9. Micah
NINE
MICAH
Eli makes her coffee every morning. Milk, half a sugar. He leaves it on the kitchen island before she comes downstairs, then disappears—onto the porch, into the garage, wherever she isn’t—so she never has to see the hands that made it.
It’s summer break, so he’s had all week to do it. Seven mornings. Seven coffees. Seven chances to man up, but he retreats instead.
I don’t like it. Not the ritual, not the choreography of avoidance, not the way Sage sits at the island alone, hands wrapped around the mug like she might shatter if she lets go. He doesn’t fool her. He only makes her lonelier.
The whole thing is so fucking sad I want to put my fist through the wall.
Holden’s house is big enough for all of us, which is part of the problem—we’re all under the same roof.
Sage has the main bedroom. Knox took the smallest room on the floor, a bed his feet hang off the end of, even though there’s a guest room downstairs with a queen in it. He wanted to be closer to Sage.
Holden moved himself into the den so Sage could have his room.
It’s the one space in the house that isn’t sparse: floor-to-ceiling with banker’s boxes, each one labeled in his blocky handwriting, a name and a year.
Cold cases. The ones the department closed and he never did.
He sleeps on a pull-out in his own house, surrounded by people he couldn’t save, and I don’t think the irony is lost on him for a second.
Eli sleeps on the couch in the living room—completely ignoring the fact that there’s a guest room available because he’s a masochist or because he thinks that’s penance, I don’t know. Sage hasn’t said a word about it, and no one’s asked.
It’s Thursday, mid-morning. The house has settled into the rhythm it’s developed since we brought Sage home.
Knox is in the kitchen cooking, Milo’s on his laptop at the dining table researching something for the Stephen case, while Sage has curled into the armchair by the window in the front room, a book in her lap that she hasn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes.
Her voice is coming back. Not all the way.
It’s still rough and catches on certain words.
The bandage is gone, replaced by a mottled landscape of purple and yellow bruising that wraps her neck like a collar.
She wears high-necked shirts and hoodies with the collar pulled up.
But sometimes she forgets, or it slips, and you see it. The map of violence on her skin.
The first time I saw it without the bandage, I had to leave the room. Walked straight out the back door and stood in Holden’s yard until the shaking stopped.
I haven’t told anyone that. I haven’t told anyone a lot of things.
Like the fact that I replay that phone call every night.
Eli’s voice. That edge of panic I’d never heard from him before.
But even worse than that, I can’t stop thinking that it was his phone call that had me turning away from Sage, walking away so I could hear him better.
Thirty seconds. That’s all it took. Thirty seconds of not watching and someone put a rope around her neck.
I know it’s not rational—but Eli called, I turned away, and Sage almost died.
Worse? He was right there.
The whole time he was on the phone to me, he was there.
Why the fuck was he there?
Why the fuck didn’t he get to her sooner?
Was he involved somehow?
But he’s in this house, making her coffee and folding her laundry and leaving a blanket on the back of her chair so she never gets cold.
He’s acting like he cares. And I’m supposed to .
. . what? Be grateful? Forgive him? Pretend the same person who hurt her so badly isn’t the same person carefully setting her mug at the exact spot on the island where she always sits?
Sage closes her book. Stretches. Winces. Her neck still punishes any sudden movement.
“I’m going to sit outside for a bit,” she says. “Get some air.”
Knox is already moving. He wipes his hands on a dish towel and follows her toward the back door without a word. He’s become her shadow.
The screen door swings shut behind them and I watch through the kitchen window as they settle on the porch steps. Knox sits close enough that their shoulders touch. Sage tips her face toward the sun and closes her eyes. Knox watches the tree line.
I turn back to the kitchen.
Eli’s at the sink. He’s washing Sage’s mug. I watch his hands as he turns it in tiny movements, methodically cleaning the ceramic as if it’s the most important task in the world.
Milo glances between us, reading the tension in the room.
He stands abruptly, lifting his laptop. “I’m going to go bother Knox about . . . something.”
Once the house is quiet, I lean against the counter. Arms folded. Watching Eli washing the mug that’s surely clean by now.
“Why are you here, Eli?”
He doesn’t look up. The water runs. His hands move the sponge over the ceramic.
My blood boils.
“Seriously, why are you in this house?”
“Same reason you are.” His voice is flat, dead.
You don’t get to check out, you bastard.
“No, you’re not. I’m here because I love her.
I’m here because I need her to be okay, and if she isn’t, I don’t know what the fuck I’ll do.
But you—you left. You broke her when she needed you most, and now you’re pretending to play the hero?
” I take a step closer, feeling years of closeness folding in on itself, crumpling tight as a fist. “Answer me, Eli, and don’t lie. Why the fuck are you here?”
He turns the water off and sets the mug in the rack, drying his hands on a paper towel. I expect him to pivot, deflect. But he surprises me. He turns and meets my eyes.
“I’m here because I fucked up,” he says. “And because I don’t know what else to do.”
“Why were you at her apartment that night?”
He tosses the paper towel in the trash.
“You heard Knox in the hospital,” he says. “I was keeping an eye on the building. Helping Dean watch Amy in case Tyler did something.”
“So, after you walked away from all of us? After you told her she was easy? After you gutted her in front of an audience?” I let each question land before I send the next one. “You expect me to believe you broke her heart just so you could sit in the dark and watch her friend?”
His shoulders tighten. “Someone needed to.”
“Needed to what? Break her?”
“No.” His eyes flash. “Fuck, no.”
“Then why do it? Why hurt her at all?”
“Because we’re the reason she’s in danger!” His voice rises, but he quickly schools it. “We knew what Brock was. If we’d done things differently that night—”
“But we didn’t. We can’t go back in time and change that now. And to be honest with you, Eli. I wouldn’t want to. My life is better with her in it. All of our lives are.”
Eli’s jaw works. He looks at the floor, at the window, anywhere but at me. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t lie on that couch every night and think about what I threw away?”
“I think you’re very good at suffering, Eli. You’ve turned it into an art form. But suffering isn’t the same as showing up, and making her freaking coffee doesn’t undo what you said to her.”
He flinches. “I don’t expect it to. But I have to do something. I have to . . . Fuck, Micah. I was trying to save her. All I wanted was for her to be safe.”
“Then why did you call me?”
His eyes snap to mine. “What do you mean?”
“You called me. That night. Right before it happened.” I keep my voice level, but I can feel the thing in my chest pulling at its leash. “I was outside her building. I was right there. And you called, and I walked away from her to hear you better. That’s when—”
“I know.” His voice cracks. “You think I don’t know that?”
“Why did you call me?”
“Because I knew you’d answer. Because I needed to hear your voice. Hear you tell me she was doing okay.”
My eyes burn and I shake my head slowly, not wanting to hear his words. His excuses. “Why didn’t you go to her, Eli? Why did you call me? I was right there. Right fucking there. I stepped away. For you.”
“I know.” His voice is a whisper.
“Do you? Do you fully comprehend what your fucking selfishness did?”
His eyes shine as he nods.
The kitchen is so quiet I can hear Sage laugh outside. A short, rasping thing. Milo must have done something. Or maybe the sun just feels good on her face. Either way, it cuts through the room like a blade.
“I stepped away from her for you,” I say again, quieter this time. “Because you called and I answered. Because that’s what I’ve always done, Eli. You call, I come. Every time. Only this time it almost killed someone.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Don’t tell me what it is!” I hate that he’s the one person who can get underneath my calm.
“I made my choice. I turned my back. That’s on me.
But you put me in the position to make that choice, and you did it because you were lonely.
Because you missed us. Because you burned everything down and then couldn’t stand the cold.
” I swallow. “We both have to live with the fact that while I was on the phone listening to you feel sorry for yourself, someone put a rope around her neck.”
He has nothing. No answer, no defense. He stands there like he’s waiting for a sentence to be read. But it’s not enough. Absorbing isn’t answering. Silence isn’t the same as truth.
I ask the question that’s been haunting me. “Did you have anything to do with it?”
The kitchen goes dead. The refrigerator hum is the only thing with the nerve to keep going.
Eli stares at me. The color drains from his face in slow, horrible increments. It’s like watching a man bleed out.
“You’re asking me if I tried to kill Sage?”
“I’m asking you to tell me you didn’t.”
“Micah.”
“Tell me!”
He takes a step toward me. His hand comes up, reaching for my arm, my shoulder, some part of me he can hold on to.
Touch is an old language between us. It existed long before we met Sage. Before everything fractured. The way he’d grip the back of my neck after a kill and press his forehead to mine.
The kissing. The fucking. The—
I slap his hand away.
The sound cracks through the kitchen. The back of my hand against his wrist, knocking it sideways.
The look on his face when I do it is pure hurt, but I can’t bring myself to care.
“Don’t.” My voice is steady but my hand is shaking. “You don’t get to touch me right now.”
He pulls his hand back. Holding it against his chest like I’ve burned him.
“Micah.”
“You called me. I walked away. Sage almost died.” I push off the counter and move toward the door because if I stay one more second, I’m going to lose it, and I can’t.
Not yet. “I need you to understand something, Eli. I’ve never hated anyone more than I hate you right now.
You broke her. You broke me. You broke all of us.
And I don’t know if I can forgive you for that.
” I don’t look back. I follow the others outside, breathing hard and hating the sting in my eyes.
The day is warm. Out on the steps, Knox is telling Sage a story, voice low and even, his arm a wall behind her on the step. They look up when I come out, and I sit down two steps below, forearms on knees.
After a minute, Milo slides down a step to sit beside me, his shoulder snug against mine.
He doesn’t say anything as he leans against me, like he’s plugging a leak I don’t want to admit is there.
Down the steps, the yard opens into weeds and wildflowers.
In the sunlight, you could almost pretend this was a normal day.
Birds, bugs. The world managing fine despite the horror show inside the house.
The sun is so bright it makes me squint.
I rub my eyes with the heel of my hand. Something about the light keeps the tremor in my chest from becoming a quake.
Then Sage laughs again behind me—torn raw, rusty, more air than sound—and the tremor comes right back.
That’s what her laugh costs now. Somebody did that to it.
“You okay, man?” Milo asks quietly. I wait for a dismissive joke, the Milo classic. But it doesn’t come.
“Not really,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “Me neither.”
The silence is fine, actually. Not heavy or awkward, but shared. I watch Sage lean into Knox, her shoulders relaxed. Her hair’s tied back, exposing the full extent of the bruising. I feel sick looking at it and yet I can’t stop, half-hypnotized by the mottled colors.
Milo must feel it too, because he says, quietly, “She’s so fucking tough. Tougher than she should ever have to be.”
I nod. “Yeah. Toughest person I’ve ever met.”
We’re silent for a beat.
“Do you want me to kill Eli for you?” Milo says.
I smile. “Not yet. But keep that in your back pocket.”