Page 255 of What We Burn

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.”