21. Jo
— ? —
Jo
Nick moves us into his apartment the same night the story breaks.
He doesn’t ask. He shows up at my door with the controlled look that means he’s holding something violent very still, and he says, Pack a bag for you and Rory.
You’re staying with me until this is over.
For once I don’t argue. His building has a doorman, cameras, a private elevator that needs a key.
My building has a welcome mat where threatening notes used to appear.
Rory thinks it’s an adventure. He bounces on the enormous guest bed, declares the city view the best in the universe, and falls asleep mid-sentence with Professor Chomps tucked under his chin. I lie awake next to Nick for two nights, listening to a city that has gone too quiet.
Matthias doesn’t call. He doesn’t text. The silence is worse than noise.
On the third night, the silence ends.
It’s past two in the morning when the sound comes. Not a knock. A crash, glass and splintering wood, from the direction of the private entrance that’s not supposed to open for anyone without a key.
Nick is out of bed before I’m fully awake, a fast certain shadow moving through the dark. Stay here. Lock the door. Call the police. And then he’s gone down the hall.
I don’t stay. I never could.
My phone is already in my hand, the operator’s voice already in my ear, my bare feet already carrying me toward the only thing that matters. Rory. I have to get to Rory.
Matthias is in the living room. I know the shape of him even drunk, even wild, even with his shirt half untucked and his knuckles bleeding from whatever he broke to get in.
The smell reaches me first, whiskey and something sour underneath.
His eyes when they find me aren’t the cold, smug eyes from the conference room.
These are worse. There’s nothing behind them at all.
You, he says. You did this to me.
Matthias. You need to leave. My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to. The operator is still talking in my ear. I don’t hang up. The police are already coming.
You ruined me. He sways forward a step. My picture in every paper in the country.
My partners, my friends, my whole life, gone, because you could not stand to watch me be happy.
His face twists into something almost like grief, then curdles past it.
So I am taking my son. Tonight. He is mine.
He is the one thing of mine you do not get to keep.
And there it is. The truth he has been circling for two months, finally said out loud.
He doesn’t want Rory. He has never once asked what Rory likes, never asked his middle name, never looked at my son as anything but a card to play.
He wants the thing that will hurt me most. That’s all Rory has ever been to him. Leverage with a heartbeat.
He is not a thing you own. I’m moving now, putting my body in the mouth of the hallway, between Matthias and Rory’s door. You will not touch him.
Mom?
Rory’s voice, small and thin, from the dark behind me. He’s in the hallway in his dinosaur pajamas, Professor Chomps dangling from one hand, his eyes huge and wet and frightened in a way I have never seen, not even at the hospital. Mom, who is that? Why is he yelling? I’m scared.
Go back in your room, baby. I don’t take my eyes off Matthias. Lock the door like we practiced. Right now.
But Matthias has seen him. And he lunges.
Nick comes out of nowhere.
He hits Matthias mid-stride and the two of them go down hard into the glass coffee table, and the sound it makes shattering under their weight is one I’ll hear for the rest of my life.
Brothers tangled on the floor, fists and fury and a lifetime of everything their parents broke between them, and I’m screaming into the phone for the police to hurry, please, hurry, while I drag Rory back and shove him behind me.
Matthias gets a hand around a long shard of the broken table.
He swings it. Nick twists, but not fast enough, and the glass opens a bright line across his forearm and his temple all at once, red, so much red, and for one white silent second I’m certain I’m about to watch the man I love die on his own living room floor.
Then Nick, bleeding, gets his weight over his brother and pins him to the floor and doesn’t let go.
It’s over, he says, low and ragged, blood running into his eye. It’s over, Matthias. You’re done.
The police come four minutes later. It feels like four hours. They take Matthias out in handcuffs, drunk and weeping and still shouting that it was my fault, all of it, while a paramedic presses gauze to Nick’s arm and Rory sobs into my shoulder hard enough to shake us both.
Is the bad man gone? he keeps asking. Is he gone? Is Nick going to be okay? Mom, is Nick going to be okay?
He’s gone, baby. I press my mouth to his hair and hold him together and watch them fold my ex-husband into the back of a squad car through the shattered doorway. He’s gone. And Nick is going to be just fine.
For once, telling Rory the truth and telling him what he needs to hear are the same thing.
Nick gets seventeen stitches, eleven in his arm and six at his hairline, and a concussion the doctors want to watch overnight. He holds my hand the whole time with the arm that’s not ruined and tells me, over and over, that he’s fine, that we’re fine, that it’s finally, actually over.
Rory falls asleep in the hospital chair near dawn, Professor Chomps standing guard on his chest.
I don’t sleep. I sit between the two of them, the man and the boy, the entire of my heart in one small room, and I let myself understand that we lived. That the thing I have been bracing for since the day I walked into that conference room finally came for us, and we’re still here.
Whatever happens next, we walk into it on our feet.