16. Eli
SIXTEEN
ELI
It’s the gasp that wakes me. Up the stairs, through the open door—a tearing inhale, then the creak of a bed taking weight as someone sits up fast.
I’m off the couch with my feet on the floor before I know I’ve moved. And then I stay exactly there, because there is no version of this where I’m the one who goes up those stairs.
Low voices. Knox, saying whatever it is Knox says. The house settles.
Monday morning, and it’s summer. No circle time. No calendar. No five-year-olds pouring through the door like someone tipped over a barrel of noise. Just weeks of empty mornings stretching out in front of me with nothing to cage the thing I keep bolted down.
I miss the classroom. Which is a hell of a thing to admit about a job that pays me to wrangle small humans through their letters.
But the kids are the anchor. Six hours a day where I’m not a man who ties nooses or stands on the wrong side of doors.
Just a guy reading stories about hungry caterpillars and putting on funny voices.
At the time, the voice in my head was telling me I just needed a break.
To rest. But the real reason was that I wanted her.
Wanted to spend endless moments with her—slow ones, stupid ones, the kind that don’t belong to men like me.
Mornings. Grocery runs. Coffee gone cold while I buried my face between her legs . . .
But that was before the rope. Before I blew everything up in the name of protecting her. Before my actions got her hurt.
I scrub a hand over my face and sit up slow, elbows on knees. Holden’s living room is blue-gray with early light. The house is quiet in that fragile way it only is before everybody starts moving. The couch creaks under me. My back is tight from sleeping on it. I deserve that too.
I could sleep at my own place. It’s twenty minutes away and it has an actual bed instead of Holden’s couch, which is built for a man eight inches shorter than me.
But I can’t make myself step away from wherever Sage is.
So I fold the blanket every morning, stack the pillows, and pretend I’m not a stray who’s been allowed to sleep inside the house.
The room assignments changed in my absence. All that’s left is the guestroom where Holden stores the overflow of old case files that won’t fit in the den—floor to ceiling boxes filled with the ghosts of other people’s pain.
The first night we all spent here, Knox opened that door, looked at the boxes, and closed it again. Said he’d rather sleep in an armchair and keep watch.
There are some kinds of pain that don’t stay politely in their containers. Holden can sleep beside them, stack them by year and victim and case number like order means anything. I can’t.
The couch is cleaner. Simpler. Physical discomfort I understand.
I get up and head for the downstairs bathroom, pausing at the foot of the stairs, listening for any sign of her and looking up into the dark like it’s a world I’m no longer welcome in.
Forcing my feet to move, I get myself in the shower, and the first thing I do is reach for the body wash that smells like her.
I don’t use it. I just uncap it and hold it under my nose while I jack off and immediately hate myself for missing the best thing that ever happened to me—the thing I lit on fire with my own two hands.
I watch the water bead and run down my chest, count the seconds I can hold my breath before my vision goes spotty, let the spray drown out the voice that says, over and over, you’re not built for this. Not for being someone’s lover. Not for being anyone’s partner.
I towel off and dress in clothes I can ruin—an old T-shirt, jeans gone soft at the knees—because today I’m finally going to deal with my house.
I haven’t set foot in the yard in weeks.
The lawn will be knee-high. The garden beds I actually keep up, the ones with the milkweed, will be choked with whatever moved in while I was gone.
It’s the kind of mindless labor I can disappear into. And right now, disappearing sounds like mercy.
I make a pot of coffee for the house and pull out the travel mug for Sage, because I want it to still be warm when she wakes up. Milk, half a sugar. Some part of me believes that one day she’ll drink this and decide I’m worth a second chance.
Knox appears in the kitchen, silent as always, already dressed, and fixes himself a protein shake the color of a fresh bruise.
I nod at him. “She sleeping?”
He looks at me for a long moment. I’ve just admitted I know exactly who she sleeps next to.
I know he took her to his room after the banana bread in the early hours of Sunday morning, and I know that when he went upstairs last night, he checked on her and never went back to his room.
Later, I stood outside her door and listened to the woman I love take comfort in his arms, wishing I was in there too. It doesn’t make me angry—it makes me jealous. I want it to be me. But I also want to know she’s okay, even if it’s not by my hand.
Knox eventually nods. “She’s good.”
“She talk much?”
“Not to me.” He drops a banana into the shake. “Mostly wants to feel someone next to her. You want an update?”
I do. I have to. I can’t stop collecting data on her moods, the way I catalog and cross-reference the quirks of every kid in my class. There’s comfort in surveillance: observe, log, adjust. “Please.”
“Still having flashbacks. Little worse after the text. Wakes up gasping and grabbing her throat.”
Something behind my ribs folds in on itself. I grip the counter and nod like this is clinical information and not a description of the woman I love waking in the dark thinking she’s dying.
“Anything else?”
Knox takes a long pull of the bruise-colored shake. Studies me. He’s never been a man who wastes words, but the silences between them say plenty. “She stole your hoodie. The gray one you left on the chair. She had it on last night.”
I don’t know what to do with that. Don’t know where to put it. So I pour her coffee into the travel mug, snap the lid, and set it where she’ll find it. I have to leave before I do something I can’t take back.
This doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you. But I’m glad you’re here.
Her words from early Sunday morning ring in my ears, feeding the small, stupid hope that won’t die in my chest.
I shake off the funk. “Bet you took the hoodie off her real fast.”
Knox’s mouth kicks up at the corner. “Never been the kind of man to kiss and tell, Eli. You know that.”
I huff out a sound that almost passes for a laugh, then grab my keys off the island.
“I’m heading out.”
Knox gives a single nod.
I hesitate at the threshold because apparently humiliation is a hobby now. “I’m not going to hurt her again.”
His eyes pin me where I stand. Calm. Heavy. Absolute.
“I know,” he says. “Because if you try, I stop you. Permanently.”
The way he says it is absent of heat. Just fact.
And maybe that’s what makes it real.
I nod once. “Fair.”
Then I leave before I can say anything worse.
The morning air hits me damp and cool, carrying salt off the inlet and the green smell of things left too long to grow.
My sedan is parked crooked at the curb because I came here half out of my mind and apparently even my parking reflected it.
I climb in, start the engine, and sit there with both hands on the wheel while the house stares at me through the windshield.
Somewhere upstairs, she’s sleeping in my hoodie.
That thought nearly undoes me.
I back out slow and pull away from Holden’s place like if I move too fast, I’ll split open and spill all over the road.
My house looks and smells abandoned—stale air, dust, the faint sweetness of fruit I left in a bowl to go brown. I open every window, then go straight outside before the silence can get its hooks in.
The yard’s worse than I thought. The lawn’s gone to seed, the grass past my ankles, dandelions flowering in smug yellow clumps. I drag the mower out of the shed, prime it, and yank the cord until it coughs to life.
For an hour I don’t think about anything.
I mow in straight, overlapping lines—there’s an order to it, a rule, and rules are the only thing that’s ever kept me level.
When the lawn’s done I move to the beds out front, kneeling in the dirt, pulling weeds by the fistful.
The milkweed survived. Of course it did.
Milkweed’s a weed itself, technically; you can neglect it for a month and it just keeps reaching for the sun.
I’m elbow-deep in it, sweating through my shirt, when a shadow falls across the bed.
“Eli?”
I look up, squinting against the sun.
Amy stands at the edge of the bed in black leggings and a neon coral tank gone dark with sweat, blonde ponytail clinging to the back of her neck. Earbuds looped around one hand. She looks between me and the mangled state of my yard and offers a sheepish little wave.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
“You didn’t.” I sit back on my heels and wipe my forearm across my forehead, leaving a stripe of dirt there probably. “You running?”
She huffs a laugh and points down at herself. “No, this is my formal wear.” Then she sobers. “Oh my God. What happened to your face?” She gestures to the healing cut on my cheek.
“Nothing serious. What can I do for you, Amy?”
“I was wondering if you’ve heard from Sage.”
I keep my hands busy, breaking up a clod of soil. “We’re in touch.”
“It’s just—she hasn’t been home since the hospital.
I know she’s staying with Holden, or whatever the arrangement is, and I’m trying not to be weird about it, but she’s barely texting me back.
” Amy’s free hand moves when she talks, punctuating the worry she’s keeping light.
“I get an ‘I’m fine, talk soon’ and then nothing.
And I guess I’m worried. After everything. She doesn’t, like, blame me, does she?”
“Why would she blame you?”
Amy shakes her head, ponytail whipping. “I don’t know. Tyler said some stuff. Made threats. Before.” She trails off, and I fill in the before she can’t say out loud.
“It wasn’t Tyler,” I say, too fast, and wince internally because there’s no clean reason I’d have that information.
“How can you be sure?”
“I just—know.” It’s almost the truth, a sanded-down sliver of it. “Trust me, Amy. He didn’t do it.”
She lets out a tight breath. “Okay. Good. I mean, I know he’s a dick, but I didn’t want to believe he was—” Her mouth closes around the word.
“Honestly, I’m not even sure why I’m telling you.
I guess I just want her to come home. Or at least tell me she’s okay with .
. . all of it. Everything that’s changed. ”
Her face is open and pleading. She has no idea she’s being watched around the clock because the people who love Sage are terrified the same thing will come for her.
“Give her time,” I say. “She’s been through a lot. When she’s ready, she’ll come back to you.”
Amy nods, not believing it. “Okay. Well—tell her to call me? Just to check in.”
“I will.”
She lifts a hand, tucks her earbuds back into her ears, and jogs down the sidewalk. I watch her go until she rounds the corner. Then it’s just me, the half-weeded bed, and the sound of someone three yards over running a sprinkler.
I pull out my phone. Open a new message. Type her name.
Me:
Amy stopped by while I was working on my house. She misses you. Asked me to tell you to call her.
I stare at it. My thumb hovers.
I add, I miss you too.
Then I delete the last line. Then I put it back. Then I delete it again.
Me:
She shouldn’t be alone there, Sage.
I stare at that for a long time. Words that say everything I can’t. That Amy’s not safe. That Tyler will only be angrier once he heals from what Micah and Milo did to him. That whoever’s sending texts from a dead man’s phone knows where Sage lives—which means they know where Amy lives.
I delete all of it.
Me:
Amy says hi and misses you. She wants you to call her when you can.
Send.
Then, before I can talk myself out of it, another thread.
Me:
You still on her?
Dean doesn’t answer texts while he’s working. That’s the entire reason we use him.
I slide the phone back into my pocket and press my dirty palms flat against my thighs, staring at the milkweed I’ve been clearing—the stuff the monarchs lay their eggs on, the only thing a caterpillar will eat before it seals itself up and turns into something else.
Why can’t I be something else?
An engine comes up the street. Dean’s sedan takes the corner Amy took, and as he passes he gives me one nod through the glass.
That’s the answer. It doesn’t help as much as it should.
The phone buzzes.
Sage:
I’ll call her tonight.
Thank you for telling me.
I stare at her words. No warmth. No edge. No anger. Just acknowledgment that I performed a function—messenger, go-between, the guy who passes the note and waits to be let back in.
It’s more than I deserve. Less than I want. Exactly what I’ve earned.