Chapter 10 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Nobody loves me / It’s true / Not like you do”
— “Sour Times” by Portishead
Red and blue lights. Siren wailing. Ambulance, red, big, square, men in uniform with stretchers that look like medieval torture devices, metal and Elliot both groaning as they crank the stretcher up and prepare to raise him onto it.
“Ma’am, we need you to step back,” one of the paramedics instructs. He’s a stocky guy with a shaved head and latex gloves already on, and he’s frowning at me in a suspicious sort of way that just makes me feel that much worse.
Numbly, robotically, I move out of the way. They kneel beside Elliot and start doing their thing. What’s your name? Can you tell me where you are? Do you know what day it is?
Elliot answers some of them. He gets the location wrong—says he’s at home—and the two paramedics share a look before loading him onto the stretcher.
“Sir, can you tell us what happened?” the other paramedic asks. She’s young, ponytail, clipboard already out.
Elliot shakes his head.
“Did someone hit you?”
He shakes his head again, harder this time, and winces at the motion. Blood is still leaking from the gash above his eye, drenching the fresh gauze they just pressed against it.
“Okay. Let’s get him in.” They wheel him toward the back door and I follow, weaving past a cluster of restaurant staff and gawking diners.
As I step outside, I realize I’m still holding the bloody paper towels I’d been pressing against his forehead when a hostess opened the door and found us crouched on the floor, kneeling in puddles of sticky crimson.
They slide Elliot into the ambulance. I try to climb in after him, but the stocky paramedic holds up a hand. “Are you family?”
“I’m his—” I stop and cringe. As I made clear to Elliot just before he was beaten to a fucking pulp, I’m not his anything. “I’m his neighbor. We were here together.”
The hand goes down, but the suspicious look remains. “Alright. Well, you can follow us to Mount Sinai West. He’s stable, but he needs stitches and probably a CT to scope for brain damage. Whatever hit him did a damn good job.”
“Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
The doors close and the ambulance pulls away from the curb, lights still spinning.
I watch it race off down Amsterdam. Police officers finish talking to the restaurant staff and flock to me as soon as they’re gone.
One of the cops is tall, mid-forties, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a notepad.
The other is younger and shorter, built like a fire hydrant, shadowing his partner a step behind.
“You the one who found him?” Mustache asks at once.
I nod. “Yeah. Uh, yeah.”
“Your name?”
“Jillian Pierce.”
He writes it down. “And the victim?”
“Elliot. Elliot, uh, Wilkinson. He’s my neighbor. We were having dinner.”
“Okay, Ms. Pierce. Can you tell me what happened?”
I give them the short version, though it already feels like I’m re-telling a dream that someone once told me. All the details sound wrong and fuzzy, mismatched, confused. “… and then he went to the bathroom. He was gone for a while, so I went to check on him and found him like that.”
That story goes over about as well as I thought it would. The two officers share a frown and look back at me with lowered brows. “Did you see anyone enter or exit the bathroom area before or after you went back there?”
“No. Not that I saw. But I was… not paying that close attention, I guess.”
You know who was paying attention, though?
Your new Shadow. A mask without form, leather gloves that know just where to reach to undo every lock, to push your hair back behind your ear, to coax you to your knees.
A Masked Man with no name who’s playing you like a fool for his own sick amusement.
Your stalker. The animal in the underbrush, just out of sight.
“… Ma’am?”
I blink and realize that Mustache was still asking me questions. “Sorry, could you ask that again?”
“I said, Did Mr. Wilkinson say anything about who attacked him?”
“No. He wouldn’t talk. He just kept shaking his head.”
“Well, do you have any idea who might have done this?”
Here it is. The question I’ve been dreading since the moment I saw the blood on the floor.
Oh, yes, Officer, I know exactly who did this.
He smells like cinnamon, and if you gave me a pen, I could sketch out the shape of his body in the dark.
He’s on the train and in my apartment, in my coffee shop, in the dingy back hallway of this tiny Thai restaurant.
He’s everywhere, Officer. I can still feel the imprint of his tongue on my neck.
But I know that if I say any of that, the next question is: Why didn’t you report the break-in?
And the one after that: Why did you let a man with a gun leave your apartment without calling 911?
And the one after that, and the one after that, and eventually they’ll get to the question underneath all the other questions, which is: What exactly are you hiding, Ms. Pierce?
“No,” I tell him instead. “I have no idea.”
Mustache studies me for a second. A lifetime passes as those plain brown eyes regard me, and every second I spent twisting under his scrutiny is pure, self-inflicted torture.
In the end, he decides I’m telling an acceptable form of the truth, because he lets it go. “Alright, ma’am. That’s fine for now. We’ll need to review the restaurant’s security footage. We’ll find you if we have follow-up questions.”
“Sure. Yeah, that’s fine.”
The shorter cop reaches out to hand me a card. “If your friend remembers anything, or if you think of something, give us a call.”
“Yeah. Definitely. I will, of course I will.”
They head inside to talk to the restaurant staff, leaving me stranded on the sidewalk holding a bloody wad of paper towels, a cop’s card, and the full, crushing weight of what I’ve done.
Elliot got hurt because of me. Because I went on a date I shouldn’t have gone on, with a man I don’t like in that way, to avoid going home to an apartment where a monster might be waiting. That monster saw it. And he didn’t punish me for it—he punished Elliot.
I knew this would happen, though, didn’t I?
The Masked Man told me. He literally told me.
People I care about tend to have very bad nights.
He said that right to my face, standing in my dark apartment with his hand in my hair, and I heard him, and I understood him, and then I went ahead and did the exact thing he warned me not to do.
I knew. I knew and I did it anyway.
I’m a very bad person.
The paper towels are sticky and cold in my fist. I drop them into a trash can on the curb and wipe my hands on my jeans, but the feeling doesn’t come off.
This is my fault. Mine and mine alone. I used Elliot as a security blanket and the Masked Man skinned him for it. The warning was clear and I ignored it.
Why, though? Because I was scared? Because I’m stubborn? Because some defiant part of me wanted to see if he’d actually follow through?
That last one sits wrong in my gut. Not because it’s false, but because it might be true.
I’m fascinated by him. I can admit that much, even though I repress everything else in my life that’s thorny or difficult. The Masked Man is not normal—but then again, neither am I.
I just fake it better.
I don’t remember much of the hospital or how I got from there back home.
I must have done it, because I’m standing in front of my apartment door with my keys in my hand, but the hours between what happened at the restaurant and here are just gone, eaten up by the loop playing in my head: Elliot’s swollen eye, the blood on the tile, the frantic side-to-side shaking of his head.
I unlock the door, step inside, and lock it behind me. The curtains are still flapping in the breeze, so I slink over and shut the window. They die immediately, limp and lifeless.
I drop my bag in the middle of the floor and walk toward the bathroom to wash the dried blood off my hands. I flip the light switch with a clean part of my wrist—but when I raise my head, I scream.
On the shower wall, smeared in rust-red streaks across the white tile in what is unmistakably blood, are six words:
I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO.