27. Let Him Come
Let Him Come
Summer
The chair beside the bed scrapes softly against the floor.
Jackson sits.
I can still feel sweat drying on my skin. I can feel the bruises coming up along my thighs, blooming slow beneath the surface where their hands were. Off to the side Donnie is still breathing hard, readjusting his belt like a man who's finished a job of work and is thinking about his dinner.
My throat feels like razor blades. I screamed so much, so loud, for so long that I don't think I could make a sound now if I tried. I try to swallow and can't. There's salt on my tongue, and the taste of it makes me heave—dry, useless, nothing left in me to bring up.
I wait for it to come. The fear. The devastation. The grief that should be tearing through me.
It doesn't come.
There's just nothing. A wide flat nothing where all of it should be, and I lie in the middle of it like a body in an empty field.
My hands are shaking. I can see them shaking, rope biting into wrists, and I watch them the way you'd watch something on a screen, thinking distantly, that poor girl.
As if she isn't me. As if I'm not the one still lying in what they left behind.
Maybe this is mercy. Maybe some part of me knows exactly how much weight I can hold and has decided to keep the rest back until I'm somewhere safe enough to set it down.
Maybe I'm never going to be somewhere safe enough.
The worst of it isn't what they did. It's that they did it in front of the camera, and Jackson watched me the whole time—not Donnie, not what was happening—me, my face, cataloging every sound I made like a man checking his work against a drawing.
Whatever he was looking for, he found some of it.
That's what turns my stomach now. Not the pain. Being studied while it happened.
I feel the weight of that same stare on the side of my face.
I don't give him my eyes.
It's the only thing left in this room that's mine, so I keep it. I fix my gaze on the ceiling, find the crack running out from the light fitting, and I count the places it forks.
Twenty-one.
Twenty-two.
Twenty-three.
The numbers are easier. The numbers don't ask me anything.
They don't make me see my mother at the window when headlights swept the road and weren't his.
They don't make me count how many birthdays he left early, how many excuses she swallowed, how many times she chose not to ask a question because she loved him too much to want the answer.
Across the room the footage is still running. It's been running this whole time. It was running while they—
Twenty-four.
Twenty-five.
And I understand something, lying here in all this nothing. He didn't just take my body tonight. He put my father in the room while he did it, so that every time I remember one I'll have to remember the other. So the two of them will be welded together in me for the rest of my life.
That's what he does. He doesn't only ruin the thing in front of him. He goes back through everything you loved and ruins that too.
Twenty-six.
For the first time since he showed me those videos, I stopped wondering whether my father loved us. The question that settles in its place is so much worse.
How much of him ever belonged to us at all?
"Jacob is coming."
It comes out in a whisper, ruined, barely a sound at all. I say it again. And again. Not to Jackson. Not really to myself either. Just out loud, because hearing it in the air makes it into something solid, and right now I need one solid thing to hold.
The room stays quiet. Then Jackson laughs.
Low. Genuine. It settles into my stomach like something swallowed whole.
"You really think I don't know that?"
I turn my head before I can stop myself.
A smile touches his mouth. Not a pleasant one. The kind that belongs to a man holding something he's been saving.
"I know your sheriff is on his way." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, close enough that I can smell the blood dried at his lip where I bit him. "I've known every step he's taken since he woke my brother up."
The room shrinks.
"There's been a mic under Kurt's bed for the past two days, princess." A quiet laugh slips out of him. "It's amazing what a nurse will do for an eight-ball of coke."
Not just that Jacob is coming—that I could bear, that was always going to be true.
But he's known the whole time. Every hour I've been lying here holding those three words against my chest like a candle in a storm, he's been watching Jacob walk toward this house with the patience of a man who set the table days ago.
I don't know how. I don't need to know how.
All I know is that the one thing keeping me breathing has been in his hands this entire time, and he let me keep it.
He let me hold onto it. He watched me whisper it to myself in an empty room and he let me, because a hope you're allowed to keep hurts so much more when it's taken.
Jackson watches the understanding land on my face. Waits for all of it to arrive.
Then he sits back, entirely relaxed. Entirely certain.
"Let him come." Calm. Almost amused. "Let him see exactly what his hesitation cost."
On the screen, my father walks through those doors again. Another date. Another lie. Another night.
Jackson's eyes drift to it, and something in his face comes loose. The certainty slides off it like a mask that's been untied at the back.
"Your father killed her."
The words go through the numbness like wire through wax.
I don't move. I don't ask. I've learned that my silence is the only thing that keeps him talking, and some starved part of me still wants to know—still needs the shape of the thing that's swallowed my whole life.
"Not with his hands. Men like Michael Miller never do it with their hands." He's watching the screen, but he isn't seeing it. "He wanted her. I said no. So he took her from me anyway, and then he made sure she couldn't come home."
He stops. His jaw works.
"I found her."
His voice changes on those three words. It goes somewhere thin and far away, and the man in the chair goes with it, and I understand that he isn't talking to me anymore.
"There was so much blood I couldn't find where it was coming from. I thought if I just kept my hands on her—if I kept saying her name—" He stops again. "She was still warm."
Something moves in me that I don't want. I don't want to feel anything for him. Not after tonight. Not ever. But the numbness has cracked in one small place and through it comes the picture anyway: a man on a floor with a woman going cold in his arms.
And underneath it, immediately, comes the second thought, and it's mine, and it's cold as stone.
Good.
I hope you never stop feeling it.
"His deputies dragged me off her." The sound that leaves him isn't a laugh, whatever it's pretending to be.
"That's what they walked in on. Me on the floor.
Her blood to my elbows. Two of your sheriff's men hauled me off a body I wouldn't put down.
" His head tilts. "Every one of them decided in the same second what they were looking at.
Nobody asked. Why would they? A man like me, holding a girl like that. "
The footage keeps looping. He hasn't blinked in a long time.
"They buried her on a Thursday." Quieter now.
Almost gentle. Gentle enough that my skin crawls, because I know exactly who he's speaking to, and it isn't me.
"Her mother chose the flowers. I put in a request. It was reviewed in due course.
" His hands have gone still on his knees.
"I sat on a bed four hours away and watched a clock go round. "
Then, so soft I nearly don't catch it:
"I never even saw where they put her."
And there it is. The thing at the bottom of all of this. Not the murder. Not the prison. A man who never got to stand at the edge of a hole in the ground and say goodbye, and who has spent every day since trying to build her back out of other people's bodies.
Mine. Out of mine.
His eyes come back into the room, and they settle on me—really on me, the way they did on the floor with my cord around his throat. Whatever was almost human in them a moment ago is gone.
"I thought I could make you her." He says it simply, like a man reading back a figure that didn't add up. "I thought if I took enough away, if I got it right—the hair, the scent, the way you hold your mouth when you're angry—I thought I could get her back."
He looks at me for a long moment. Something in his face closes like a hand.
"But you'll always be Michael Miller's daughter. And I'm never going to change that."
The floor goes out from under me.
Because I know what I've been to him since the moment he put me in this house. A vessel. A canvas. A thing worth keeping careful, worth feeding, worth dressing—because there was something he wanted to grow inside it. Every hour I've survived here, I've survived on the back of that want.
And he's just set it down.
If I can't be her, then there's nothing left of me he needs. No project. No patience. No reason to keep me whole.
Only the surname. Only the debt.
I lie very still and understand, with a clarity that cuts straight through the numbness, that I have just become something much simpler than a woman he wants.
I've become a thing he intends to spend.
"And your sheriff." The word comes out heavy, like he's been carrying it a while.
"He wore the badge. He stood in that station, in that same building, drank the same coffee, laughed at the same jokes.
" His lip curls. "And never once looked up.
Never asked one question about the girl they were processing downstairs, because he was too busy panting after Michael Miller's daughter. "
He leans in.
"He didn't have to lift a finger, Summer. That's what you're not understanding. He only had to look. And he didn't. Not once. Because she wasn't anybody's daughter that mattered."
And there—right there, through all the nothing—something in me lifts its head.
No.
I can't say it. My throat is ruined and my hands are tied and there isn't a sound left in my body.
But it goes through me anyway, hot and clear and entirely mine: you have this backward.
Jacob didn't look away from her. You buried her under your own silence, kept her upstairs like a secret, and then you spent every year since making the whole world pay for a door you closed yourself.
You didn't lose her because nobody looked.
You lost her because of what you built.
Jackson settles back into the chair, and the mask slides quietly into place, and he smiles at me like we've come to an understanding.
"So let him come." His voice is easy again. Pleasant. "Let him walk into my house and stand exactly where I stood. Let him find out what it costs."
He turns his head toward me, and what's on his face now is worse than any of it.
"And then he can be the one on the floor."
The footage loops. The timestamps climb. My father keeps walking through the same doors into the same room and the same life, over and over, forever.
And I lie in the wreck of my own body with rope at my wrists and a dead woman's perfume on my skin, and I make myself a promise while the numbness closes back over me like water.
He's told me what he wants. He's told me what he's waiting for. He's so certain he's already won that he's stopped hiding a single thing from me.
Let him be certain.
Because Jacob is coming—and now I know exactly what's waiting for him.
And I'm the only one in this house who does.