Chapter Nineteen
Twenty-three months, four days, and eighteen hours ago
Not all love stories end happily ever after.
It was the middle of a November night, and there were empty Chinese food takeout boxes littering the kitchen counter inside
the Seattle apartment that Helen shared with Tyler.
In the living room, there were two empty wineglasses sitting on the coffee table. A miniature half-eaten cake was still inside
the bakery box. Two forks rested nearby, white frosting hardened on their tines.
Evil things aren’t supposed to happen to you when there’s rainbow chip cake on the coffee table.
Tyler was happy, and he was asleep.
Helen was happy, and she was asleep.
Looking back on that fated night, Helen would wonder if she’d heard something and that was the reason she’d awoken. But in
the actual moment, it seemed she’d simply drifted far enough out of her dream state to recognize that she needed to use the
bathroom.
Oblivious to the danger lurking, she padded half-asleep out of the bedroom and down the hall. She was wearing a long pink T-shirt that said Sometimes I pretend to be normal on it.
Inside the bathroom, she filled a glass of water and sipped it. That’s when she heard a noise that sounded like it was coming
from the living room. Several months earlier, they’d had a mouse in the apartment. She hoped it wasn’t a damn mouse again.
She set the glass on the bathroom counter and stepped into the hallway.
There was a shuffling sound coming from the living area, and a chill moved through her body. She peered toward the hallway
entrance that revealed the edge of the living room, where the carpet ended and the tiles of the foyer that led to the kitchen
began.
Soft thumps, as if someone was walking on the carpet.
Helen took one careful step back toward the bedroom, caught between staying frozen and retreating. If a person were to cross
the threshold from the living room to the kitchen, they may or may not notice her standing fifteen feet down the hall in the
darkness. She took another quiet step back.
And then a stocky figure appeared, facing away from her, a black ski mask covering his head.
In his hand, he held a large knife. The silver blade glinted in the soft light cast from the street through the window.
He seemed to be glancing around the living and kitchen area.
Unnoticed, Helen stood motionless, in shock.
Then the masked man turned his head toward her. The dark holes of his black ski mask stared at her, inhuman.
A terrifying beat.
Life flooded back into Helen’s body as she fled down the hallway to the bedroom.
She slammed the door shut behind her, and Tyler bolted upright in bed.
“What? What?!” he said as she locked the door.
“Someone’s in the living room!”
She ran to Tyler. As she reached him, he was clambering out of the bed.
“Call 911,” he said.
Her eyes went to the bedside table. No phone. That’s when she remembered both their cell phones were plugged into the USB
port.
“They’re in the kitchen.” Her voice sounded strange in her ears, like it wasn’t her own. “He has a knife.”
Tyler’s eyes flashed in distress as they both realized how very bad this was. And then the bedroom door was kicked in.
There was a moment suspended in time. The masked man stood in the doorway, knife in hand. He was on the shorter side, thick
in the middle, dressed in black from head to toe.
Then Tyler moved between Helen and the man, and he raised both hands: Stop, don’t do this.
The man shouted, “Your phones!”
“They’re not in here.” Tyler’s voice, calm and placating. “Take what you want and you can go.”
“Give ’em to me!” the man said, louder now, and then he charged.
Helen let out a scream.
It happened so fast that all Tyler had time to do was reach a protective hand toward her. She heard him make only the slightest
gasp, so at first she thought he’d blocked the knife with his other hand somehow. But then he swayed backward. She grappled
to catch him, but he was in a free fall, and she was pulled down to her knees with him.
The man loomed over them, knife in hand, and in the dim light, Helen saw his eyeballs through the eyeholes of his ski mask.
She couldn’t detect the color, but she could see the dark irises against the white, crazed and fevered.
“Please don’t do this,” she managed to say.
He stared down at her, unblinking. And then he turned and left the room.
Helen grabbed Tyler’s shoulder. “Honey? Tyler?”
He rolled onto his back, and she saw blood pooling on his stomach. He looked down at the wound, confused. For a moment, she couldn’t process it either. It felt like they were in a bad dream.
“I think he punched me.” Tyler’s voice sounded far away. “It’s not that bad.”
But then he groaned, and she saw the red circle on his faded blue T-shirt was growing, and she knew the nightmare was real.
Helen guided Tyler’s hands to the wound and said, “You’re right. It’s not that bad.” She smiled at him reassuringly and held
back a river of tears. “But I need you to press your hands down here while I go get us a phone.”
The door was partially hanging from its hinges, slices of splintered wood sticking out from the frame. She went to it and
peered into the hallway. The masked man had to have left the apartment, right? She hadn’t heard the front door slam shut,
but when she’d seen the blood on Tyler, she’d momentarily lost track of everything else. She listened at the bedroom door
and recoiled when she heard a noise.
Tyler lifted his head from the floor, a disoriented look. “Is he still here?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. It was the middle of the night, so all the neighbors should be asleep, unless they’d heard
her scream. But if the noise had been the man still inside their apartment, robbing them, and she went for a phone, he’d stab
her too.
Tyler rested his head back against the carpet, and his hands fell limp to his sides. “Helen, stay with me,” he pleaded, in
a voice that sounded weaker with each word. “Don’t go out there. It’s not safe.”
Tyler might be right, so she rushed to their bedroom window and opened it. They were on the fifth floor, overlooking an alley
that faced the brick side of another building. No windows across the way and no fire escape near their own window. A silent
alley that she’d always appreciated because it kept things relatively quiet for city living. Now it couldn’t feel more desolate
and hopeless.
She looked both ways down the alley. Empty. No one to help them.
She swore under her breath as she hurried back to Tyler. His eyes were still open, squinting in distress as he stared up at the ceiling, and she was shocked to see that blood was beginning to spread beneath his body on the carpet.
“Tyler, I need you to focus,” Helen whispered urgently as she pressed her hands to his wound.
His eyes fluttered shut, and he let out a sound halfway between a groan and a sigh.
She touched her lips to his forehead. It felt cold. “Baby?”
Tyler’s eyes opened, but he sounded groggy with his next words. “It’s a lot of blood, isn’t it?”
She needed there to be two of her. One Helen to press down on the wound, to hold her husband, to keep him there with her,
alive and fighting. And another Helen to go out and try to get a phone.
“Press here, as hard as you can, and I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
“Okay,” Tyler mumbled.
Helen guided his hands to the wound and pressed them down, but as soon as she lifted her own hands, Tyler’s went limp. A wave
of despair threatened to engulf her, but she pushed the feeling away. From the bottom of their bookshelf, she snatched four
of the thickest books from her encyclopedia collection. She knew it automatically: volumes A, M, P, and S.
“I love you, darling. I’m going to rest these on you.”
She laid them on his stomach, but when the pile teetered, she removed the S volume. A three-stack of encyclopedias to stop
the bleeding was nowhere near good enough, but it was the best she could think of in the moment.
Tyler sighed. “I’m so tired.”
The way he said it terrified her, as if he was being lulled into a distant nightfall. How dare some monster come into her
home and destroy what she held precious.
She needed a weapon. Her eyes settled on the wrought-iron lamp on the dresser.
It was heavy and sharp, and she was going to bash the masked man’s head in with it.
But even as the brave thought fired in her mind, she could feel her rib cage shaking violently.
It was a warning from her body, but she could not afford to stop and think.
Ignore it! She had to act now. Right now!
She yanked the plug from the wall, tossed the lamp shade aside, and hastily wrapped the cord around its base, all the while
talking softly to Tyler: “I’ll be right back. You’re okay. You just hold on and the ambulance will be here to fix you up.”
“Helen . . .” Tyler’s voice wavered. “I need to tell you . . .”
Helen gripped the neck of the lamp in both hands, like a baseball bat. “As soon as I’m back, honey.”
The day needed saving, and it needed saving right now, while she was filled with guts and rage. She looked at Tyler for only
one moment—savoring his face briefly—before she stepped into the hallway.
Almost right away, her courage faltered. In the bedroom, cracking the intruder across his skull with a lamp had been a plan.
Now it might be about to happen. She had never been in a physical fight before, but she’d also never had so much adrenaline
coursing through her blood. She wasn’t aware of her heartbeat or her breath. All she could feel was that strange shuddering
in her center, like her rib cage was made of violin strings stuck in an endless, terrible vibration.
She forced herself to creep forward, pausing once to listen. Was that a creak she heard? He might be there still, clutching
the same knife he’d used to stab Tyler.
Helen made it to the end of the hallway, to the edge of the tile foyer that separated the living room from the kitchen. The
front door to the apartment was shut. Did that mean the masked man was still here, or that he was gone? She was desperate
for clues and signs.
And then she saw the phones! Through the opening into the kitchen, she saw them charging on the counter. She raised the lamp
in the air and started across the foyer, terror mixing with her resolve. If he was hiding in the kitchen, she’d fight him
to the death. Anything to get her phone.
She released a silent scream inside her brain as she burst into the kitchen, ready to fight, but she found it completely empty. Untouched, even. The noise she thought she’d heard probably hadn’t even been him. Jesus, he was gone, and she’d wasted critical minutes afraid to leave the bedroom.
Helen yanked her phone from the charging cable and dialed 911. As it was ringing, she ran back down the hallway.
“Nine-one-one, where is your emergency?”
Helen gave the address quickly, then said, “My husband’s been stabbed. He’s bleeding from his stomach . . .”
She trailed off, because she was back in the bedroom now and she saw Tyler lying there, completely still.
The operator’s voice remained calm. “Who stabbed him?”
Helen dropped the phone and fell to her knees beside Tyler.
“Tyler? Tyler!” She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. The encyclopedias slid from his stomach and came to rest on the carpet.
“Tyler, come on. You had something to tell me, remember? Tyler?!”
His body was limp.
Helen wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, sobbing. Helen’s love for Tyler was so vast that if her
life were a fairy tale, the electrical charge of her heart pressed to his chest would have been enough to restart his heart.
But this was no fairy tale.
From the abandoned phone on the carpet, the faraway voice of the 911 operator drifted out.
“Ma’am, are you there?”