Chapter 21 - Jess
I see him on a Monday morning.
I'm walking to the studio, coffee from Hector's in one hand, my head full of the new sculpture and the yielding forms and the problem I've been trying to solve with the angle of the second piece.
November cold on my face. The usual route, the usual rhythm.
I'm thinking about steel and Damien and whether Nish is right about the solo show and all the things that have been filling my days since my life became something I almost don't recognize—full, warm, a life with a person in it.
I almost walk past him.
He's on the sidewalk across from my building, half a block from the studio.
Not doing anything. Just standing, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the building the way you look at an address you've written down and are confirming.
Average height. Heavy through the shoulders, heavier than he was at seventeen.
Reddish hair cropped close to his skull.
A face that fifteen years have thickened and coarsened but not changed in any way that matters.
My body knows him before my brain does. The coffee cup locks in my hand. My feet stop. My stomach drops—not gradually, not a slow descent, but all at once, the floor vanishing, the world tilting on an axis I thought I'd welded shut years ago.
Kyle Purcell.
He turns his head. Sees me. And he smiles.
The smile. Fifteen years and the smile hasn't changed.
Easy, warm, the kind of smile that made the caseworkers trust him.
The kind that made the Voss family believe he was the good one, the helpful one, the older kid who looked out for the younger ones.
A smile that disarms the room while the hands behind it do whatever they want.
"Jess Rowe," he says. He takes his hands out of his pockets and opens them, palms up, a gesture of friendliness so practiced it looks natural. "I thought that was you."
My voice is gone. Not metaphorically—physically gone.
My throat has closed. I'm standing on the sidewalk with coffee in my hand and the November wind on my face and I'm twelve years old.
Twelve years old in a house in Queens with a boy who kept the lights off and the door locked and told me what would happen if I made a sound.
"You look great," he says. He takes a step toward me and my legs almost buckle. "I saw your name—in a write-up about a gallery show? I couldn't believe it. Little Jess Rowe, an artist. I always knew you'd do something with those hands."
The word hands in his mouth. My crooked finger throbs. The ghost pain, sharp and sudden, like the bone remembers what the rest of me is trying not to.
He's cleaned up. The teenager who smelled like cigarettes and wore torn jeans is gone.
In his place: a man in a decent jacket, clean-shaven, the kind of face you'd pass on the street without a second thought.
Normal. Ordinary. The kind of man who holds doors for women and tips at restaurants and nobody would ever guess what he did to a twelve-year-old girl in a house where the adults weren't watching.
"I'm in the neighborhood sometimes for work," he says. "Real estate. Crazy, right? Me in real estate." He laughs. The laugh is the same too—easy, inviting, designed to make you feel like you're sharing a joke. "I'd love to catch up sometime. See your art. I always told people you were talented."
He never told anyone I was talented. He told me I was nothing.
He told me nobody would believe me if I spoke, because who listens to a foster kid with no family and no proof?
He told me the sketchbook was a privilege he could take away, and my silence was the price, and every day I paid it—sitting where he told me to sit, eating only after he'd finished, staying out of rooms he'd claimed, making myself so small I barely existed.
And when he wanted me to exist—when the house was empty and the hallway was dark—the smallness didn't protect me either.
And then the sketchbook burned anyway. In the backyard, page by page. He made me watch.
I walk away. I don't say a word. I turn and walk—not toward the studio, away from it, because the studio is mine and I won't lead him there.
I walk around the block, my coffee sloshing over my hand, my heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
I walk until I'm sure he's not behind me, and then I double back and get to the cargo door and roll it up and pull it down behind me and lock the latch and sit on the concrete floor with my back against the wall and my knees against my chest and I shake.
Not crying. Not yet. Just shaking. The full-body tremor of an animal that's been cornered and escaped and is sitting in the dark waiting for its nervous system to understand that the danger has passed.
Except it hasn't passed. He's here. He knows where I am.
He found me—through the show, through the write-up, through whatever digital trail my name has started leaving now that Nish has been promoting my work.
The visibility I've been building, the career I've been growing, the life I've been making—it led him right to me.
I sit on the floor of my studio and shake, and the twelve-year-old girl sits beside me and shakes too, and neither of us can make it stop.
I don't work that day.
I go to the studio because the studio is where I go, but the torch stays cold.
I sit on the crate and stare at the new sculpture—the yielding forms, the piece I've been pouring myself into—and I can't touch it.
My hands are unsteady. The precision that welding requires, the steadiness, the focus—it's gone.
Replaced by a vibration that starts in my chest and radiates outward, making every fine motor task impossible.
I'm jumping at sounds. The cargo door rattling in the wind. Footsteps on the sidewalk outside. A man's voice from the street—any man's voice—and my body floods with adrenaline so fast my vision goes white at the edges.
He didn't threaten me. He smiled. He said he was proud.
He said he'd love to catch up. The words were friendly and normal and that's what makes them so devastating—the performance of warmth from a person whose warmth was always a trap.
The smile that said isn't this nice while the hand behind it held a lighter.
That evening, I call Tess.
"He found me," I say. No preamble. My voice sounds like someone else's—flat, stripped, the voice of a woman who's retreated behind her own walls.
Tess goes quiet. She knows. She's the only person in the world who knows the full story, who sat with me in a dorm room at three in the morning while I told her about the Voss house and the boy and the sketchbook and the dark hallway and the finger, and she held me and didn't say anything because there was nothing to say.
"Kyle," she says. Not a question.
"He was on my street. This morning. He knows about the show. He's been—he said he read a write-up. He knows where I work, Tess. He knows about the art."
"Where is he now?"
"I don't know. I haven't left the studio."
"Jess." Her voice has a quality I rarely hear—Tess angry. Tess fierce. "Call the police."
"And say what? A man I knew as a teenager said hello to me on the street?"
"Say he abused you. Say he broke your finger. Say—"
"I was twelve. There's no record. Nobody documented anything except me, and my documentation was a drawing in a sketchbook that he burned in a backyard.
" I press my phone against my ear so hard the screen digs into my cheekbone.
"The system didn't protect me then. I don't trust it to protect me now. "
"Then I'm coming over. Right now."
"Tess—"
"Don't. Don't tell me you're fine. Don't tell me you can handle it. I have known you since we were fourteen and I know what your voice sounds like when you're holding yourself together with your fingernails, and that's what it sounds like right now."
The precision of this—the way Tess sees through me, always, without effort—almost breaks me. My eyes burn. I press the heel of my hand against them and breathe.
"Okay," I say. The word comes out small. The smallest word I've said in years.
"I'll be there in forty minutes. Don't argue."
She comes. She brings soup from the Vietnamese place and she sits on my crate in the studio and holds my hand while I tell her about Monday, about the smile, about the words that sounded friendly and felt like a door slamming on my fingers all over again.
"He can't hurt you," Tess says. "You're not twelve. You're not in that house."
"My body doesn't know that."
"I know." She squeezes my hand. "But I'm here. And we'll figure it out."
I don't work that night. Tess stays until midnight, and when she leaves I walk her to the cargo door and watch her go and lock the latch behind her and the studio feels emptier and safer at the same time.
Tuesday, I text Damien. Just one line—Working on something. Need a couple of days. It's not a lie, exactly. I am working on something. Survival. The project of putting one foot in front of the other when the floor has gone soft.
He replies: Take the time you need. I'm here.
The message is simple. Uncomplicated. The four words at the end—I'm here—sit on my screen like a handhold on a rock face. I don't reach for it. Not yet. But I know it's there.
On Wednesday, Damien comes.
Two days without seeing me. A text that said nothing and meant everything. Of course he came.
The cargo door is down. He knocks—three measured raps, the knock I'd know anywhere now. I sit on the crate and consider not answering. Consider staying in the dark with the cold torch and the silent sculpture and the twelve-year-old girl who's been sitting beside me since Monday morning.
I get up and lift the door.