64. Sage
SIXTY-FOUR
SAGE
Eli drives me to Amy because I can’t stop shaking.
“She wouldn’t talk to me,” I tell Eli from the passenger seat.
Eli doesn’t speed up, but his hands shift on the wheel. “She called you. That’s the important part.”
“She sounded—”
“I know the sound.” His voice is quiet but steady. “I’ve heard it before. In kids. In parents. In people who’ve had the floor pulled out from under them.”
“What do I do?”
“You show up. You don’t try to fix it. You just stay.”
Dean meets us at the side entrance of the funeral home and leads us to the narrow staircase at the back.
“She’s locked herself in,” he says, looking up the stairs. “She won’t answer me.”
“I’ve got her.”
He nods. “I’ll be downstairs if she needs me.”
Eli hangs back. “I’ll wait down here too. If you need us, yell.”
The apartment door is locked. I knock. No answer. I knock again.
“Amy. It’s me. Open up.”
Nothing.
“Amy, I will stand here all day. You know I will. I once waited forty minutes for a table at Applebee’s and I will bring that same energy to this door.”
A sound from inside. Kind of a laugh, but not quite. The ghost of a sound that used to be a laugh, before someone broke the mechanism that makes laughter work.
The deadbolt turns. The chain slides. The door opens three inches and one eye appears in the gap.
She looks terrible.
Her face is puffy and blotched. Her eyes are swollen to slits. Her hair is matted on one side where she’s been lying on it. She’s in the same sweats she was wearing last night and a T-shirt I’m guessing she borrowed from Dean, its collar stretched out and damp.
“Go away,” she says.
“No.”
“Sage, I don’t want—”
“I know. Open the door, Aims. Or I’m gonna get Eli to break it.”
She opens it.
The apartment is dark. Every curtain drawn. Every blind down. The TV is on but muted, flickering blue light across the walls. There’s a blanket nest on the couch—pillows, throws, a hoodie.
“Did you sleep out here?” I ask, glancing around the small apartment and noticing the pristine bed through the open bedroom door.
“Kinda.”
“When did you last eat?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Amy.”
“I said I don’t know.” Her voice breaks on the last word. Her face crumples, and she’s crying again—full-body, gasping sobs that bend her in half. She sinks onto the couch, pulls the blanket over her head, and disappears into the nest.
I sit beside her. Put my hand on the blanket where I think her back is.
“I don’t want to sleep,” she says from inside the blanket.
Her voice is muffled, fractured. “Every time I close my eyes I see his face. It’s not even what he did to you that keeps replaying.
It’s the second before. He was standing in the doorway and he looked normal.
He looked like someone I used to know. And then he wasn’t. ”
I rub her back through the blanket.
“I keep thinking I should have seen it. That night at the party, when he and Brock were—I was right there, Sage. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t notice anything. What kind of person doesn’t notice that the man standing next to her is—”
“The kind who shouldn’t have to.”
She pulls the blanket down enough to show her face. Her eyes are red and raw and furious and terrified all at once.
“I killed him,” she says, like she’s confessing.
“You did.”
“I killed him and then I watched your boyfriends unload—”
The tears come again, harder this time, and she curls forward until her forehead is on her knees. I pull her into me, blanket and all, and hold her while she falls apart. She grabs fistfuls of my shirt and holds on like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s gone liquid.
I know this feeling. The metal taste. The body that won’t stop shaking. The person in the mirror who knows things she can never unknow.
“I want to go home,” she whispers against my chest. “But it doesn’t feel like home anymore. It feels like a place where something happened and I can’t go back there.”
I hold her tighter. My own eyes are burning. The rope scar under my choker throbs beneath the new bruising, because my body remembers too, and proximity to someone else’s pain makes the memory louder.
We stay like that for a long time. The muted TV flickers. The dark apartment hums. Amy’s breathing goes from ragged to uneven to something approaching steady, and I keep my arms around her and don’t let go.
When she finally pulls back, her face is wrecked. She looks like she hasn’t slept at all. She probably hasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“I’m being dramatic.”
“You killed a man to save my life last night. You’re allowed to fall apart.”
She wipes her face with the hem of Dean’s T-shirt. “Dean keeps bringing me food.” She picks at the hoodie. “And clothes.”
“That’s because he’s a good man.”
“I know he’s a good man. That’s the problem. Good men shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“Amy. You’re not a problem someone has to deal with. You’re a good person too. And good people deserve other good people who are willing to keep them safe.”
She’s quiet. The blanket is pulled up to her chin. She looks about twelve years old.
“Will you stay?” she asks. “For a bit?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I make her tea. I make her toast. She eats half a slice and drinks the tea in small sips while we sit on the couch together, staring at the muted TV. I hold her hand and don’t let go.
When she falls asleep—finally, mercifully, her head on the arm of the couch and the blanket pulled up to her ears—I slide my hand free and step into the hallway.
Eli is on the stairs.
He’s sitting on the top step, back against the wall, phone in his hand. He looks up when I come out and reads my face in a second.
“How is she?”
“Bad.” My voice cracks. “She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. She’s living in a blanket fort. She cried for twenty minutes because she thinks killing Tyler makes her a bad person.”
Eli is quiet for a beat. Then he stands, pockets his phone, and puts both hands on my shoulders.
“We’ll get her through it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” His thumbs press into my collarbones, grounding me. “But she saved your life. She survived the night. And when she felt like she couldn’t do it anymore, she reached out to you.”
“I did manage to get her to eat a little.”
“See? You’re already helping.”
“What if that’s not enough?”
“Then we come back tomorrow. And the day after that. We keep showing up until it is.”
I lean into him. His arms come around me and I press my face into his chest and breathe. He smells like coffee and laundry detergent.
“I hate this,” I say against his shirt.
“I know.”
“She didn’t deserve this.”
“No.”
“None of us did.”
His phone rings between us.
Eli’s arms loosen. He pulls it from his pocket, checks the screen, and immediately goes still.
“Odin.”
He answers. “Yeah.”
I stay where I am while he listens. He doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t argue. He just goes very still, the way he does when he’s holding something down.
“Understood,” he says eventually. “I’ll tell them.”
He hangs up.
“What happened?”
“Odin’s been called out of town on emergency business.”
“Because of last night?”
“At least partly. What Milo and Knox did has created problems beyond our team.” He rubs a hand over his jaw. “Odin said—and I’m quoting—‘Quite frankly, I don’t want to see any of you right now.’”
“Fair.”
“The Hangmen are officially on leave until he gets back. No targets. No meetings. None of us touches the Kennel. No freelancing and no excuses.”
“What about me?”
“You’re not contracted, so he can’t put you on leave.” His mouth tightens. “But he ordered you to stand down with us.”
“For how long?”
“He didn’t say. Fenrir has the devices and everything Knox collected. He’s the only person authorized to touch any of it.”
“Milo’s going to hate that.”
“I know.”
“So we wait.”
“We wait.”
We tell Dean Amy is asleep before we leave. He promises to stay close and call the second she wakes.
In the car, I look up at the apartment window. The blue flicker of the television moves behind the drawn curtains.
Amy is asleep behind a locked door. Milo is home recovering. Fenrir has a bag full of dead men’s devices, and Odin has put the Hangmen on ice.
Stephen might be dead.
He might not.
And until Odin comes back, our job is to sit still and try to live with not knowing.