Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Nick
The first time I saw her, she had a bloody lip and fire in her eyes. Twelve years later, I’m still trying to catch my breath.
She stood at the edge of the kitchen with her arms crossed and a glare that could’ve melted brick. The rest of us kids huddled behind the couch, watching with held breath like we were waiting for a grenade to go off, and we were.
Meredith flung a metal spoon across the room. It hit the wall with a sharp clang before clattering to the floor. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink.
Greta, our foster mom—acrylic nails, cigarette-stained fingers, vodka on her breath—stomped over with a face like thunder. She started screaming about “ungrateful little bitches” and how we didn’t deserve second helpings of stew. I shrank back, heart jackhammering, but Meredith stood her ground.
She didn’t back down. Didn’t apologize. Didn’t cry.
Instead, she turned on her heel and walked out of the room like she owned the fucking place.
For a second, nobody moved. I swear even Greta froze, thrown off by the fact that someone dared to just walk away.
Meredith had done what the rest of us only ever fantasized about, she’d stood up and simply left.
I waited maybe five minutes, until Greta’s ranting slid into drunken muttering and the other kids scattered like roaches. Then I slipped away to find the girl with the storm in her eyes.
I found her in the back hallway, legs pulled up to her chest, head resting on her knees.
Her dark hair fell forward, hiding most of her face.
The split in her bottom lip had stopped bleeding, but it was swollen and angry.
Fading bruises bloomed along her arms, fingerprints and shadows that looked wrong on someone who was only thirteen.
I felt something hot and ugly flare up under my skin at the sight of them.
Quietly, I sat down beside her without asking.
The hallway light above us flickered, painting her in jumpy flashes of yellow.
The air smelled like piss, floor polish, and old stew—standard for that house—but neither of us reacted.
We just sat there, shoulder to shoulder on scuffed linoleum, listening to the muffled shouting now coming from the living room.
For a long time, she didn’t acknowledge me at all.
Finally, without looking over, she spoke. “You’re the new one.” Her voice was flat, frayed at the edges.
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Nicholas.”
“I didn’t ask,” she snapped, but there was no real bite in it. Just exhaustion.
I snuck a look from the corner of my eye. She’d folded in on herself, trying to take up as little space as possible, like if she could make herself small enough the world might forget to hit her. She looked fragile and dangerous at the same time, like glass with a razor edge.
Silence settled again. Her tension vibrated between us.
I wanted to say something useful, but my tongue felt too big and dumb in my mouth.
I’d only been in this house a week and was already hollowed out by it.
But watching her stand up to Greta…that had sparked something small in me.
Hope, maybe. Or fixation. Hard to tell the difference when you’re starving.
After a minute, I reached into my pocket where I’d shoved the last crust of bread from dinner. I held it out to her. “You want the rest of my bread?”
She lifted her head and looked at me then. Her eyes were a stormy gray, glassy and bright, like rain was coming and she dared it to fall. The sight hit me low and hard. For the first time in weeks, I actually felt something other than fear or numbness.
She stared at the bread, but didn’t take it. “You’re gonna hate it here,” she said.
I already did, but I shrugged. “You don’t?”
A bitter snort slipped out of her. “You think I like it here?”
“You’re not crying,” I said quietly.
She narrowed her eyes, studying me like I was something to figure out. Then she sighed, the sound too tired for someone our age. “Crying doesn’t help. They don’t care.” Matter-of-fact. Like she was reciting a rule written in stone.
The words landed in my gut with a heavy, familiar thud. She was right. Mom leaving had taught me that much.
I nodded slowly. “Then I won’t cry either.”
She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “Good.” That came out softer, like maybe she was relieved.
We didn’t shake hands or say anything dramatic, but something shifted between us in that dirty hallway. I moved a little closer, so our shoulders brushed, and she didn’t move away. That was enough.
That night, I dragged my blanket down the hall after lights-out and curled up on the floor outside her bedroom door. Like a loyal stray dog guarding the only person who’d offered him anything that wasn’t cruelty or indifference.
It became routine.
Every night after that, once the house quieted and the lights went out, I slipped from my bunk and took my place outside her door.
She never invited me in, but little by little I moved closer.
Until one night there was a mattress on the floor beside her bed, she didn't tell me to stay, she didn't have to.
Meredith wasn't very talkative, but when she did speak up, I memorized every word.
“Don’t talk to Tony. He likes hurting people.”
“Never eat anything that’s already open.”
“Keep your back to the wall when you sleep.”
“Don’t trust anyone who smiles all the time.”
Her survival rules, delivered in that blunt, quiet voice. Thirteen going on thirty. Razor-edged, cautious, and miles wiser than me.
I watched her like other kids watched superheroes. Every move she made, I watched. Every line she drew, I stepped behind it.
She never really smiled, not for real. Sometimes she wore this empty, mean kind of grin when she wanted to scare someone off, but it didn’t touch her eyes.
She didn’t let anyone touch her either. If a kid bumped into her or a one of the parents tried to put a hand on her shoulder, she’d jerk away like she’d been burned.
The only person she ever allowed near was me, and I wore that like armor.
One night—Christmas Eve, I think—I was hiding in the laundry room, avoiding the chaos in the living room. The foster parents had dragged out a plastic tree that was missing half its lights and were trying to pretend we were some normal family. The noise made my skin crawl.
I slipped into the laundry room and sank onto the cold tile floor between baskets of other people’s clothes.
The washing machine rattled like it was about to fall apart.
I had a little broken music box I’d dug out of the trash earlier that week cradled in my hands.
Cheap, chipped ballerina inside, paint peeling off the sides, but the lid was covered in tiny silver stars.
It made me think of her. Of us. Maybe because we lived in dark corners of that house, and the stars felt like a promise that somewhere else had to exist.
The door creaked open and Meredith came in. She didn’t say anything, just slid down the opposite wall until she was sitting next to me, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. My heart stuttered like it didn’t know how to beat properly anymore.
I watched her out of the corner of my eye, chewing my lip. Before I could chicken out, I nudged the music box toward her. “It’s for you,” I mumbled.
She turned it over in her hands, thumbs tracing the chipped edges. The thing didn’t play music anymore; it was junk, really. But she studied it like it might bite. My stomach twisted while I waited for her reaction.
“You’re weird,” she said finally, but the words came out softer than I expected.
I tried to shrug like it didn’t matter, even though my pulse was racing. “It, uh…it reminded me of you.”
Her eyes snapped to mine. Dark, sharp, suspicious. For a second I thought she was going to throw it back at me or throw it at the wall like the spoon.
Instead, she carefully pushed the music box back into my hands. “Don’t give me anything,” she said quietly. “That’s how people get hurt. They think it means something. Then it gets taken away.”
The way she said it told me it was something she learned from experience.
I didn’t understand all of it then, not really. I just knew my chest ached as I curled my fingers back around the box.
“People like us don’t get happy endings, Nick,” she added after a moment, staring straight ahead at the humming dryer. “We get what we get and we don't get upset. That’s it.”
I wanted to argue, tell her she was wrong, that I’d make it different somehow. But I was just a scrawny kid with a stolen blanket and a broken toy. What the hell did I know about endings?
So I kept the music box. I still have it.
A few weeks later, she was gone.
“New placement,” I heard the caseworker tell Greta in the kitchen. Some private agency, some fancy program that would “give her a real chance.” College at some point, maybe. Therapy. A future. They said it like it erased everything that came before.
She didn’t say goodbye. One day she was there; the next, her room was empty and her bed was stripped bare. When I asked where she was, Greta told me to mind my own business and threatened to lock me in the basement if I kept “snooping.”
That night, I lay outside her door anyway, staring at the closed, hollow frame. No peppermint, no sliver of light. Just dust and cold air and the creak of the vents.
What she never knew—what I never told her—was that I’d heard her the night before she left.
The vents in that old house carried sound too well.
I was curled up in my usual spot outside her room when I heard it: choked, broken sounds seeping through the wall.
It took me a second to realize she was crying.
Meredith, who never shed a tear for anyone, was sobbing into her pillow like the world was ending.
I lay there frozen, every muscle locked. I wanted to knock. I wanted to go in, to tell her it would be okay even if it was a lie, to thank her for every rule and every night and every scrap of kindness. To beg her not to leave me.
But I didn’t move.
I stayed where I was and let her cry alone. Cowardice pressed me to the floor heavier than any hand ever had. It was the first and only time I ever heard her break.
I’ve been making up for that night ever since.
I jolt awake, heart pounding, in the cramped back room behind the mall’s Santa setup. The vinyl of the cheap plastic chair has dug a pattern into my spine. My neck aches from the angle I slept in, and my right arm is a dead weight.
For a few seconds, I’m back in that hallway—peeling wallpaper, flickering light, her quiet voice. Then the smell of mall popcorn and stale coffee cuts through the memory and drags me into now.
I sit up with a groan and roll my shoulders until something in my back pops.
Fluorescent light buzzes overhead. A crooked poster about “Maintaining Holiday Cheer!” is taped to the wall across from me, curling at the edges.
Christmas music drifts in faintly from the concourse outside, some overproduced version of “Silent Night” that makes my teeth ache.
Her words are still ringing in my head: People like us don’t get happy endings, Nick.
She was so certain. So sure the world had already decided how our story ended.
She was wrong. She has to be.
I reach into the inner pocket of my jacket and feel for the familiar shape there.
The little music box presses into my palm, solid and worn.
My thumb traces the fading silver stars on its lid.
The paint is mostly gone now, scratched by a dozen moves and a thousand restless nights, but I know every chip, every crack.
I’ve carried this thing across state lines, through jobs, in and out of shitty apartments and worse motels.
It’s the closest thing I have to a relic.
Anyone else would call this what it is: obsession. Stalking.
They’re not wrong. I just don’t care.
Meredith might believe people like us don’t get happy endings.
The world proved that to her again and again.
But I’ve spent the past ten years making sure I’m not helpless anymore.
Learning how to disappear in plain sight.
How to find people who don’t want to be found.
How to pull records that should’ve been sealed and make money under names that don’t belong to me.
Every skill I picked up, every line I crossed, I did with one goal lodged in my chest like shrapnel: when I found her again, I’d be able to do something about it.
I slide the music box back into my pocket and push to my feet.
My legs tingle as blood returns, but my resolve is steady.
Out in the mall, they’re hanging their happiness on credit cards and fake snow.
Out there, she’s walking through the world I finally clawed my way into, cold and untouchable and alone.
My chest tightens with something that feels stuck between longing and rage. Longing for the girl who sat in hallways and laundry rooms with me, saving me without ever meaning to. Rage at the world that taught her that accepting anything—a gift, a hand, a promise—only ends in pain.
Crying doesn’t help. They don’t care.
She was right about most people.
But I care enough for both of us.
I flex my hand, the edge of the music box digging into my ribs beneath my jacket. The tiny bite of pain steadies me, pulls me into focus.
“Hold on, Meredith,” I whisper into the empty room, voice rough. “You're not leaving me behind this time.”
Caring about her was never the problem. Leaving her to cry alone was.
Our story isn’t over just because she decided we don’t get happy endings. She wrote that rule when we were kids trying not to starve. I’m rewriting it now.
People like us don’t get happy endings handed to us.
So I’ll take one. For both of us.
Even if I have to break the whole damn world to do it.