeak in every plank. I keep my breathing shallow. My whole body is one held breath.
The kitchen is dark. The knife block sits on the counter.
I slide the butcher's knife out of its slot, same as I did earlier when Todd knocked.
It's the biggest one I own, but even still, I know it's not enough.
It's for cutting a chicken. Against whatever weighs 228 pounds and walked into my house and killed the cameras, it's a joke. It's a flimsy toy.
But I have two children asleep upstairs. So I take it anyway.
I creep back toward the stairs. My plan, if I have one, is to get back up to the landing and insert myself between the stranger and my kids' doors, because whatever else happens, whatever this is, they are not getting past me.
They can do whatever they want to me.
They are not touching my babies.
I go up the way I came down, board by board, knife held flat against my thigh. Every shadow at the top of the stairs is a person until I look at it long enough to see it isn't.
I'm almost there. Six steps from the landing. The bathroom door at the end of the hall is open, and the darkness inside it has a different quality to it than the rest of the hall. Thicker, denser. Like something's standing in it.
Then my phone rings.
It goes off in my back pocket, vibrating like a droning insect. I fumble for it just to make it stop, so whoever has broken into my house doesn't hear it, and the fastest way to do that is to answer. Which is the only reason I hear:
"Kotyonok."
Ronan's voice.
But it's not his voice, not like how I once knew it. Every time I've ever heard Ronan Akov speak, there's been control in it, the sound of a man who has never once in his life been afraid of what's coming next because he's usually the thing that's coming.
This isn't that.
This is the Ronan with the fear in his eyes.
"Listen to me very carefully," he says. "Do not—"
And then the sentence ends.
I don't know how it ends. Maybe the line dies, the connection dropping into nothing, just like the cameras, everything in this house going dark one thing at a time.
Or maybe it's the sound behind me.
A floorboard. The third one down from the landing, the one I know squeaks, the one I carefully passed over on my way up.
Someone else just stepped on it.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN BOOK 2 OF THE AKOV brATVA DUET,
CRUEL KISS!