Chapter 17 Rejection in
Disguise
Bishop
"Bishop."
Cole's voice comes through the phone like something held together with effort. Tight. Controlled. The specific register of my brother when he's scared and trying not to sound it the same register he's used since we were kids, since our father's funeral, since every hard thing he's decided to carry without asking for help.
I learned it from him. Or he learned it from me. Hard to know, from here, which way that went.
"Hey." My own voice comes out even. "Cole."
"Have you heard anything? About Delilah?"
I am lying in my own bed in the dark with Delilah Hart asleep against my side. Her hair is across my shoulder. Her hand is on my chest. Her breathing is slow and even and completely unaware of what I just did by picking up this phone.
"Nothing yet," I say. "I've been keeping an eye out."
"She's been gone since yesterday afternoon." His voice drops. "Bishop, her parents are here. Graham's family drove up his father, his brother, two cousins. They've got people covering the lakefront, the shuttle routes, the trailheads above the lake road." A pause where I can hear him steadying himself. "We've been out here since last night. Nobody's seen her."
"She's an adult. She might have needed space."
"She left her wedding." The words come out stripped down. Raw. "Her wedding, Bishop. She was supposed to marry Graham yesterday and she just vanished. Nobody saw her leave. Nobody saw where she went." His voice tightens. "That's not someone who needed space. That's someone in trouble."
Or someone who finally made a choice. I don't say that.
"I'm sorry," I say instead. "That sounds terrifying."
"It is." A breath that shakes slightly at the end. "I just I've called everyone I can think of. I drove the lakefront road twice. I talked to every shuttle driver I could find." His voice goes quieter. "She's my person, Bishop. You understand? She's the person I call. She's the one who" He stops. Starts again. "If something happened to her."
"Nothing happened to her."
Silence.
"You don't know that," Cole says.
No. I don't. Except that I do, completely, because she's breathing against my shoulder and her hand is warm on my chest and the thing that happened to her today was her choice and mine and it has nothing to do with missing persons reports or lakefront searches.
"I'll drive the lake road again tonight," I say. "Check the marina lot. If I see anything I'll call you immediately."
"Yeah." He exhales. Long. Tired. "Yeah, okay. Thank you."
"How's everyone holding up?"
A pause. The kind with something in it.
"Graham's dad has been on the phone with the sheriff's department since this morning," Cole says. "They're treating it as voluntary for now no signs of foul play, adult, known history of the area. But if she doesn't surface by morning they're going to escalate. Pull more resources. Widen the search."
I process that.
Escalate means warrants. Means resources. Means the deputy this morning was the polite opening of something that has more behind it.
"I hear you," I say.
"Just, if you see anything."
"I'll call."
"Okay." Another breath. Quieter now. The scared stripped down to just tired. "Thanks, Bishop. I mean it."
"Get some sleep if you can."
A sound that might be a laugh in different circumstances. "Yeah."
He hangs up.
I hold the phone for a long moment.
Then I set it face down on the nightstand.
Delilah is still asleep. Her hair across my shoulder. The room dark except for the strip of moonlight through the blinds, laying itself across the floor in a pale line that reaches almost to the bed. I can see the shape of her face in it relaxed, completely unguarded, the version of her that exists only when she's not managing anyone's expectations including her own.
My brother just called me terrified.
He told me she’s, his person. He told me he's been driving lakefront roads since last night and talking to shuttle drivers and organizing a search with Graham Weller's family a man I have every reason to mistrust and no current right to despise and the whole time I was lying here with the reason for his fear breathing slowly against my chest.
I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of.
The club. The years of looking the other way when things happened that I could've stopped. The incident the one that ended whatever I'd been telling myself my life was about. I built a catalog of compromises and called it practicality and kept moving because stopping long enough to look at the catalog directly would have required something I didn't have.
This is different.
The compromises before were about survival. About staying alive in a world that punished weakness and rewarded usefulness and didn't particularly care which version of yourself you offered up as long as you showed up and delivered.
This isn't survival. This is a betrayal dressed up as protection, and the difference between the two is getting harder to locate with Delilah's hand on my chest and Cole's voice still sitting in my ear like something I can't put down.
She's his best friend.
She's in my bed.
I put her there. She asked me to, and I let her, and I knew every reason it was wrong and I did it anyway. Because four years of keeping my distance collapsed the moment, she looked at me on that dock and told me to stop wanting her from a distance. Because I am apparently not the man, I've been telling myself I am the controlled one, the careful one, the one who keeps his hands to himself and his feelings where they can't cost anyone anything.
I'm none of those things tonight.
Outside, the lake has gone quiet. The marina is dark. The holiday weekend is finished tourists packed up and gone, the lake road empty, the town settling back into itself after two days of noise. It should feel like relief.
It doesn't feel like anything except the weight of what I've done.
Cole is out there with a flashlight and Graham Weller's family driving the lakefront and the sheriff's department ready to escalate in the morning.
And I'm here.
I reach for the phone.
Look at Cole's name in the call log.
The number of times he's called me in the last twenty-four hours. The voicemails I know are there without listening to them. The text he sent that Delilah and I read together at the kitchen table that said I'm losing my mind in seven words that hit harder than anything Reyes put on the fence post.
I could call him back right now.
I could tell him the truth not all of it, but enough. She's here. She's safe. She's sleeping. You can stop driving the lakefront. I could do that. I could give him back the part of tonight where he doesn't know something happened to her.
I hold the phone.
I put it back down.
And I sit with what it means that I made that choice. That I looked at my brother's name and chose the warmth against my shoulder and the hand on my chest and the ceiling I've been staring at and didn't call him back.
I'm so tired of calling things protection.
Delilah stirs.
I go still.
She doesn't wake just shifts, settles, her breathing evening back out. Her hand moves slightly on my chest. I stay completely still and let her sleep and stare at the ceiling and think about what kind of man does this.
The answer isn't one I want to sit with.
But I sit with it anyway because I've earned it.
Outside a car passes on the lake road. I track it by sound the engine note, the speed, the way it slows slightly near the marina entrance before continuing on. Not stopping. Just passing.
Cole, maybe. Still looking.
Or someone from Graham's family.
Or just a car.
I don't know. I'll never know. That's the thing about lying in the dark with your choices you can't see the edges of them from here. You only know what they cost when the bill arrives.
Delilah moves again.
This time she wakes.
I know the moment it happens. Her breathing changes the looseness of sleep shifting to the subtle gathering of someone coming back into themselves. Her body doesn't move. She doesn't sit up or pull away. She stays exactly where she is.
But her hand on my chest goes still.
Not the still of sleep. The still of someone who is awake and listening and has been awake long enough to have heard something.
I don't know how much. The shape of it, maybe. Cole's voice through the speaker tight, scared, his person, I've been driving the lakefront. My own voice responding with its careful flatness. The particular sound of a man managing a conversation he shouldn't be having.
Enough.
The quiet stretches between us.
I don't fill it.
I don't have anything to put in it that doesn't make this worse.
"Bishop." Her voice is barely sound. Something careful in it. Something that's already bracing for the answer before she asks the question.
I wait.
"So, I'm a secret," she whispers.
So, I'm a secret.
He doesn't deny it.
That's the part that lands hardest not the call itself, not Cole's voice coming through the speaker tight and scared, not even the specific words Bishop used. Nothing happened to her. Clean. Flat. Automatic. The kind of lie that doesn't hesitate because the shape of it is already familiar.
What lands hardest is the silence after I say it.
Because Bishop Morgan, who tells the truth when you give him room to get there, who said both times when he was wrong and meant it, who sat across a kitchen table and admitted four years of wanting me that Bishop goes completely silent.
I count the seconds.
One. Two. Three. Four.
He doesn't deny it.
And that tells me everything I needed to know and several things I didn't.
I sit up.
The moonlight is still coming through the blinds in that pale flat line across the floor. I find the edge of the bed and put my feet down and sit with my back to him and breathe through the particular cold of understanding something you were hoping you'd misread.
I didn't misread it.
I sit there for a moment longer than I need to. Giving him a chance. Giving the silence a chance to fill with something other than what it currently contains.
It doesn't fill.
"Delilah." His voice behind me. Low. Careful.