Chapter 50
S ix years ago
Nora
I’ve been reliving this day since I found out about Jericho.
It started like most bad things do. Quietly.
I’m twenty-one and stupid and reckless and heartbroken, living in a shoebox apartment above a Vietnamese bakery on a street that smells like cinnamon and car exhaust. Boston has not been kind to me so far. But neither has Big Love, so I’m still trying to build a life here.
It’s been over a year since Richard dumped me with the same care someone might toss a fast-food wrapper out of their car window, and by now he’s graduated to Dick.
“You’re too much, Nora,” he said. Like I was a hurricane and he just wanted sunny skies.
“Too much?”
“You have all of,” he waved his hand in my face, “ that . You’re not wifey material for someone like me.”
Someone like him. A dickhead. That’s what he was.
So I ran. Or, more accurately, I crawled out of my skin and drove three hours south into the big city where everything was loud and bright and so busy it drowned out the hum of my grief.
That had been our plan from the beginning—to move to the big city when we graduated and find ourselves a new life. Together.
But now, while I’m looking for myself, I end up losing more and more. The city is lonely, and I feel very small here. I don’t have friends. I don’t even have enemies to make my life a little more exciting. Here I’m just no one.
I have a job at a diner with sticky floors and endless coffee refills. It’s the same job I’d been doing for years for Grandma at her diner, but it’s different here. No one here knows me, no one really talks. Everyone has their own lives, and I have mine.
The big city isn’t what I thought it would be.
I painted my tiny studio in the brightest yellow I could find. I even cut my bangs—a terrible idea, I couldn’t pull them off. But it felt like something people do when they’re trying to start over.
And then it happens. I’ve been in Boston for over a year at this point and thought I was finally getting accustomed to a big city.
It’s a Tuesday night, and I stay late after my shift because my coworker has a sore back and asked me to cover the last table. I don’t mind. The streets are safer after midnight, paradoxically, because there are fewer people to wreak havoc. Or so I thought.
I leave the diner at 12:32 a.m. My sneakers squeak against the wet pavement as I cut down the alley like I always do. It shaves five minutes off my walk, and after a fourteen-hour shift, even that small number of minutes matters .
The alley is well lit. Usually empty. Usually safe.
Tonight it’s not.
At first, it’s just voices. Low and tense. Male voices. In this lonely alley. The first voices I’ve heard in this alley besides mine late at night.
I slow down. My heart taps against my ribs, and my instincts scream Turn around , but exhaustion and pride are louder. I tell myself I’ve walked this alley a hundred times, and I don’t want to be that girl who runs from shadows.
So I keep going.
That’s when I see him.
A man, maybe in his late twenties, broad and furious, slamming another guy against the wall. The smaller man gasps, barely managing to get a word out before a fist cracks across his jaw. And then another. Then the attacker grabs the man and begins smacking his head against the wall.
The sound is sharp— unwavering —and it splits the night like thunder every time his head connects with the concrete.
I freeze.
I’m telling myself to move, but my body doesn’t listen. It just stands there, witnessing a violent attack of one human beating on another.
Another slam sounds particularly loud, and I cry out, dropping my bag.
The attacker’s face whips toward me, and I see a ghost. Literally.
The man’s wearing a ghost mask over his face, and all I can see are his eyes.
Wild, like something unhinged has taken root behind them.
He drops the man he’s been pressing into the wall and steps toward me, just one step, and it’s enough to send a jolt of ice down my spine.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he barks.
But I can’t move. I’m rooted to the concrete like a statue carved out of fear. My mind is trying to catch up, trying to compute what’s happening, trying to scream RUN , but my body won’t listen .
The attacked man is trying to get on his feet, and my eyes dart toward him. The attacker who’s almost near me, rushes back to the man and starts his maniacal assault again.
The victim crumples without making a noise.
The bigger man looks down at him, panting, like he’s coming down from something. Rage, maybe. Drugs. Trauma. Who knows.
Is that what happened to my dad? Was the man attacking him reliving some sort of trauma?
My throat makes a gurgling sound. Then another.
The man turns to me and tilts his head as if he’s surprised I’m still here.
He’s gone after a few seconds. No running. No panic. Just gone.
I turn to the side and double over, vomiting the remains of the dinner I had a few hours ago. I heave until my stomach is empty and my chest is hurting.
I don’t remember calling the cops. I don’t remember kneeling by the man on the ground and whispering over and over, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.
” I don’t remember anything except the blood on my hands.
And his eyes. God, his eyes. Dazed and fading.
The very same eyes I saw on my dad in the hospital before they closed forever.
The police arrive. An ambulance takes him away. They ask me questions: how tall was the attacker, what did he look like, did you get a name? Like I had a chance to ask him to introduce himself.
I answer. Kind of. Through the fog. I shake. I throw up twice more. One of the paramedics wraps me in a blanket like a child.
The man doesn’t survive. I know because I go to check on him the next morning.
The city doesn’t change after that.
But I do. I change .
Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just in quiet, gradual ways that no one notices but me.
I stop using the alley. I stop working night shifts. I stop walking with headphones on.
I start wearing protective crystals and touching them often for my own comfort. I start checking my locks three times instead of once. I start getting this tight, crawling sensation in my stomach whenever someone raises their voice. Even if it’s just to cheer.
The worst part?
It follows me. Even after I leave the city and come back to Big Love. Even after I return to the comfort of the diner and Grandma’s warm hands and my old room with its creaky bed frame. I can’t forget. I can’t unsee it.
What I saw reignites the nightmares that started long before, involving the last day our parents were alive.
I thought I’d overcome it. I really did.
Until I hear aggravated assault and Jericho in the same sentence. My safest person in the world now associated with the worst memory of my life.
I laugh at first when I learn it. A bitter, defensive kind of laugh, like the universe is playing a cruel joke on me. Like this laugh is some sort of a years-delayed reaction to all the previous traumas.
Of course the safe, grumpy man next door—who looks like he could snap a person in half with one hand—has a record. Of course he does. And not just any record, but one for assault, something which has been haunting me for half of my life.
I thought I’d grown to know the man.
Turns out I don’t. Not really. I know he has callused hands that can be gentle on my body and a big soul that secretly loves the rooster.
I know he’s protective of his niece and family.
I know he smells like pine and paint and has a look of danger in his eyes that makes your knees buckle, not from fear, but something worse—want.
He feels like a mystery wrapped in a cozy evening blanket.
As it turns out, the danger is real, and the mystery is dark. It’s too dark for me to accept. Too heavy to handle.
Not when every cell in me screams that it could happen again.
Maybe not to me. Maybe not by him.
But that doesn’t matter. Because it only takes one second for everything to change.
One punch.
One scream.
One alley.
And the life of a whole family is altered forever.
And I promised myself, all those years ago, that I’d never be around people who can change other people’s life on a whim. On an uncontained emotion. That I’d never get close to someone who could turn a switch and become something unrecognizable.
So when Dick tells me about Jericho’s time for assault, I shut down.
I go cold.
I go still.
And I understand why I’ve been pulling away. Why I’ve been making excuses. Why every time he gets too close, I find a reason to run.
Because he’s the alley.
He’s the shadow.
He’s the echo of that moment I’ve spent years trying to forget.
And no matter how many times I remind myself that he’s different—soft with Grandma, patient with Junie, annoyingly respectful even when I push him—my fear doesn’t listen.
Fear never does .
So I keep putting one foot in front of the other, I relax against the cold air, and I tell myself that I need to find the other Nora. The one who used to listen. The one who wanted to be herself and let others be themselves too. The one who didn’t judge.