Chapter 38 Theo #2
The lights are on in the front room when I pull into the drive — my mother's doing, she has never once in her life left a room dark if she could help it, something about the quality of empty lit spaces being more welcoming than the alternative.
I used to find it excessive. Today, in this cloudy weather, I find something closer to relief.
I let myself in with my key.
The house smells like an early dinner — something with onion and garlic. I follow it and find my mom at the island with a glass of wine and a medical journal open in front of her, reading glasses pushed up into her hair the way she does when she's finished reading but not ready to admit it.
She looks up when I come in.
"You look tired," she says.
"I'm fine."
"You look tired," she says again, because my mother has never once accepted fine as an answer and isn't going to start now. She closes the journal and studies me.
I drop my bag by the door, open the refrigerator, and stand in the cold for a moment without taking anything out.
“The game loss making you age?”
I glance at her. She removes the reading glasses from her head and sets them down. She looks like she has something to say.
"She's been eating."
I close the refrigerator.
"Nessa," she clarifies, as if I needed clarification. "She ate dinner with us last night. A full plate." A pause. "She came downstairs this morning without being asked."
I look at her face.
"She seems better," she says. "There's something — I don't know. An energy. Like something has come back on." She tilts her head slightly. "Do you know what's changed?"
"Has she left the house?" I ask.
"A few times this week. She didn't say where." She picks up her wine glass. "I didn't push it. You know how she gets when I push."
I know exactly how she gets.
I'm already moving toward the hallway.
"Theo."
I stop.
My mother sets down her wine glass and looks at me over the island with the expression she reserves for things she's decided need to be said, regardless of whether I want to hear them.
"Your thesis," she says. "How is it coming?"
The question lands differently than she intends it to — or maybe exactly as she intends it to. With my mother, it's sometimes impossible to tell.
"The presentation went well," I say. "I have another coming up. Final defense."
Her face does something that is unambiguously proud. Not performed, not managed — just present, the way her emotions always are when she's not in a professional context and has decided not to monitor them.
"Your father told me the department head called it one of the strongest senior theses he's reviewed in years," she says.
"Dad shouldn't be making calls on my behalf."
"He wasn't. Your Professor called him." She smiles slightly. "Apparently, it was unprompted."
I hold her gaze for a moment.
"Good," I say.
She nods once and lets me go.
Nessa's room is at the end of the upstairs hallway.
Her light is on — visible under the door, the warm yellow of her lamp rather than the overhead, which means she's been in there for a while and settled into it.
I can hear something faintly through the door.
Music. Low, the kind she plays when she's in a good mood, which used to be the default setting of my sister and became something so rare I stopped expecting it without realizing I had.
I don't knock.
I open the door.
She's sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open and her hair down. She's wearing an oversized sweatshirt, and she has color in her face, and she looks—
She looks like herself.
The version of herself that existed before.
The sight of it moves through me in a way I wasn't prepared for, and I stand in the doorway for a moment just taking inventory.
The room is clean. Not the performative clean of someone who tidied for company, but the natural order of a person who is functioning again.
Books on the desk instead of the floor. The curtains open.
A half-eaten bowl of something on the nightstand.
She looks up.
Her expression shifts immediately from open to guarded. "What are you doing in here?" She closes the laptop halfway. "You're supposed to knock."
"Your room is clean."
"Get out, Theo."
I step inside and close the door behind me.
Her jaw tightens. "I said—"
"I heard you." I lean against the door and look at her — at the color in her face, at the way she's sitting, at the brightness in her eyes that I recognize, and that has nothing to do with recovery and everything to do with something that is going to be a problem. "You seem good."
"I am good." Her chin lifts slightly. "Is that not allowed?"
"It's allowed." I push off the door, deciding something. "Give me your phone."
"Absolutely not."
"Nessa."
"No." She pulls it off the nightstand and tucks it behind her like we’re twelve. "You don't get to come in here without knocking and demand my phone. I'm not a child."
"I know you're not a child."
"Then stop treating me like one."
I cross the room.
She scrambles back on the bed, and I reach past her and get my hand around the phone before she can slide it further.
Her screen is locked. I know her passcode. She thinks I don't, but I've known it for two years, the same six digits she's used since she got her first phone, because Nessa is brilliant in every way except the ways that involve self-protection.
I put the code in while she screams at me to stop. I sit on her while she flails and cries.
I go to her messages.
I find his name before I find anything else because it's at the top of the list, the most recent conversation, the one she's been in today.
Cody.
The blood moves through me differently for a moment.
I glance at her.
She's watching my face, and I can see her deciding whether to defend it, wait me out, or try to take the phone back.
She settles on something in between, which is to meet my gaze directly without flinching, which is the most Nessa thing possible and the thing I love most about her and the thing that is going to get her destroyed.
"Theo," she says. Steady. Careful. "Listen to me—"
"What did I tell you?" I say.
Not a question.
"He's different," she says. "He's been through something, and he's—"
"What did I tell you?"
Her jaw sets. "I heard you. I heard everything you told me, and I'm telling you that you don't know him the way I—"
"Nessa," I say her name the way I say it when I need her to understand that what comes after it is the only thing that matters. "If you contact him again—"
"You'll what?" Her eyes flash. "What are you going to do, Theo? You've already done everything. You did everything, and he still—" She stops. Presses her lips together. Looks at her hands.
The room goes very quiet.
I set the phone on her nightstand.
I look at my sister, at the color in her face that I wanted so badly to see, and that I now understand the source of, and that is the most dangerous thing in this house tonight.
He's back.
He reached out, and she answered because she had been waiting for him to reach out since before any of this started, since before I made the decision I made, since before the hospital and the coma and everything that was supposed to be the end of it.
It wasn't the end of it.
For her, it was never going to be the end of it.
"He's going to hurt you again," I say quietly.
"You don't know that."
"I do know that."
"You don't know everything, Theo." Her voice cracks slightly on the last word, and she hates it — I can see her hating it, pressing it back down, reassembling the composure. "You think you do, but you don't."
I look at her for a long moment.
She reaches for it. "Theo—"
I look at Cody's name in the message list. At the timestamp.
He's using every piece on the board.
Including her.
I set the phone back down and have nothing to say, so I just stare at her. My sister, who has been in the dumps for weeks, is finally looking like herself.
"Be careful," I mutter.
It comes out differently than I intend — not a warning, not a threat. Just two words that mean something I don't have cleaner language for. Something that sounds almost like please.
She looks at me. The hardness in her face softens by one degree — not forgiveness, not agreement, just the specific shift that happens between two people who have loved each other their whole lives and are on opposite sides of something and both know it.
"Lock the door on your way out," she says.
I do.
I stand in the hallway for a moment, my hand still on the knob, the music still audible through the door, and the sound of my mother downstairs moving through the kitchen.
Cody Ravenshaw woke up and declared war.
He remembers every second of that night.
He went after Adela. He went after Serena. And now he's gone after Nessa.
He is not running one play.
He is running all of them simultaneously.
I push off the door, walk down the hallway, and I am completely calm on the surface.
“Are you staying for dinner?” my mother asks.
I glare up at her, and she can see the answer in my eyes.
“Theo,” she warns.
I walk out, not wanting to hear it. I get in my car and sit.
I pull the note out of my pocket.
You took the book. I know it was you. Bring it back.
I fold it once more, slide it back into my pocket, and start the engine.
He is running all of them.
So will I.