I understood it. I didn’t blame either of them.
After a couple of weeks the maintenance kind wasn’t working as well. The amounts were going up to get the same effect, which I recognized for what it was and kept doing anyway. The nightmares came back around the same time.
I’d wake hard, heart going, sheets damp under my back. 3 AM. 3:08. Always in that range. I’d lie there in the dark waiting for my pulse to slow, the images already fracturing — Danny’s shoulder dropping, the sound of it — and underneath that, Bea’s face in the doorway of her apartment.
Not dreams exactly—more like moments on repeat, stuck in a loop I couldn’t shut down. Danny stepping in front of the gun.Danny’s last question. The way she’d looked when I saidI’m ending it. The way I’d turned and walked down the stairs before she could argue.
I kept waking up at 3 AM with the absolute certainty that I’d made a catastrophic mistake.
And then, in the gray light of 3:15, I’d remember why I’d done it. What I’d woken up to. What I’d seen on the security feed. And I’d lie there in the dark understanding that the catastrophic mistake had come first—that the one in the doorway of her apartment had just been the consequence.
?
Glitch found me out by my bike one morning, running a cloth over it for the fourth time without really seeing it.
“You should go for a ride,” he said. “No point polishing it if you’re not going to take it out and get it dirty again.”
I kept moving the cloth. “I know.”
He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. Glitch wasn’t a talker—he was an observer, which sometimes made him harder to deflect because he didn’t need you to say much. “Something you want to ask me, brother?”
I knew what he meant. A man sent a text at two in the morning because something surfaced and he needed somewhere to put it — not because he wanted to talk about it. Glitch coming out here was a different ask. He wanted me to say it to his face. I kept moving the cloth. “No.”
He didn’t say anything. Just watched me — steady, unhurried, the way Glitch watched things when he was deciding whether to push. I didn’t look up.
“What actually happened?” he said finally. “That night. After the run.”
I told him. Straight through, no softening. He listened without moving. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.
“You looked at the hallway feed,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“How far back did you go?”
I thought about it. “Just back to when she came out of my room. Two fourteen. Watched it a few times. Went back maybe four or five seconds — enough to see the door swing open from inside.”
“Four or five seconds.” Flat. No question.
I looked up. He was frowning at the middle distance, the expression he got when something didn’t fit together the way it should. “What?” I said.
“Nothing.” He pushed off the wall. “Nothing yet.” He walked back toward the building, hands in his pockets, still frowning. “Asshole,” he muttered, not quite under his breath.
I watched him go. Then I turned back to my bike and tried to remember why I’d been polishing it.
Chapter 13
?
— Bea —
Iwent to the funeral. I hadn’t been sure I would, right up until the morning of it. I’d been back and forth all the night before — the argument running both ways. He’d ended things. It wasn’t my world to walk into anymore.
But Lindsay Curtis had called the day before, her voice thin and steady like someone running on nothing but the necessity of getting through the next thing.Will you come? Will you be with me?There was no world in which I said no to that.
The procession was something I hadn’t anticipated. Dozens of bikes, two by two through the center of town behind the hearse — hazard lights on, no helmets, faces forward. People stopped on the sidewalk to watch. I stood beside Lindsay and felt her flinch at the sound of the engines, then steady herself.
He always wanted to belong to something,she said.
