Rowan shook his head slowly. "I'll go out there when the sun's up. But I don't think there's anything left to find. Whatever was holding it together fell apart when he did."
Oleander looked at Rowan, then at Theo, then back to me. He looked at us like he was seeing the architecture of a new house, one he hadn't realized he was building. He didn't look like a man haunted by a husband. He looked like a man who had survived a crash and was surprised to find his limbs still worked.
"We're still here," Oleander whispered, and it sounded less like a statement and more like a discovery. He squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, and I didn't mind. I wanted the pain. I wanted the pressure. I wanted everything that proved the world was still solid.
Rowan’s grip tightened on my shoulder, his thumb tracing the line of my collarbone through my shirt. He was looking at Oleander, his expression a complicated mess of protectiveness and something that looked a lot like awe. Rowan didn't do vulnerability well, but he was doing it now, sitting on a dirty floor in a ruined room, refusing to let go of the people who had survived the night with him.
"Yeah," Rowan said. "We're still here. And nobody’s going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever."
thirty-five
THEO
The photo series started by accident. I was sitting on the floor of Julian and Rowan's apartment, reloading a roll of film I'd found in the bottom of my bag, when Julian sat down at the piano and played something I'd never heard before. It wasn't the melody. It was something loose and unfinished, a sketch of a piece he hadn't written yet, and halfway through he hit a wrong note and laughed.
I raised the camera before I thought about it. The shutter clicked once and Julian opened his eyes and looked at me and said "delete that" and I said "absolutely not" and that was the beginning.
I started carrying the camera differently after that, more like a notebook, something I opened when the moment was already happening instead of something I hid behind to keep the moment from touching me. The difference sounds small. It changed everything.
I photographed Rowan asleep on the couch one Tuesday afternoon, his hair fanned across the cushion, one hand hanging off the edge with his fingers curled like he was holding something in his sleep. The light was terrible. The composition was wrong. His mouth was slightly open. It was the most human I'd ever seen him look, and when I showed it to Julian later, Julian stared at it for a long time and said "he's going to kill you for this" and then asked for a print.
I photographed Oleander at the bookshop on Main Street, where he'd taken a part-time job shelving used paperbacks and arguing with the owner about the merits of organizing by author versus by color. He was standing on a step stool reaching for a high shelf, his dark curls falling into his eyes, his mouth moving because he was talking to himself the way he always did when he was concentrating. He didn't know I was there. The focus on his face, the careful way he handled each spine like it mattered, made my chest tight in a way I'd stopped trying to photograph and started just feeling.
Oleander's apartment was different now. I spent a lot of time there, all of us did, and the air had changed. It was lighter. The cold spots were gone. The cologne smell had faded to nothing, replaced by the coffee Oleander actually made himself and the cedar from Rowan's coat and the soap Julian used. It smelled like the four of us, which was its own kind of haunting, the good kind, the kind you don't want to exorcise.
The anomalies hadn't stopped entirely. I still caught them sometimes, a shadow slightly too dark in the corner of a frame, a blur near a doorway that could be a figure or could be nothing.Hollow Vale was still Hollow Vale. The buildings still decayed in spirals. The fog still sat at knee level on cold mornings. But the shadows didn't reach anymore. They didn't lean toward Oleander in every frame. They were just part of the landscape, ambient strangeness that I was learning to live with. Some towns have traffic noise. Some have tourists. Ours had ghosts. You adjust.
I was editing at my kitchen table one evening, scrolling through the week's shots, when I stopped on one I'd almost forgotten taking. It was from the previous Sunday. I'd set the camera on a timer and propped it on a stack of books on Julian's piano and run back to the couch where the three of them were sitting. The photo was slightly blurry because I'd tripped on Rowan's boot on the way back and landed half in Oleander's lap. Julian was mid-laugh. Rowan was reaching for me with one hand, the other still holding his coffee. Oleander was looking at the camera with an expression of pure, startled warmth, his hand on my back where he'd caught me.
Nobody was positioned right. The framing was off. The light was flat. By every technical standard I'd spent my career perfecting, it was a failure.
I printed it that night. I pinned it to the wall of my apartment, right in the center of the space where the conspiracy board used to be. The red twine was gone. The anomaly photos were in a box under my bed, documented and filed and put away. In their place was this one image, four men caught mid-collision, blurry and imperfect and unmistakably alive.
It was the best thing I'd ever shot.
thirty-six
OLEANDER
I woke up to an elbow in my ribs and someone's knee pressed against the back of my thigh and my left hand completely numb because Rowan's forearm had been cutting off the circulation for what felt like hours. The bed was never meant for four people. It was barely meant for two. But we kept ending up in it anyway, a nightly negotiation of limbs and blankets that nobody had figured out and nobody was willing to solve by sleeping somewhere else.
I smiled before I was fully conscious. It was the elbows that did it. The sheer, logistical absurdity of trying to share a queen-sized mattress with four grown men, one of whom slept like hewas defending a perimeter and another who migrated toward the warmest body in the bed without fail.
Julian was already awake. He was sitting up against the headboard, his fingertips pressed together in the pattern of invisible keys, working through something in his head. His face was calm. The ghost note was still there, I knew that, a faint hum beneath everything he played, but he'd stopped fighting it. He said it was like a scar on a favorite instrument. You learned to play around it. Sometimes you played through it. Sometimes it made the music better in ways you couldn't explain.
Rowan was asleep with his hair over his face and one arm thrown across Julian's lap and Theo's ankle simultaneously, a feat of physics I still didn't understand. He hadn't moved. Rowan slept like the dead and always had, a phrase I could use now without flinching, and that was its own kind of progress.
Theo was drooling on my shoulder. A small, warm patch of damp that I would absolutely tell him about later and that he would absolutely deny. His camera was on the nightstand where he'd left it last night, lens cap on, strap coiled neatly. He'd started doing that, putting it away at night instead of sleeping with it beside him. I hadn't said anything about it. Some changes are better when nobody points them out.
I extracted my dead hand from under Rowan's arm, flexing the pins and needles out of my fingers, and slid out of bed. The floor was cold. My apartment was gone. We'd cleaned it out two weeks ago, packed the last of Dominic's things into boxes that Rowan carried to the car without being asked, and I'd turned the key in for the last time without looking back. I lived here now. The word still felt new in my mouth, like a language I was learning late.
The kitchen was small and the coffee maker was the one reliable appliance in the apartment. I filled it, pressed the button, and stood at the window while it brewed.
Hollow Vale was fogged in. The buildings across the street were crumbling in their slow, spiral way, the ironwork rusting into lace, the brick softening at the edges. The shadows between the houses were deeper than they should have been. They always would be. This was not a town that pretended to be normal, and I had stopped wanting it to.
But it looked like a place where people lived. Not a place where people were kept.
My phone buzzed on the counter. Liliana.
