Chapter 20 #2
When a monster sees something else monstrous, he only thinks it pretty.
Slowly, her hand a detached thing floating in the air before her, she touches the edge of that ice cream tub and pulls out one of the test kits.
Anticlimactic, she thinks at first. They’re just kits to test for lead toxins, something everyone does when renovating an old house.
Dozens of them. Each used packet labeled with a different room name: dining room, kitchen, laundry, master suite, nursery …
Each and every kit reads positive.
For toxic lead paint.
Something shifts, a breath let out slow.
A footfall sounds, even and measured.
Elodie whirls around, her fingers curved like claws as she drops the lead toxin kits and presses herself hard against the unforgiving edge of the workbench. Her heartbeat surges up her throat and she thinks for a moment she will start screaming and never, never stop.
Instead, she stays silent as she watches Bren pick his way slowly down the stairs, still dressed in his suit, jacket discarded and tie loosened as he does the moment he enters the house after a long workday.
He would have seen the destruction as soon as he came in the door and begun hunting for her—then found the power cord trailing through the pantry and down, down into his basement.
In his arms is Jude.
Her son looks rumpled and mussy from preschool, tired in a cross way with his thumb in his mouth as he leans into Bren with the easy trust of a child who feels safe. One shoe is on, the other off, purple marker all over his fingers. His worried eyes flick around the basement.
But they can’t be home yet—it’s too early.
Or else she’s lost hours. She’s lost the entire day.
Her mouth is full of dead things, a fist closed so tight about her throat that she still can’t catch a full breath.
It’s only then, as she stares at him, that she realizes it isn’t dust layered thickly over the walls and furniture and broken crates of trash.
It’s black mold.
The room seethes with it.
“It’s not what you think,” Bren says.
She could laugh. She could scream.
No anger lines his face. There’s just a steady sort of weariness as if she’s created yet another drama he has to clean up. His eyebrows draw together in worry as he glances from her to the papers around her feet like torn out feathers, soaking into the milky wet of the floor.
Elodie yanks the circular saw from the workbench and twists around, clutching it to her chest. Fevered rage burns through her. She is incandescent with it, trembling and ruthless and horrible.
“Give me my son,” she hisses. “Right now.”
Jude sniffles and lays his head on Bren’s shoulder, and Bren just watches her with careful consideration as if he’s sizing up how best to manage this nasty creature caught in his basement.
“You’re literally holding a power saw,” Bren says calmly. “Maybe put that down first. We can go upstairs and talk.”
“Fuck,” she snarls, “you.”
He rubs a thumb into the corner of his eyes, tired, so tired of her theatrics. “Listen, Elodie…”
“You fucking stalked me?” She hates that it come out a question, her voice tipping high with disbelief at the end. “You pretended to stumble into me at that yacht club but—you followed me there. How often did you fly out to Australia to stalk me?”
“Look, I didn’t lie that I had family out there. So, I just … It wasn’t that often.” He sighs. “Jesus, you have to acknowledge that I never made you like me. I dated you properly. I never forced you to do anything.”
“Oh, that makes it all right, then. The psychopath love-bombed me and then asked for consent before we fucked.”
Something flashes behind his eyes—but it’s still not anger. Guilt. It is guilt, as softened and anxious as melted butter.
“I’m not,” he says, so very quietly, “a psychopath. I just … I just wanted you.”
Her fingers tighten around the saw and she takes a vicious step forward. “Don’t you dare—”
“I wanted someone who wouldn’t leave me!
” It’s almost a shout, and he immediately holds his breath, checking on Jude as if worried he frightened him.
“That’s all, Elodie. I swear on my parents’ graves.
I—I just wanted someone who needed me as much as I needed them.
And…” Now his voice has started to shake.
“And you have to admit, you started it.”
Stalker. Liar. Monster. Panic has rent her apart, and she is full of a shrill desperation to get Jude away from him. She can barely parse his words in the vicious cyclone crashing through her head.
You started it.
She is sixteen years old at a crowded party, drunk and miserable, there to find a boy. Any will do.
And there is a twitchy, anxious boy in the back, skinny and gangling with hair all in his eyes and huge glasses blocking out the blur of his face.
The scream is inside her chest, her lungs, poisoning her as it rachets higher and higher.
“And you have to agree,” Bren goes on, low, “that I came for you at the right time. Do you think your parents wouldn’t have done worse to Jude? To you? They’re abusers. I just wanted to keep you safe. That’s all I ever wanted.”
“Bold of you to call them abusers,” her voice trembles, “when you secretly beat my child.”
“What?” He looks genuinely shocked, his body curving away slightly as if to protect Jude from her words. “I would never—”
“Hit him? He’s covered in welts!”
“The hell?” Bren says. “I thought that was you. That you were disciplining him. I was going to bring it up, but then I realized everything else you were doing to him—”
“I WOULD NEVER HURT MY CHILD.” It tears out of her in a roar.
Jude starts whimpering, pressing his face closer to Bren’s neck. Not reaching for her, not asking for her, not crying for her. If Bren did hurt him, he would be frightened to be touched.
“The glass in his food?” Bren’s voice rises to meet hers. “Faking that the floor was eating you? Brainwashing him to believe he’s four? Filling his head with monsters? It’s all you.”
“You are the monster.” She is gasping for air, but there’s not enough, not down here in this mold-encased tomb. “This house is full of lead paint.” Her cheeks have turned wet, though she can’t feel herself crying. “You’re poisoning us. You’re poisoning us and you knew it the whole time.”
Then she is sobbing, folding in on herself, the saw suddenly too heavy to hold.
Bren sets Jude down carefully on the lowest step, pressing his mouth over the top of Jude’s curls so tenderly. “Go upstairs, bud. We’ll get some dinner soon. Everything’s going to be okay. Mommy’s not well, and I’ll help her up to bed.”
Jude darts a furtive glance at her and makes no move to go upstairs as Bren edges carefully forward along the narrow pathway toward her. His hand reaches out, soothing and calm, corraling this rabid creature.
“It’s okay,” he whispers. “I’m going to make everything okay.”
He is upon her too fast and she can’t think of what to do. Her whole body racks with thick, drowning sobs, and it would be so easy just to lean into his strong, open arms.
His hands fold over hers, gently prying her fingers off the saw handle.
“Shh,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you. We’re going to work through this, you and me.”
She tilts her face away from him. “No.” It’s more of a sob than a word. “No, no, no. Not you, it’s not you.”
His brow furrows slightly as he watches her, and there is almost a tactical, clinical way in how he surveys the diminished wreck of her shuddering body. “What do you mean?” he says cautiously, and then his eyes go wide. “Oh. Do you remember me now?”
You have to admit you started it.
She’s going to be sick. She can’t handle this, can’t hold everything she has understood inside herself. A wail sticks behind her teeth and she can’t look at him, can only whisper, through heaving sobs, “It’s not you.”
“You chose me.” He says it with such tenderness that it punches all the air from her lungs.
“So I just chose you back.” He draws the circular saw from her hands and holds it casually to his chest. “My only crime is falling in love with you, and how could I not? You were everything to me from the first time we kissed, and I only did the right thing by coming back for you.”
Her hands curl over her ears and she’s shaking her head hard and fast. “No, no, nonono.”
“I’m doing what any father should do,” he says easily. “Providing for my son.”
The world shuts off, silence hitting her with a slap, and there is only a sharp, high-pitched ringing in her ears as darkness crowds her vision. She is made of nothing. She is stepping outside of this universe, this reality, where Jude is not only hers.
“You can’t hold any of this against me,” Bren goes on, factual and calm, his stance casual as if he has nothing to fear down here in the dark. “Not compared to what you’ve done.”
Slowly, she looks up at him through her gnarled curls, her eyes fathomless black pits.
“At least I,” he says, “didn’t murder my parents.”
He is so close to her; she so close to him.
It is so easy to reach over and flip the switch on the circular saw.