Chapter 12 #2
“Where are Steph and Jacob?” he asks. The question cuts through the unsettling quiet, ordinary words carrying the weight of everything unspoken, dragging me back into a room where his mouth is no longer on me, but my body still remembers every second it was.
The question catches for a second because I’m still not used to hearing him say their names like that, not Mom and Dad, not your parents, just Steph and Jacob, as if he’s holding himself at a careful distance from the whole arrangement.
“They’re at work,” I say, setting the waffle down because I realize I haven’t really been eating it. “My mom leaves early on Mondays. My dad had some meeting before court.”
Silas nods once.
That’s it.
No follow-up. No attempt at conversation. He takes a bite of the protein bar like we are two strangers accidentally sharing a table instead of two people who spent half the night trying not to unravel in each other’s hands.
I don’t know whether to be angry at him for that or grateful.
Probably both.
The silence stretches again, every passing second the truth I haven’t told him pressing harder against the back of my teeth.
He doesn’t know. Or if he does, he’s hiding it well.
The whole drive home, the way he moved, the way he tried to keep going even after he’d lost the pulse, makes it impossible for me not to imagine what hearing it will do to him.
My fingers tighten around the edge of the plate.
“You should know,” I say finally.
He stills.
It’s subtle. The kind of stillness most people would miss. But I see it. The tiny pause before he takes another bite. The way his shoulders tighten almost imperceptibly beneath the hoodie.
I force myself to keep going before I can lose my nerve.
“About the boy from last night.”
Now he looks at me.
Really looks at me.
And all at once I can’t hide behind frozen waffles or kitchen light or the ridiculous normalcy of the morning anymore.
His eyes are unreadable beneath the brim of the cap, but there is a tension in his face that wasn’t there a second ago.
Like some part of him has already guessed what I’m about to say and is bracing for it anyway.
“He didn’t make it,” I tell him quietly.
The words leave me and land between us with a heaviness that changes the whole room.
For a second he doesn’t move at all. Not a blink. Not a breath I can see. The protein bar lowers slowly from his hand until it rests against the table, forgotten there. His jaw tightens once, sharply enough that I notice it even from across from him.
There is no dramatic reaction.
No swearing. No denial. No burst of anger.
Just absence.
Something in his expression empties out in a way that is somehow worse than grief worn openly.
It’s the look of someone who already knew this was possible, maybe even likely, but still hadn’t built the part of himself that could absorb it cleanly.
The look of someone who has watched death win enough times to recognize it before anyone else does, and still hates it every single time.
I don’t know what to do with that face.
So I stay still too.
For a moment, I think he isn’t going to say anything at all.
He just sits there with that same emptied-out expression, one hand still resting near the protein bar, the other flat against the table like he needs the surface beneath it to remind himself where he is.
Morning light cuts across the kitchen and catches the edge of his jaw, the tension there so severe it almost looks painful.
Then something in him hardens.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. It happens the way ice forms over dark water. Whatever grief had flashed through him disappears behind something colder, something easier to carry because it leaves less exposed.
“He was a fool,” he says.
The words are sharp enough to sting, not because of the boy, not really, but because of what he is doing to himself by saying them. He sounds angry, but the anger is too polished. Too practiced. The kind people reach for when sorrow feels too humiliating to let anyone witness.
“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”
His eyes cut to me just long enough for the sentence to land where he wants it to.
There is no accusation spelled out plainly, but it doesn’t need to be. The implication hangs there all the same. The boy on the patio. Me. Him. All of us orbiting our own bad decisions like they aren’t going to finally drag us under.
Before I can answer, he pushes back from the table.
The chair legs scrape against the floor with a harsh, ugly sound.
He doesn’t look at me again as he reaches across the counter and picks up my car keys, his fingers closing around them with a familiarity that should irritate me more than it does.
The metal jingles softly in the sudden silence of the kitchen.
“I’ll be in the car,” he says.
That’s it.
No discussion. No acknowledgment of what passed between us last night.
No apology for the cruelty buried inside his grief.
He just turns, leaving the kitchen with that same clipped, controlled energy, as though if he moves quickly enough he can outrun the weight of everything that happened before the sun came up.
The front door closes and I’m left standing in the kitchen with a cold waffle on my plate, a dead boy in my thoughts, and the sting of Silas’s words settling into places that were already bruised.