Page 55 of What We Burn

The room assignments changed in my absence. All that’s left is the guestroom where Holden stores the overflow of old case files that won’t fit in the den—floor to ceiling boxes filled with the ghosts of other people’s pain.

The first night we all spent here, Knox opened that door, looked at the boxes, and closed it again. Said he’d rather sleep in an armchair and keep watch.

There are some kinds of pain that don’t stay politely in their containers. Holden can sleep beside them, stack them by year and victim and case number like order means anything. I can’t.

The couch is cleaner. Simpler. Physical discomfort I understand.

I get up and head for the downstairs bathroom, pausing at the foot of the stairs, listening for any sign of her and looking up into the dark like it’s a world I’m no longer welcome in.

Forcing my feet to move, I get myself in the shower, and the first thing I do is reach for the body wash that smells like her. I don’t use it. I just uncap it and hold it under my nose while I jack off and immediately hate myself for missing the best thing that ever happened to me—the thing I lit on fire with my own two hands.

I watch the water bead and run down my chest, count the seconds I can hold my breath before my vision goes spotty, let the spray drown out the voice that says, over and over, you’re not built for this. Not for being someone’s lover. Not for being anyone’s partner.

I towel off and dress in clothes I can ruin—an old T-shirt, jeans gone soft at the knees—because today I’m finally going to deal with my house. I haven’t set foot in the yard in weeks. The lawn will be knee-high. The garden beds I actually keep up, the ones with the milkweed, will be choked with whatever moved in while I was gone.

It’s the kind of mindless labor I can disappear into. And right now, disappearing sounds like mercy.

I make a pot of coffee for the house and pull out the travel mug for Sage, because I want it to still be warm when she wakes up. Milk, half a sugar. Some part of me believes that one day she’ll drink this and decide I’m worth a second chance.

Knox appears in the kitchen, silent as always, already dressed, and fixes himself a protein shake the color of a fresh bruise.

I nod at him. “She sleeping?”

He looks at me for a long moment. I’ve just admitted I know exactly who she sleeps next to.

I know he took her to his room after the banana bread in the early hours of Sunday morning, and I know that when he went upstairs last night, he checked on her and never went back to his room.

Later, I stood outside her door and listened to the woman I love take comfort in his arms, wishing I was in there too. It doesn’t make me angry—it makes me jealous. I want it to be me. But I also want to know she’s okay, even if it’s not by my hand.

Knox eventually nods. “She’s good.”

“She talk much?”

“Not to me.” He drops a banana into the shake. “Mostly wants to feel someone next to her. You want an update?”

I do. I have to. I can’t stop collecting data on her moods, the way I catalog and cross-reference the quirks of every kid in my class. There’s comfort in surveillance: observe, log, adjust. “Please.”

“Still having flashbacks. Little worse after the text. Wakes up gasping and grabbing her throat.”

Something behind my ribs folds in on itself. I grip the counter and nod like this is clinical information and not a description of the woman I love waking in the dark thinking she’s dying.

“Anything else?”

Knox takes a long pull of the bruise-colored shake. Studies me. He’s never been a man who wastes words, but the silences between them say plenty. “She stole your hoodie. The gray one you left on the chair. She had it on last night.”

I don’t know what to do with that. Don’t know where to put it. So I pour her coffee into the travel mug, snap the lid, and set it where she’ll find it. I have to leave before I do something I can’t take back.

This doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you. But I’m glad you’re here.

Her words from early Sunday morning ring in my ears, feeding the small, stupid hope that won’t die in my chest.

I shake off the funk. “Bet you took the hoodie off her real fast.”

Knox’s mouth kicks up at the corner. “Never been the kind of man to kiss and tell, Eli. You know that.”

I huff out a sound that almost passes for a laugh, then grab my keys off the island.

“I’m heading out.”