Chapter 16
The hotel room smells like lavender and strangers.
Margot booked it from the car. One hand on the wheel, the other scrolling her phone, tears running down her face in the pale glow of her screen while I sat in the passenger seat with my lip split open and the taste of regret and so many fuck ups like ash on my tongue.
She didn't ask me which hotel. She didn't ask me anything.
She drove and she booked and she parked and she walked me through a lobby where the desk clerk took one look at my face and opened his mouth and Margot said we're fine, thank you with the voice she uses when the conversation is already over.
None of this was my decision. But I wasn’t going to put up a fight against the woman who saved my life.
That was two hours ago.
Now it's almost dawn. The sky through the hotel window has gone from black to that bruised grey-blue that happens right before the sun decides whether it's coming.
The room is on the fourth floor. Two queen beds.
A desk with a leather folder nobody will ever open.
The air conditioning hums a low mechanical drone that fills the silence Margot and I have been sitting in since we got here.
She's on the other bed. Shoes still on. Her phone pressed to her ear. She's been on it for twenty minutes—low, urgent, building an escape route out of this life that has turned sour for her overnight.
"—yes. Yes, Georgia, I know it's early. I know. I wouldn't be calling if it weren't—" She presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose. Breathes. "I need the guest room. For a few days. Maybe longer. I'll explain when I get there but I need you to tell me it's available."
Her sister. Georgia. In Wisconsin. A woman I've met twice at holidays—warm, loud, a little overstimulating but a kind-hearted woman like her sister.
Margot is taking us to Wisconsin.
Both of us. Her and me. She's already decided—we're going together, to a house with plastic-wrapped leftovers and a guest room that smells like cedar sachets and a sister who will ask exactly one question and then make us soup and not push.
Margot isn't dropping me off. She's leaving too.
Leaving Richard, leaving the estate, leaving the life she built with a man in the blink of an eye.
She is doing what Margot does. She is doing the thing she has done my entire life—seeing a problem, building a solution, putting me inside it, climbing in after me, closing the door.
I press the cold washcloth to my lip. The split is shallow. Richard's ring caught the edge of my mouth when I stepped in front of Atlas. The blood has stopped but the swelling hasn't, and every time I press the cloth against it the sting reminds me of the sound Margot made when I hit the floor.
Not a scream. Worse. A sound like something ripping. Like the part of her that believed this house was safe tore loose from the part that was watching her son bleed on the floor of the foyer.
She hasn't looked at me since we got in the car.
Not because she's angry. Because she's afraid that if she looks at me she'll see something she's not ready to see.
Some version of her son that doesn't match the one she's been protecting for four years.
The Max who got hit—that Max she can handle.
She's handled that Max before. She handled Linda's Max.
She handled foster-system Max. She has a whole playbook for the Max who gets hurt by the people who are supposed to love him.
But the Max who was kissing his stepbrother in the moonlight at three in the morning and meant it—that Max is new. That Max breaks the playbook. And Margot can’t operate without a plan, so she's on the phone with Georgia in Wisconsin because Wisconsin is a plan and a plan is how she loves me.
"—I'll book the flights as soon as I hang up.
First thing. We can be there by tomorrow evening if I—" She stops.
Listens. Her jaw works. "No. No, he's not coming.
Richard is—Richard and I are going to have a conversation and it's not going to be a short one, but right now I need to get Max out of that house.
Out of the state, Georgia. I need distance. I need—"
She breaks.
It's quiet. She presses her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shake once, twice, and then she pulls it back together. She pulls it back together the way she always does—fast, efficient, like grief is a spill she can wipe up if she moves quickly enough.
"I'll call you back in an hour. Thank you. I love you."
She hangs up. Sets the phone on the bedspread. Sits with her hands in her lap.
The room hums.
"Mom."
"Don't." She holds up one hand. Not looking at me. "Don't, Max. Not right now. I can't—I need a minute."
I give her a minute. I give her two. I sit on the edge of my bed with the washcloth in my hand and the bond screaming in my chest—three threads pulling northeast, back toward the house, back toward my whole heart.
My life.
She breathes.
"I'm going to ask you one question," she says. To her hands. "And I need you to answer it honestly. Can you do that for me?"
"Yes."
"Were they hurting you?"
The question lands in my chest like a stone. Not because it's unexpected. Because it's the wrong question, asked by a woman who loves me more than anyone on this planet, and the wrongness of it is the whole problem.
"No, Mom. They weren’t hurting me."
"Max—"
"They weren’t hurting me. They've never hurt me. What you saw—"
"I feel sick, Max." Her voice cracks and reshapes itself in the same breath.
"I feel physically sick. I have been running it through my head for two hours and my skin is crawling and I can't—I can't stop seeing it.
I can't get it out of my head." She presses the heel of her hand against her sternum like something is lodged there.
"I feel dirty. I feel like something is wrong with me for not seeing it before this.
For not—how did I not see it? How did I live in that house for nine months and not—" She swallows.
Hard. "I brought you there. I brought you into that house.
I put you in a room down the hall from three grown men and I smiled about it, Max.
I was happy. I thought you were thriving.
I thought—" Her mouth twists. "God, I'm going to be sick. "
"Mom—"
"Don't. Don't tell me it's not what I think. Don't tell me I'm overreacting. I can still feel it in my chest—this awful, crawling thing, like I failed you in a way I can't even name yet. Like the ground I was standing on just opened up and I'm still falling."
I press the cloth harder against my lip. The sting sharpens. Keeps me here.
"You didn't fail me," I say. "And it is what you think. It's exactly what you think. I love him, Mom. I love all three of them. That's what you saw."
She flinches. Full body. Like I hit her.
"Max—"
"You asked me to be honest."
"I asked if they were hurting you!"
"And they're not. What's hurting me right now is sitting in a hotel room listening to you book us flights to Wisconsin like I'm sixteen and you just pulled me out of another foster home."
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Her mouth opens. Closes. Her hands are flat on her thighs, pressing down, the way she presses down when she's trying not to let her hands shake.
"That's not what I'm doing."
"It's exactly what you're doing! You're making arrangements.
You're calling Georgia. You're getting me out.
You're doing what you've always done—you see a fire and you grab me and you run.
" I set the washcloth down on the nightstand.
My hands are shaking now too. "And I love you for it.
I love you so much for it, Mom. You saved my life doing that.
More than once. But I'm not on fire. I'm not in danger.
I'm not being hurt by the people in that house. I chose them. I chose this."
"You're twenty years old—"
"I know how old I am!
"—and they are grown men, Max, they are Richard's sons, they are your stepbrothers—"
"I know who they are."
"Do you?" She looks at me then. Finally.
Her eyes are red and swollen and her mascara is smudged under her left eye and she looks ten years older than she did six hours ago.
"Do you really know who they are? Because I have spent the last nine months watching you change, Max.
Watching you come alive. I thought—I thought it was the house.
I thought it was stability. I thought it was me.
" Her voice goes thin. "I thought I was finally getting it right. "
"You were."
"Then what is this?"
"This is me getting it right too. In a way you didn't plan for."
She closes her eyes. Presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose. The same gesture she made on the phone. The same gesture she makes when the world is too much and she needs to compress it into something she can carry.
"Wisconsin," she says. Flat. Decided. "We're going to Georgia's. We're going to take some space. You're going to talk to someone—a professional, Max, not me, someone who can—"
"I'm not going to Wisconsin."
"Max—"
"Mom." I stand. My cheek and lip throbs.
The bond in my chest is so tight I can feel it in my teeth—Atlas's thread, dark and worried; Bane's, heavy and braced; Zero's, raw and bright and terrified.
They're in that house right now. They're reading my letters.
They're looking at the space where my shoes were and the space where my jacket was and the space where I am supposed to be, and they're not here, and I'm not there, and every second I sit on this hotel bed listening to Margot book flights to Wisconsin is a second I'm not doing the thing I came out of that house to do.
"I need to use the phone."
"To call them? Max, absolutely not—"
"Not them." I look at her. Steady. "Wren."
She blinks.
"I need to call Wren. And then I need to leave."
"You're not leaving this room—"