Page 28 of What We Burn

She’ll get back to herself. I know it the way I know the tide.

I’ll make sure of it.

“Come on, Fury. Micah made tea.”

She steps off the bathmat. Wobbles. I catch her arm.

Then she shakes me off and walks out of the bathroom on her own two feet.

That’s my girl.

My Fury.

NINE

MICAH

Eli makes her coffee every morning. Milk, half a sugar. He leaves it on the kitchen island before she comes downstairs, then disappears—onto the porch, into the garage, wherever she isn’t—so she never has to see the hands that made it.

It’s summer break, so he’s had all week to do it. Seven mornings. Seven coffees. Seven chances to man up, but he retreats instead.

I don’t like it. Not the ritual, not the choreography of avoidance, not the way Sage sits at the island alone, hands wrapped around the mug like she might shatter if she lets go. He doesn’t fool her. He only makes her lonelier.

The whole thing is so fucking sad I want to put my fist through the wall.

Holden’s house is big enough for all of us, which is part of the problem—we’re all under the same roof.

Sage has the main bedroom. Knox took the smallest room on the floor, a bed his feet hang off the end of, even though there’s a guest room downstairs with a queen in it. He wanted to be closer to Sage.

Holden moved himself into the den so Sage could have his room. It’s the one space in the house that isn’t sparse: floor-to-ceiling with banker’s boxes, each one labeled in his blocky handwriting, a name and a year. Cold cases. The ones the department closed and he never did. He sleeps on a pull-out in his own house, surrounded by people he couldn’t save, and I don’t think the irony is lost on him for a second.

Eli sleeps on the couch in the living room—completely ignoring the fact that there’s a guest room available because he’s a masochist or because he thinks that’s penance, I don’t know. Sage hasn’t said a word about it, and no one’s asked.

It’s Thursday, mid-morning. The house has settled into the rhythm it’s developed since we brought Sage home. Knox is in the kitchen cooking, Milo’s on his laptop at the dining table researching something for the Stephen case, while Sage has curled into the armchair by the window in the front room, a book in her lap that she hasn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes.

Her voice is coming back. Not all the way. It’s still rough and catches on certain words. The bandage is gone, replaced by a mottled landscape of purple and yellow bruising that wraps her neck like a collar. She wears high-necked shirts and hoodies with the collar pulled up. But sometimes she forgets, or it slips, and you see it. The map of violence on her skin.

The first time I saw it without the bandage, I had to leave the room. Walked straight out the back door and stood in Holden’s yard until the shaking stopped.

I haven’t told anyone that. I haven’t told anyone a lot of things.

Like the fact that I replay that phone call every night. Eli’s voice. That edge of panic I’d never heard from him before. But even worse than that, I can’t stop thinking that it was his phone call that had me turning away from Sage, walking away so I could hear him better. Thirty seconds. That’s all it took. Thirty seconds of not watching and someone put a rope around her neck.

I know it’s not rational—but Eli called, I turned away, and Sage almost died.

Worse? He was right there.

The whole time he was on the phone to me, he was there.

Why the fuck was he there?

Why the fuck didn’t he get to her sooner?

Was he involved somehow?

But he’s in this house, making her coffee and folding her laundry and leaving a blanket on the back of her chair so she never gets cold. He’s acting like he cares. And I’m supposed to . . . what? Be grateful? Forgive him? Pretend the same person who hurt her so badly isn’t the same person carefully setting her mug at the exact spot on the island where she always sits?

Sage closes her book. Stretches. Winces. Her neck still punishes any sudden movement.