5. Elara
Elara
“Is the fireplace load-bearing?”
Rayner looks at the fireplace, then at me, with the expression of a man who wants very badly to give the right answer to a question he does not understand.
“It’s stone,” he says carefully.
“So that’s a yes.”
“That’s a — the wall is holding the wall up.”
“Agree to disagree.”
The guys laugh, and I let them, because the food is unfairly good and the fire is warm and my feet have been granted amnesty under the table, and for about eleven minutes I have allowed this dinner to feel normal.
The eleven minutes are up.
I set my fork down. “Okay. Now that we’re all here.” I look around the table. “You promised me answers. Tonight. You —” I point at Leif — “said all of it that I can hold. I’m holding out my hands, gentlemen. Start filling them.”
Rayner grins. Actually grins, wide and delighted, like me issuing demands at their dinner table is the best thing that’s happened to him all year. Gunnar groans into his drink.
“This is not going to end well,” he mutters.
“First question.” I turn to Erik, because there’s an elephant in this room and it’s wearing his face. “How did you get here before us? You were behind me. The entire walk. I would know.”
“I moved through shadow.”
He says it like that. No wind-up. No glance around the table for permission. He says it just like you’d say I took the shortcut, and he goes back to his plate.
“…Excuse me. You did what through what?”
“Shadow.” He gestures vaguely at the room, at the dark stacked in the corners of it, like he’s pointing out a door I should have noticed. “Anywhere there’s shadow, I can move through it. Come out somewhere else. It’s fast.”
“It’s fast,” I repeat.
“Considerably faster than walking.”
I wait for someone to laugh.
Nobody laughs.
Four grown men keep eating dinner like he didn’t just casually announce he commutes through darkness.
That’s how I know it’s true.
I’m going to need a minute.
Okay.
Okay. Shadow. Sure. I fell up through the sky today, there are four moons outside, my cat is a commander. I can deal with the shadow whatever it is.
“How often do you do that?”
He shrugs. “Not often. Almost never, on Earth.”
“But sometimes.”
“Sometimes.”
“Where do you go? When you do it.”
“Depends.” He’s relaxed. He is so relaxed. He has no idea he’s under oath. “If I was running late somewhere. Skipping a line. Small things.”
“Skipping a line.”
“The coffee place gets busy.”
“Uh-huh.” I nod slowly. Somewhere in the back of my head, a courtroom is assembling itself. Exhibits are being labeled. “And when you’re in there… In the shadow. Can you hear things?”
“Yes.”
“See things?”
“Yes.”
“Ever hear any good conversations?”
And Erik — Erik, who notices everything, who probably knew every time I was about to complain on our three-hour walk — smiles a little, fond, like I’ve asked about his hobbies. “Plenty.”
Brock clears his throat.
It’s a small sound. It’s a very deliberate small sound, and it’s aimed at Erik, and it comes half a second too late, because I’m already leaning forward with my elbows on their table.
“How many times have you been in the shadows in my apartment, Erik?”
He looks up from his plate, eyes wide.
The room stops.
Not quiet. Stopped. Forks still in the air, glasses down, five large men achieving perfect stillness all at once, and Erik’s face does something I have never seen it do in three years of hallways.
He goes red.
“I—” He sets his fork down like it’s suddenly heavy. “I can explain.”
“No.” It comes out low, which surprises both of us. “No, see, there’s nothing to explain, because did you ever hear any good conversations and plenty already explained it. How many times?”
“Elara—”
“How dare you!” And now it’s not low anymore, now it’s standing up inside me with its own legs.
“How dare you. That’s my home. That is my — I sing into hairbrushes in there, Erik.
I talk to Gerald. I cry at insurance commercials.
I do jumping jacks in my living room like an unwell Victorian ghost, and I do all of it because I think I’m alone, and you — how long?
How many times? Was there a schedule? Did you have favorites? ”
“It wasn’t—” He stops. Starts again, and his voice has dropped into something careful. “After Kyle—”
“What does Kyle have to do with—”
“You weren’t the same.”
That’s not where my head was going and I don’t want… No, I don’t need it to go there right now, because that isn’t a part of things that are up for discussion. Because they aren’t, and that’s the end of that. He doesn’t get to talk about that. He doesn’t. Because I don’t have armor for that.
“After he moved out, you stopped sleeping with your window cracked,” he says, quiet, steady, and it’s fucking awful.
“You started leaving a light on in your living room. You checked the peephole before you opened the door for packages you ordered yourself. You kept your keys in your fist from the mailboxes to your door. Every day. For weeks.”
The fire pops and nobody moves.
And he’s right. He’s right about every single one of them, things I never told anyone, things I barely told myself, and for one second I go soft toward him — he saw, he noticed, somebody noticed —
And then I hear it.
“Erik.” My voice comes out flat. “Every example you just gave me is more evidence of the crime.”
He flinches. Actually flinches.
“You know about my window. My living room light. My peephole. My keys.” I count them off on my fingers, and my hands are shaking, and I’m so angry I’m hot everywhere, which I’m blaming on the fireplace.
My heart is going too fast. I can hear it.
Since when can I hear it? “The defense is surveillance. Your alibi is more surveillance. I was worried is not — you don’t get to — you could have knocked.
You lived twelve feet away. Neighbors knock, Erik.
Neighbors say, hey, you seem jumpy, want to get coffee.
They don’t hide themselves in my corners like—”
Like…
The corner.
The word walks into my own sentence and turns all the lights on, and my whole body goes cold and hot in the same second, and my next breath comes in shallow and doesn’t reach the bottom.
“…Wednesday,” I say.
Erik’s brow creases. “What?”
“Last Wednesday. That was you.” I’m not asking.
I’m assembling, and I’m doing it too fast, and the words are coming out quicker than I can breathe around them.
“I was working. Trying to work. I was doing jumping jacks and talking to Gerald and the corner by the bookshelf went — weird. The shadows there were wrong, they were too thick, and Gerald’s leaves kept leaning toward it, plants lean toward light, Erik, and he was leaning at the dark, and I looked at it and I decided —”
I decided the corner was fine. I made it a whole policy.
“— and it was you. Standing in my corner. Watching me flail around my living room in a sports bra, so, what I need from you right now is—”
“Elara.”
Something in his voice makes me stop.
He’s not red anymore. That’s the first thing I notice.
The color is gone, all of it, and the guilt is gone with it, and what’s left on his face has no business being there — Erik, who got between me and Kyle at the coffee shop, Erik who is never surprised by anything, is looking at me like he wants to kill something.
“What corner?”
My stomach drops through the floor of me.
“The one by the bookshelf, obviously, the—”
“Elara,” he says carefully. “Four times.”
“…What?”
“Three years. I have been inside your apartment four times. Passing through. Seconds, each time. Nights I heard you crying through the wall, and then couldn’t hear you at all, and I stepped through to make sure you were still breathing, and I stepped out.
That’s what I was going to explain.” His eyes don’t leave mine.
“I can stop, inside the shadow. I never stopped in your apartment. I have never stood in a corner and watched you. Not Wednesday. Not ever.”
Four times.
Nights I was crying. Nights I thought nobody— he heard me. Through the wall. And he came to make sure I was still breathing and then he left me my privacy and my pride and never said a word for three years, and I am trying so hard to stay angry and the anger keeps losing its footing—
“But—”
“Wednesday morning I was nowhere near the building. I was across the city.” He’s not talking to me anymore, not really. He’s talking to the table. To the others. “I can’t prove either of those things. But whatever stood in your corner, it wasn’t me.”
The fire is the only thing still making noise.
I press my hands flat on the table to stop the shaking.
It doesn’t stop the shaking. It just moves it inward, up through my wrists and into my chest, and my breathing has picked up somewhere in the last minute — fast, high, useless.
I try the thing where you breathe in for four counts. It gets to two and quits.
Beside me, Leif sets his fork down without a sound. Rayner’s grin has been gone for a while, I realize. I don’t know when it left.
“Okay,” I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I authorized. “Okay, well. Then it was — the light was weird, or I was tired, or Gerald was — plants just do that, probably, sometimes, it was probably—”
Nobody agrees with me.
Why is nobody agreeing with me?
I am offering them perfectly good explanations, the same ones I sold myself at the time.
Excellent explanations, and not one of these men will pick one up, and Erik is looking at the dark stacked in the corners of this room like maybe I wasn’t the crazy one after all.
I understand now, all at once and way too late, that I would give anything to have him be guilty.
Something was in my apartment.
Something stood in my corner and watched me do jumping jacks and talk to my plant, and it wasn’t Erik, and I want it to be Erik so badly I could cry.
My skin is hot.
Too hot and too small and my heart is a fist on a door, and there’s a sound building somewhere under my sternum. Low. Rolling. Like the growl in the clearing — except the clearing is three hours away, and Leif’s mouth isn’t moving, and it’s coming from —
“Elara.” Brock’s voice, very calm, very quiet. “Breathe.”
I can’t.
That’s new information. I’m trying. I am trying, and my breath is doing a panicked stutter-step at the top of my chest and getting no further down, and every man at this table has stopped looking at the corners and started looking at me — and not one of them looks confused about what they’re seeing.
Which is somehow the most frightening thing that has happened all day.
The corner was not fine.
I am not fine.
Nothing is fine.