Chapter 27 Phoenix #2
“Initials here,” Atticus says softly, pointing to a line on the label I don’t remember seeing before. “Not your name. Date. Time. That’s it.”
I write P.J. and the seconds tick by endlessly. Atticus does A.W. Storm scrawls S.C. Maverick, M.L. We line the tubes up like chess pieces and stare at them like they might hatch.
“Courier picks up in twenty,” Atticus says. “I’ll grab Conrad’s DNA from his bathroom. I’m sure his toothbrush is there.”
“How long?” I ask, and I hate that my voice is hopeful. I hate that I want the science to rush just for me.
Spencer walks back in as if summoned. “Six hours for a preliminary read on markers that would make it impossible to ignore the truth,” he says. “Twenty-four hours for the rest. We’ll have a provisional by tonight.”
Six hours. I can do six hours and not crawl out of my skin if my hands are busy and no one says my name more than necessary. Six hours is nothing. Maybe I can put an audiobook on or something. My fingers tremble.
Atticus sees it hit me. He puts both hands on the table and leans in.
“Work,” he says. “We have plenty that needs doing. Board package. HR policy. Press language. You said you wanted a front-office desk? Today is a good day to start. The more we hold, the less this holds us. And no matter what the results are, you’re one of us. Take your throne and make it shine.”
“Give me the staff list,” I say. “And the draft you started for escort protocols. I’ll write the rest. And I want the vendor contract language for cleaning crews. No more single-person routes. Ever.”
“It’s already on your tablet,” he says. “I put the HR folder in the top row.”
“Of course you did,” I murmur.
We move for an hour like normal humans—emails, calls, a quiet fight over whether the trash contract can be terminated for cause because they’re overcharging us through our fucking teeth, two cups of coffee I don’t taste.
Spencer stands on the deck and talks to a judge about ethics while looking at herons.
Storm disappears into a shadow and comes back with a list of first names that matter at the docks because we’re still trying to figure out the real solution.
Maverick arranges rooms at the hotel for three women from the shipping container who don’t want to go home yet and says words to them that make the tension in their shoulders drop.
I hold it together. I do. Until I just can’t anymore, and then everything shatters.
It happens stupidly. The housekeeper—Rosa—texts me a photo of a new phone she bought with her first hazard pay installment and two lines.
Thank you. I told my sister she can come.
I read it twice, and then the words won’t focus. The house tilts. My throat closes like I’m being strangled by a necklace I can’t find the clasp to.
“I need air,” I say.
It comes out too fast. Too bright. Like a glitch. I stand too fast. The chair leg squeals against the wood and every single person looks at me on reflex, then away, like we practiced this and learned the rules about not staring at the girl who was in a box.
The room feels hot. My skin too tight.
I walk because I don’t know what else to do.
The back steps are cooler. The marsh wind slaps my face, wet and heavy, dragging salt into my lungs. I push through the screen door and it bangs lightly behind me.
Zeus limps out after me, nails clicking. He doesn’t bark. He just comes to my side and drops down with a groan, big head on his paws at the top of the steps, like a chaperone who forgot he’s a dog and remembered he’s a wall.
I grip the rail with both hands. Wood bites into my palms.
I count while my fingers tap the edge.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
My heart ignores me. It is sprinting. My chest feels like it has been wrapped in wire.
Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
The world is still sideways. The stars smear, the porch light halos. My breath gets stuck halfway up my throat like it hit a closed door.
Start again.
One. Two. Three.
My brain replays it on a loop. The exact pitch of Conrad’s voice. The way his hand fell away from me. The way he didn’t even kiss me goodbye, like I had suddenly turned radioactive.
Four. Five.
Half sister. The words slither. They get under my skin, into my veins, into every place he has ever kissed. Every memory goes sour.
Six.
Did I do something wrong. Did I miss something. Did I break some rule of the universe I didn’t know existed.
Seven.
What if it’s true? What if I’m dirty in some way I can’t wash off?
Eight.
What if that was it? What if that was our last time, and I didn’t know to mark it?
Nine.
What if every time he looked at me, he was—
Ten.
The railing is under my hands. The night is in my mouth. Nothing has changed.
My vision tunnels. Sound drops in and out. I hear frogs in the marsh, the distant hum of a boat, the house breathing behind me. Everything feels far away and too close, both at once.
My fingers go numb on the rail.
Footsteps on the steps. Slow. Measured.
“Phoenix.”
Atticus. Not a question. A statement, like he is checking a box in his head. Alive. Located. Panicking.
He stops two steps below and doesn’t come up. I feel the urge in his body. The way he wants to close the space. He locks it down.
“Do you want me to go away?” he asks.
I want to say yes. I want to say no. I want to scream that everyone leaves anyway, so what does it matter.
“No,” I say. It scrapes out of me. “But don’t touch me. Not right now.”
“Okay,” he says, simple. No wounded tone. No disappointment. Just okay.
We stand like that.
Me gripping the rail like it’s the only thing holding me on the planet. Him behind me, hands loose at his sides, the man who can crack any system on earth and can’t hack my nervous system out of a spiral without permission.
The air moves over my skin. My body doesn’t care. My chest is a fist. My lungs are a locked program.
“Phoenix,” he says after a beat, voice quieter. “Tell me what your brain is saying.”
“I feel like I’m eighteen again,” I hear myself say.
“High school hallway. The day I realized the texts weren’t ever going to go away, not really.
The way my stomach fell through me and never came back.
I left that night because I couldn’t stand the idea of seeing Conrad and not being allowed to love him and not knowing why. ”
I close my eyes. It’s all there. The ache. The certainty that leaving Conrad was the only way to survive what staying would’ve done to me. I loved them all then, and knowing I wasn’t good enough then… and definitely not now is enough to destroy me.
“I feel it now,” I say, quiet, honest. “Exactly the same way. Like the only thing that will stop the noise in my head is motion. I can’t sit here and be one card in a losing poker hand. I can’t be the center of a story I didn’t write.”
Atticus doesn’t argue. He knows better. “Where would you go?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet,” I admit. “But I can’t have just part of you. Part of this. I can’t be handled like evidence while you decide if I’m allowed the piece I want.”
“You’re allowed whatever you want,” he says at once.
“Am I?” I look down at him. “If it’s true? If that paper comes back with matching boxes, am I allowed what I want? Or is everything I thought I’d have for the rest of my life being ripped away from me like it’s nothing? Like I’m nothing.”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. He’s honest enough not to pretend there’s a version of the answer that makes us all saints.
“I don’t know,” he says. It hurts. But the honesty helps.
Behind us, the screen door creaks. Maverick sticks his head out, reads the air in a second, and keeps it light by force. “Lab courier has our spit,” he says. “We’re officially gross and waiting for results now.”
“Thanks,” I say, without turning.
Storm’s voice from the doorway, low. “If you’re leaving, you’re not leaving alone.”
“I didn’t say I was leaving,” I shoot back.
“You didn’t have to,” he says. “I know your face.”
“You all make it very hard to make a dramatic exit,” I mutter.
Maverick smiles with his voice. “That’s the point.”
I look out over the marsh and try to imagine a world where I can watch the tide for six more hours and not climb out of my skin. It doesn’t exist. Not for me. Not now. I need the old trick that kept me alive before I knew these men. Forward. The door. The bus. The next thing.
“I have to go,” I say. The words land in my mouth and settle like a decision that was always going to be made.
“I can’t stay here and wait for an email to tell me who I am.
I can’t sit in a room with three of the four men that I love and try to not want what I want while we wait to find out if I’m allowed to have it. ”
“Phoenix—” Atticus begins, too careful.
“It’s all or nothing,” I say, turning, finding all of their faces in the doorway. “I can’t live my life in the maybe, or the halfway. I either get all of you, or I get none of you.”
I slip past them into the hall, heart pounding, legs steady.
I grab a bag from the closet and throw in the stupid practical things I have learned to remember—cash, charger, a hat, sneakers, a hoodie that isn’t his.
I take my tablet because there are policies on it that belong to me now, and I’ll be damned if the work I do for them is just…
lost. I leave the shirt on Conrad’s pillow and stand there for one second longer than I should, breathing like a person learning to run again.
“Phoenix,” Atticus says from the doorway, voice raw in a way he never lets anyone hear. “Please don’t leave us.”
I turn, hand on the strap, decision burning a clean line through my spine.
“I’ll call,” I say.
I don’t promise when.