Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
CALEB
I’ve been floating somewhere above the ground ever since Harper visited two days ago.
She hasn’t called or texted, but I have her number written down in three different places because that felt like the right amount of backups. She told me where she lives and promised to come back, and we’ve cleared up all the misunderstandings of the past.
Maybe trusting all that is foolish, but I know she has things to settle before we make a real go of this. And frankly, so do I.
It’s like waking up after ten years of being stuck in neutral, just coasting through life without ever really letting any of it touch me.
But she’s back now and it’s time to re-engage.
Which starts with facing the man I’ve been too cowardly to look in the eyes all these years.
Yes, he sent me that letter telling me not to visit, but that was probably just him trying to protect me from the harsh realities of what it’s like behind bars, especially when there was nothing I could do about it.
But I’m a man now, and it’s time to face the past and look the man who was the only real father I ever knew in the eye. Shame had a hold of me, and I let it because shame is easier than confronting what I’d lost.
I can control most of my outward ticks, or at least until Harper showed back up. But I never did manage to completely overcome my obsessive, spiraling brain—though not many people know about it because I’ve gotten good at hiding the worst of it. Only the very observant notice.
My best friend Domhnall has noticed my pattern of only doing certain rep counts when we’re lifting weights because I can’t make myself stop at arbitrary numbers. And everyone knows I run the club with fastidious tidiness and keep everything organized in ways that make sense only to me.
What they don’t know is that sometimes my brain eats itself, obsessing about patterns until I can barely think straight.
And yeah, the ruminating spirals have gotten bad again ever since Harper came back.
But in times of stress, the numbers are my brain’s go-to survival strategy ever since Mom’s first bout with cancer. And then it was like they suddenly turned on me, unlucky after all.
As if it was my fault for picking wrong, when I clearly should have chosen odd numbers all along instead of even.
Was it because I took the straightforward route with the easily divisible numbers that I lost everything?
It’s so foolish not to have seen that the world is rarely parallel or symmetrical because of course it’s all chaos in fractal patterns!
Would that have kept Harper with me?
Maybe it was Fibonacci numbers I ought to have been clinging to, since they’re the patterns that order the universe. Either way, it seems clear I should have been looking deeper the whole time for the designs underneath instead of foolishly choosing to only look at the surface.
Even though I know all of this is just my mind playing tricks on itself.
I haven’t forgotten my years in therapy where a compassionate older gentleman explained that these mind games are nothing but a futile little boy’s brain attempting to grasp control in an uncontrollable world.
They don’t mean anything at all in and of themselves. If I wasn’t ruminating over numbers, it would be something equally meaningless, like a conversation I had, or obsessing over germs, or intrusive thoughts I can’t stop fixating on.
It’s simply what an obsessive, compulsive brain like mine does.
The content of what I’m obsessing over has no inherent meaning.
When I get stressed, I’m always going to spin.
But no matter how many rules I make or how many times I tap, I’m never actually gaining control of anything.
It’s just a silly fucking cope. One that might have been useful to a little kid, but no longer serves me.
And God, Mom’s death should have proved once and for all that I never had control of anything.
Now, with Harper’s return… of course magical thinking isn’t actually worth a damn against the real-world machinations of that selfish bastard who spent years maneuvering to get Harper for himself.
All the while I was frittering away counting primes and thinking it meant something!
God, it’s all so ludicrous. I do understand that!
And yet my mind will still spin. Sometimes there’s no stopping it.
So, the last few years, I’ve been trying to be more gentle with myself about it.
What if numbers are just my mind’s meaning-neutral way of passing time?
If my mind’s going to spin on something regardless, why not let it be this?
The Fibonacci sequence runs like a friendly litany in my head, and after it, the digits of pi out to the fourteenth decimal point—
Then a large truck swerves into my lane and cuts me off, which yanks me right out of the rhythm and back to zero. Always back to zero.
The GPS voice alerts, telling me to turn right into the prison visiting lot, but I glance at the time on my dash. Visiting hours at the prison don’t start until ten-thirty, and I’m early, so I circle around to a little shop to grab coffee and a croissant.
By the time I’ve eaten it and downed as much coffee as I can stomach, it turns out I’m too late, anyway.
When I sign in, finally having talked myself up to walking through the door for the visit I’ve waited almost ten years for, the clerk on the other side of the counter looks at me with bored eyes.
“That one’s popular today,” she says in a flat monotone. “Have a seat. He’s with another visitor. We’ll call you when it’s your turn.”
Silas has another visitor? I frown as I take my ID back and go to sit on one of the metal chairs along the wall.
I didn’t think it was one of Father Bane’s days to come by, but then I didn’t exactly coordinate with him about when I’d finally work up the nerve to show up myself.
I sit down and run my hand down my face because it only serves me right that I’ve waited all this time to come and now I’m the one forced to wait.
I look around the small prison waiting room, which is theoretically one of the more inviting spaces in the entire facility.
Everything is institutional concrete with no attempt at decoration, and you can tell the place is old from the way the paint on the concrete block walls is dirty along the floor.
The lighting’s dreary and the faces of the guards and employees are even drearier.
What has it been like for Silas in here all these years? I wish I could say I’ve been thinking of him every day and praying for him every night.
Not that I believe in God, but prayer is a nice way to regularly hold people in your thoughts.
At least I’ve decided so lately after making friends with the priest. I haven’t held Silas in my thoughts as regularly as I should, and the guilt sits heavy in my chest because he made my mother happy at the end of so many miserable years.
Not to mention, he was the first person to ever show me what it means to be a man. The real kind, who supports his lover and laughs with her and helps her dreams thrive instead of crushing them under the weight of his own needs or ego.
I haven’t lived up to the man he taught me to be yet, but I aim to, and coming here is the first step of many.
Even if Silas just wants to sit in silence and won’t even talk to me, that’s all right because I can take it. I’ll do whatever it takes to earn my way back into his good graces and prove that I haven’t forgotten everything he taught me.
A loud, obnoxious buzzing noise sounds, and I startle hard enough that my knee hits the underside of the chair in front of me. My eyes are drawn to a heavy door that opens against the far wall.
Harper steps through.
For a moment I think I’m hallucinating because this is the last place I expected to see her, but then she does a double-take when she sees me and I know she’s real.
I launch out of my chair, moving toward her before I can think it through because every cell in my body needs to be closer to her.
And also because something’s wrong.
I can see it in the way she’s moving and in the hollowness of her face, which has nothing to do with the harsh fluorescent lighting.
Her eyes are too big and there are shadows under them that weren’t there two days ago.
Her hair is pulled back in a way that looks like it was done in a hurry and she didn’t care how it looked.
Something’s happened to her in the last forty-eight hours. I thought she wasn’t texting me back out of respect while she got things settled with Z and her life in Austin. But looking at her now, I realize I was catastrophically wrong.
I start to call out to her, but she gives me a death glare that could strip paint and then averts her gaze like she means to walk past me as if we don’t even know each other.
What the hell is going on? Damn it, I just have to trust her and follow her lead. I redirect my steps toward the desk because if she’s pretending we don’t know each other, then I need to pretend she wasn’t the reason I got up from my chair.
But at the last moment, she drops her purse.
The contents spill across the concrete floor in a scatter of lipstick tubes, receipts, and pens. I lean down automatically to help her pick everything up because it’s what you do when someone drops something.
That’s when she leans in close enough that I can smell her shampoo, and her voice comes out in a hiss so quiet I almost miss it.
“Don’t say anything, they’re watching!” The words are fast and desperate. “Look, Z got me mixed up with some bad guys. Silas just told me to grab Bruiser and run. You hear me?” She grabs my wrist hard enough that it hurts. “You need to do the same. Run!”
My hands freeze over a lipstick tube, and I can feel my brain trying to process what she just said while simultaneously trying to count the coins scattered on the floor because that’s what my broken brain does in moments of stress.