Chapter 11- JADE
The hotel room feels smaller in the morning light.
I wake to the sound of traffic on the street below, the rumble of delivery trucks and the distant wail of sirens. For a moment, I don't remember where I am. The ceiling is wrong, the sheets are scratchy, and the air smells different.
Then it all comes rushing back. The fight. The things I said. The look on his face when I told him he was just like his father.
I roll over and reach for my phone in the nightstand drawer. When I turn it on, notifications flood the screen. Twelve missed calls from Phoenix. Eight text messages, each one more desperate than the last.
Please call me.
I'm sorry. You're right. I've been suffocating you.
Just tell me you're safe.
Jade, please.
I should respond. I know I should. But every time I start to type, the words dissolve before I can capture them. What is there to say? I love you but I can't breathe around you? I need you but I'm terrified of becoming a prisoner in your gilded cage?
The phone buzzes in my hand, and a new name flashes across the screen.
Mom.
I stare at it for a long moment, watching it ring.
I haven't talked to my mother in over a week.
Our last conversation ended badly, with her demanding to know when I was coming home and me insisting that my life was in California now.
She doesn't know about Marcus. She doesn't know about the police.
She doesn't know that her daughter has become an accessory to murder.
The phone stops ringing. Then immediately starts again.
I answer before I can talk myself out of it.
"Jade?" My mother's voice is sharp with worry, pitched higher than usual. "Jade, is that you?"
"Hi, Mom."
"Oh thank God." I hear her exhale, a rush of breath that carries weeks of tension. "Where are you? I've been worried sick. You haven't returned my calls, you've barely texted, I didn't know if you were alive or dead or what."
"I'm fine, Mom. I'm still here."
"With him?" The word drips with disdain. She's never met Phoenix, but she's already decided she hates him. Rich men are dangerous, she's told me a thousand times. They think they can buy whatever they want, including people. "Are you still with that man?"
I close my eyes and lean back against the headboard. The pillows are flat and lumpy, nothing like the cloud-soft pillows on Phoenix's bed. "We had a fight. I'm at a hotel."
A pause. I can practically hear my mother's mind working, calculating how to use this information to her advantage.
"Come home," she says finally. "Please, Jade. Just for a few days. We can talk, really talk, without him hovering over your shoulder."
"Mom."
"I'm not asking you to leave him forever.
I'm asking for a few days. A week at most." Her voice softens, and I hear something underneath the usual sharpness.
Fear, maybe. Or loneliness. "I miss you.
I barely know what's happening in your life anymore.
You used to tell me everything, and now I feel like I'm talking to a stranger. "
The words hit harder than they should. She's right. I have been distant, keeping her at arm's length because I'm terrified of what she might see if she looks too closely: the guilt, the fear.
"I don't know," I start to say, but she cuts me off.
"Please. Whatever happened between you and this Phoenix person, you shouldn't be dealing with it alone in some hotel room. You should be home, with family, where people actually care about you."
"He cares about me."
"Does he? Or does he just want to control you?
" She sighs, and I hear the creak of her old armchair, the one she's had since I was a baby.
"I know I don't know him. I know I'm probably being unfair.
But Jade, you're my daughter, and I can hear it in your voice.
Something's wrong. Something's been wrong for weeks, and you won't tell me what it is. "
My throat tightens. I want to tell her everything.
I want to confess that I watched a man die, that I helped cover up a murder, that I'm being questioned by police and threatened by anonymous strangers and slowly suffocated by the man I love.
But the words stick in my throat, too heavy to speak aloud.
"I can't explain right now," I manage. "But you're right. Something is wrong. And maybe getting away for a few days would help me figure out what to do about it."
"Then come home. Tonight, if you can. I'll pick you up at the airport."
I think about Phoenix, alone in that big house by the ocean, waiting for me to come back. I think about the detectives who might be building a case against us right now. I think about the anonymous text message that still haunts my dreams.
And then I think about Boston. My cramped studio apartment that I haven't seen in weeks. My mother's place across town, small but familiar. The life I had before everything got so complicated.
"Okay," I hear myself say. "I'll come home.”
My mother makes a sound that might be a sob or might be a laugh. "Thank you. Oh, Jade, thank you. Stay with me for a few days. I have the guest room made up. We can have dinner together, just like when you were little. Everything is going to be okay, sweetheart. You'll see."
I don't believe her. But I let her believe I do.
After we hang up, I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at my phone. I need to tell Phoenix. He deserves that much, at least.
My fingers hover over the keyboard for a long time before I finally type the message.
I need space. Going to Boston for a few days. Please don't follow me.
I hit send before I can change my mind.
The response comes faster than I expected, as if he's been sitting there staring at his phone, waiting for any sign of life from me.
I'll wait. However long you need. I love you.
No arguments. No demands. No threats to come find me if I don't check in. Just acceptance and love, offered freely, without strings attached.
It's exactly what I asked for. And somehow, that makes it worse.
I start to cry. Not the quiet, dignified tears, but ugly, gasping sobs that shake my whole body. I cry for Phoenix and the impossible situation we've created and even for Marcus, who shouldn’t have come to the cabin and shouldn’t be dead.
By the time the tears finally stop, I'm exhausted. Empty. Wrung out like a dishrag and left to dry.
I book a flight to Boston that leaves in three hours.
Detective Nowak's voice surfaces in the back of my mind, don't take any trips out of the area, and I push it down.
If they were watching me closely enough for this to matter, we'd already be in handcuffs.
I pack my small bag. I check out of the hotel and call a rideshare to take me to LAX.
The airport is crowded and loud, full of families going on vacation and businesspeople rushing to make their connections. I move through the security line like a ghost, invisible, unremarkable. Just another traveler heading home.
On the plane, I take a window seat and watch California shrink beneath me as we climb into the clouds. The coastline curves away, the mountains fade to nothing.
I cry again, silently this time, tears streaming down my face while the businessman next to me pretends not to notice. The flight attendant offers me a tissue without making eye contact. I take it and turn back to the window.
Five hours to Boston. Five hours to figure out what I'm going to tell my mother. Five hours to decide if I'm ever going back.
The plane levels out above the clouds, and I close my eyes.
When I open them again, we're beginning our descent, and my phone is buzzing with a new message.
But it's not from Phoenix.
It's from that same unknown number, the one that's been haunting me since the first threatening text arrived.
Running won't help. I know everything.