Chapter 29 Ledger
Ledger
Ash doesn't want to go inside. He says it once, quietly, from the back seat of the truck as we pull into the lot of a complex that looks exactly like the kind of place Marcus would choose, presentable from the outside, cheap where it counts.
The building is beige with iron railings that need paint, the kind of place that photographs well in a listing and shows its age in person.
Ash is staring at it through the window with an expression I've seen on horses being led back into stalls where they've been hurt, the eyes tracking every corner, every shadow, every exit before the body commits to moving forward.
"I'll wait here," he says.
I turn in the passenger seat and look at him. He's wearing one of Teague's shirts and a pair of jeans we bought him yesterday at the farm supply because the man has been living in our clothes for nearly two weeks and deserved something that wasn't three sizes too large.
His hands are in his lap, his fingers picking at the skin around his thumbnail, the nervous habit he falls into when he's trying to talk himself out of fear.
He's not scared of Marcus. He's scared of the apartment, of what it felt like to live in it, of stepping back into the outline of the person he was before he climbed into my father's truck on a dark road.
I lean between the seats and press my mouth to his forehead. His eyes close and his shoulders drop half an inch, the tension leaving him in a slow exhale that warms my wrist where it rests against the headrest.
"We'll call if we need to find something," I tell him. "Keep the doors locked."
"Ledger." His hand catches my wrist before I pull back. His dark eyes hold mine with that particular earnestness that makes my chest tight every time he turns it on me. "Thank you. For doing this."
"Don't thank me yet. I haven't seen the apartment." I crack a grin, letting him know I’m joking before climbing out of the car.
Teague and Cass are already at the tailgate, pulling out the flattened boxes we picked up at the hardware store this morning.
Teague stacks four under his arm and heads for the stairs.
Cass grabs the packing tape, a roll of garbage bags, and follows.
I take the rest of the boxes and a marker, and shut the tailgate.
The apartment is on the second floor, number 207, the brass numbers slightly crooked on the door.
Teague has the spare key Ash pressed into his hand at breakfast this morning without looking at it, like the metal was too hot to hold.
The door opens into a living room that tells me everything I need to know about the last two years of Ash Dunne's life.
Marcus' taste fills every surface. The furniture is dark, modern, and coordinated in a way that suggests a catalog rather than a person who actually lives here.
Leather couch, glass coffee table with no rings or smudges, matching shelves lined with books whose spines have never been cracked.
The art on the walls is abstract, the kind of thing you buy because it signals taste to anyone who visits, not because it moved you enough to hang it where you'd see it every day.
Everything is clean, positioned, and controlled.
The room smells like the air freshener plugged into the outlet near the kitchen, something synthetic and vaguely floral, the smell of a space that's being maintained rather than lived in.
Ash doesn't exist in this room.
I stand in the doorway, scanning for any trace of him, and find nothing. No photos on the shelves. No blanket tossed over the arm of the couch. No coffee mug on the table, no book left open, no shoes by the door.
The throw pillows are Marcus' color palette, dark blue and gray. The coat hooks by the door hold Marcus' jacket, with no space left for a second one. The one pair of shoes on the mat is Marcus', a pair of leather boots lined up with military precision.
Teague has already moved into the bedroom. I hear him opening drawers, the sound of wood sliding on wood. "Ledger," he calls. "Come look at this."
The bedroom continues the erasure. A queen bed pushed against the wall, Marcus' nightstand on the open side with a lamp, a charger, a glass that still has a ring of dried water in the bottom, and a book with a receipt marking his page.
Marcus' side of the bed has space. Room to get up, room to move, room to exist.
Ash's side is pressed against the wall. No nightstand.
No lamp. The gap between the mattress and the drywall is barely wide enough to fit a hand through, which means getting in and out of this bed required climbing over Marcus every single time.
Every bathroom trip, every glass of water, every night Ash couldn't sleep and wanted to leave without disturbing the man beside him, he had to climb over him or ask him to move.
Neither option would have been free of consequences.
I stand there staring at the bed for longer than I should, picturing Ash pressed against that wall, lying still in the dark, trying not to take up space. My hands close into fists at my sides before I force them open again.
The closet is worse. Marcus' clothes fill three-quarters of the rod, suits and pressed shirts organized by color, the hangers evenly spaced.
Ash's clothes are compressed into the remaining quarter, a tight cluster of flannels, soft t-shirts, and jeans shoved against the wall as if they're trying to disappear into it.
Some of them are still on the wire hangers from the thrift store, the kind you get for free that leave dents in the shoulders of anything that hangs on them too long. Marcus has cedar wooden hangers, the kind that cost three dollars each.
"I want to burn this place down," Teague says from behind me. His voice is flat, missing every note of warmth and humor I'm used to hearing in it. He's holding a drawer open, Ash's underwear and socks crammed into a space that wouldn't hold a week's worth for anyone else.
"Start packing," I tell him. I hand him a box and take one for myself.
We work room by room. The bathroom yields a single shelf of Ash's things, a toothbrush, a razor, a bottle of shampoo that's almost empty, and a stick of deodorant.
Marcus' side of the sink has a skincare routine that takes up the entire counter, moisturizers, cleansers, and a cologne that smells expensive and empty.
Ash's things fit into a single plastic bag.
Cass is in the kitchen. I hear him opening cabinets, the sound of plates shifting, glasses clinking.
He appears in the bedroom doorway holding a blue mug, turning it slowly in his thick fingers.
The ceramic is handmade, the glaze uneven in a way that says someone shaped this with their own hands.
The blue is deep, mottled, darker at the rim where the glaze pooled during firing.
"Found it behind a whole matching set," Cass says. "Shoved in the back corner like it didn't belong."
I take the mug and turn it in the light from the window.
Ash made this nearly a year ago at a community ceramics class, the one afternoon a week Marcus didn't control.
He'd brought it to the ranch the following Tuesday and held it up at the kitchen table with that quiet pride he carries when he's made something and isn't sure if anyone will care.
My father poured coffee into it without being asked, without comment, like it was already part of the house. Ash had looked at that mug full of coffee like someone had handed him a key to a room he'd been locked out of.
That's why the blue mug at the ranch must have hit him so hard every time he saw it.
Not because it was the same mug. Because it was the same color.
The ranch mug was a reminder that somewhere in this apartment, hidden behind Marcus' matching set, was the only object Ash had ever made with his own hands, shoved into a dark corner where it wouldn't clash with the aesthetic of a man who couldn't tolerate anything he hadn't chosen himself.
I carefully wrap it in one of Ash's t-shirts, and set it in the box on top of everything else.
The packing takes less than forty minutes.
Ash's entire life fits into six boxes, four of them barely full.
Six boxes for two years. I carry each one down the stairs and Teague loads them into the truck bed, arranging them with a care that seems pointed, like he's handling the remains of something that deserves better than what it got.
Cass comes down with the last of the kitchen items, a single pot that Ash apparently bought himself, a spatula, and a cutting board with a burn mark on one corner.
Ash had double checked the list this morning, crossing off several things that showed us how much of that apartment wasn’t really his even if he paid for half the expenses.
Ash is watching us through the windshield.
I can see him tracking the boxes, his face still, his hands folded in his lap.
Each trip we make down the stairs he watches with an expression that I can't read from this distance but that I suspect is the look of a man realizing his entire life can be disassembled in the time it takes to watch a movie.
I go back up for the final sweep. The apartment looks exactly the same without Ash's things in it.
The shelves are the same, the furniture is the same, Marcus' clothes still fill the closet.
The only evidence that a second person ever lived here is the thin line of dust where Ash's shoes used to sit by the door, a rectangle of slightly cleaner floor where his toothbrush holder was, and the empty quarter of the closet rod with the wire hangers still swinging slightly from where Teague pulled the last shirt off.