44. Eli
FORTY-FOUR
ELI
The TV bolted over the espresso machine says the jury hung.
Eleven to one. Mistrial. The reporter starts talking about retrial like that is a real possibility, but I know better.
The girl is tired, the DA likes his numbers, and the man who cornered her in a stairwell gets to drive home tonight with the windows down.
I read the whole arc off the chyron in about four seconds. I’ve seen it enough times to know the shape.
My coffee’s gone cold in my hands. I keep them wrapped around the cup anyway.
Flat. Still. These hands spent two hours at the learning center earlier, walking a fifty-two-year-old student through the gap between their and there, watching forty years of shame fall off his face when the sentence finally held together.
Good hands. Teacher’s hands. Usually, I keep them in that box.
Tonight, I’m about to open it in front of Dean.
We do this most weeks, Dean and me. Even though it’s now summer break, I still have my classes at the learning center.
Wednesday’s finishes at eight, giving me enough time to get to the support group for people connected to victims at eight-thirty.
Once that’s done, the two of us are always the last to leave—the ones who stack the chairs, who don’t have anyone at home asking where we’ve been.
Then coffee, if the place down the block is still open.
We don’t talk about the group. We mostly talk about nothing.
It’s the most honest hour of my week, which tells you everything you need to know about the rest of it.
Across the table, Dean watches the screen with me. He doesn’t fill the silence. He never does—just lets it sit there between us like a third chair, comfortable in it the way most people aren’t. It’s one of the things I trust about him. It’s also the thing I’m here to measure.
You’d never make him for any of this. Tall, built like he does something honest with his hands—solid, not gym-mirror big. Black hair, blue eyes, a jaw drawn with a ruler. Clark Kent with the glasses off.
The first night he walked into that church basement I had him pegged for a firefighter, a Little League coach, somebody’s dependable older brother. Took me weeks to understand the stillness wasn’t peace.
“Did you follow this case?” Dean asks, nodding at the TV.
I shake my head. “Don’t need to. Outcomes always the same. Legal system’s broken beyond repair.”
“Yeah.” He turns his cup a slow half-circle on the table. “Group’s going to be rough next week. Marian’s daughter was the same story. Same ending.” He says it evenly. Dean says everything evenly. “She’ll want to talk about forgiveness. She always does.”
“And you?”
“Gave up on forgiveness a while back. It’s a lot of work to feel worse.”
That’s the closest Dean comes to a joke. I almost smile.
I think about his sister. I don’t know the whole of it—he’s said maybe three sentences about her the entire time I’ve known him, and I’ve never pushed, because I know what it costs to be pushed.
But I know she’s gone now. The assault didn’t kill her.
The months after did—the morning no one got to her in time.
And after that the shape of Dean’s life was never the same.
Our stories are similar. I just found my sister in time. She survived the assault. She survived the after—barely. Which meant she had to keep surviving it, every morning after.
In some ways that was worse.
She had to keep waking up after. Keep walking around with it in her skin, in her startle response, in the way she stopped wearing her hair down because he’d grabbed it.
She had to sit in a courtroom and hear a defense attorney say words like misunderstanding and mixed signals while I learned what it felt like to want to kill someone with my bare hands.
Maybe Dean wants the same . . .
Loki told me to test whether he holds, and Odin is done waiting for me to do it slowly. I’ve run out of slow.
I release my cup before I crush it.
“Hypothetical,” I say.
Dean’s eyes come off the TV. “Okay.”
“If I brought you a body. Asked you to make it go away.” I keep my voice level. Unhurried. “What would you do?”
He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even blink. He doesn’t do the thing a normal man does, which is decide I’m joking and wait for the punchline. He just looks at me and turns the question over, considering it.
“Depends on the body,” he says. “And why you need it gone.”
I’d braced myself for, I’d call someone, or what the hell, Eli. But when he comes out with a genuine answer, my pulse does something I don’t let reach my face.
“Someone like the men who hurt our sisters,” I say. “Or worse.”
The coffee shop hums around us. The espresso machine shrieks. Somewhere behind me a woman laughs about oat milk. And Dean watches me across a slab of reclaimed wood in a neighborhood built entirely out of other people’s safety.
“A guy like that?” His eyes flick to the TV where the news segment is wrapping up, then back to me. “I’ve got a crematorium and no shortage of paperwork. I’d burn it. Without hesitation.”
I sit back.
Dean lifts his cup and takes a sip like he didn’t just casually volunteer body disposal over crappy coffee.
“Good to know,” I say.
He sets the cup down.
“Why?” he asks. Quiet. “Is that something you need, Eli?” He waits a beat. “Is there a body?”
“No.”
I skip the not yet. I don’t say that part.
Dean doesn’t move for a long moment. His hand stays wrapped around his cup, thumb resting against the seam in the cardboard sleeve.
“This about the girl?”
My eyes lift to his.
Dean’s expression doesn’t change, but something in his voice sharpens. Not accusation. Not curiosity, exactly. More like he’s found the edge of a thing I’ve been trying to keep covered.
“The one you keep asking me to watch?” he says. “Pacific Street. Diner shifts. The one you won’t explain.”
My hand tightens around the coffee cup.
“It does and it doesn’t.”
Dean waits.
“She’s not the reason this started.” I look past him, to the TV, to the reporter’s mouth moving around words that will ruin some girl’s life and barely dent his. “She’s another person I didn’t get to before the bad shit happened.”
The cup creaks in my hand. I slide it away before it splits.
“Now she’s caught in the middle of it. In the mess. In ours.” My jaw works. “And all I can do is protect her. Keep her from getting hurt worse than she already has.”
Dean looks at me for a long second.
“And the body?”
“There isn’t one.”
“Yet.” He fills it in himself this time.
I don’t answer.
Logically, this is where I should stop. But I can’t walk into Tuesday’s meeting with a hypothetical. I need to push harder.
I came here to find out what Dean is. And the only way to learn what a man does with the truth is to hand him a piece of yours and watch his face while he holds it.
“There’s a thing I carry,” I say, voice low.
“Most of the time I keep it where it lives. But some nights the thing gets so big and dark that the only thing I can imagine putting it out is the right person’s blood on the floor.
” My jaw works. I let it. “Not anyone’s.
People like him. The ones who dump a girl in a stairwell and walk out like they had a right.
” I watch him the whole time, clinical. “I don’t know how to keep fighting that want without doing something about it. ”
I’ve handed people far smaller truths than that and watched the color go out of them.
Watched the door close behind their eyes.
The slow lean-back, the I should probably get going.
If Dean stands up, I let him leave. Then I call Loki, close every door I opened, and make sure Dean never gets another piece of the truth.
Dean doesn’t stand up.
For a second, he doesn’t do anything at all.
Then Dean laughs.
It’s low and short and it doesn’t reach for anything.
No horror in it, no nervous edge, no you’re kidding.
It’s the laugh of recognition—one animal hearing another make the sound it knows from the inside.
He sets his cup down. Looks at me dead-on.
And for the first time in six weeks of careful, settled calm, I see all the way to the floor of him.
“Me too, man,” he says.
The pressure in my chest eases.
“Me too.” Softer the second time. Like he’s tired of carrying it alone.
“I’ve got the building. The license. I could do it clean and nobody would ever know.
” He turns the cup again—and now I see it for what it is.
Not a habit. A tell. The same lid, bolted down, leaning.
“I sit in that circle every Wednesday and listen to people pray for the strength to let it go. And I smile. But I will never—never—fucking let it go.” He meets my eyes. “It would be so easy, Eli.”
I keep my eyes on his for one beat longer, then slip my hand into my coat pocket.
The card is thick between my fingers. Cream stock. Heavy. Expensive enough to feel obscene in a place serving burnt espresso and stale muffins. I set it on the table and slide it across to him with two fingers.
Gold letters catch the light—UD.
On the back, a number in my handwriting. Not the public line. Not the club desk. A private intake line Loki controls.
“If you mean that,” I say, “call this.”
Dean looks down at it but doesn’t touch it right away. “What is it?”
“A door.”
His eyes lift to mine again. Steady. Assessing. “What kind of door?”
“The kind that doesn’t open twice. You call, you know more than you can unknow. You don’t call, this conversation dies here.”
That gets his attention in a way almost nothing else has. Not with visible surprise—Dean’s too controlled for that—but something in his face narrows. Focus sharpens.
He picks the card up. Turns it over. Studies the number like he can read the rest of the sentence off the ink.
“And if I call?”
“Then you decide whether you walk through it.”
Dean rolls the card once between his fingers. “You make it sound dramatic.”
“It is.”
He huffs out the barest breath through his nose. Not really amusement. More like acknowledgment that I’m not dressing this up as anything it isn’t.
Outside, tires hiss over wet street. The barista calls out a drink that sounds like a chemical formula. Everything in this place keeps moving like two men at a table aren’t discussing a way to get rid of the scum the system keeps setting free.
Dean tucks the card into his wallet.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll call.”
I drink my cold coffee and let out a breath. I’m not sure if I just gave Dean a way out of the loneliness or recruited him into sanctioned murder. Either way, I’m probably ruining his life.