Page 34 of What We Become

I cough.

Shahid looks between us and decides not to ask. He reconnects the monitor and IV, then replaces the damp dressings around her wrists. Sage winces but doesn’t pull away.

I stand beside the bed.

When Shahid tapes the final edge of gauze into place, he checks the oxygen reading. “Ninety-five,” he says. “Good. Keep the mask on. I’ll check again in four hours.”

Sage lifts it slightly.

“Thank you, Doc McStuffins.”

His eyes close briefly. “It’s Dr. Shahid.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“No.”

He leaves before she can make it worse.

The door clicks shut.

Sage’s eyes crinkle above the mask.

“Five?” I ask.

“Minimum.”

I take her hand and start calculating bedrooms.

Five bedrooms. Six, if they want their own later. A fence with milkweed running along the base of it.

I get about forty seconds of that before the other number arrives—the one I’ve been holding down since the bricks came out. One. One man, alive, who thinks he finished this, sleeping tonight with nothing at all on his chest.

NINE

MILO

When Holden said “you’re with me,” I assumed—not unreasonably—that he meant sexually.

Let the record show that the man wrapped his hand around my wrist in front of four other people, used a voice that could melt steel at forty paces, and then walked me out of a hospital and into a car to sit in a parked sedan eating drive-thru breakfast burritos across the street from the house where our girlfriend was almost murdered.

Romance isn’t dead. It’s just deeply weird.

Two hours of mountain switchbacks, highway, and coast road later, here we are. Holden drove in silence while I ran traces on my laptop and tried not to think about every mile taking us farther from Sage and closer to the house where she almost died. We stopped for burritos on the edge of town because even stakeouts require calories, and because neither of us had eaten properly since yesterday.

The first time I saw this beach house, Brock was still alive. I’d broken in under the cover of darkness to find handwriting samples for his suicide note—dug through drawers, looked in the trash, stared at him while he was fast asleep.

I remember thinking, as I watched yet another rapist peacefully dream, that there might be something irrevocably bent about the wiring in my head. Not because of what I was doing, but because of how little it disturbed me. I was preparing to murder Brock with four other men and force him to admit to his crimes by making it look like a suicide. That, to me, was just good fun.

Now, sitting in broad daylight with egg and hot sauce dripping down my wrist while Holden stares at the Davis place like he can set it on fire with concentration alone, I’m thinking about the clean little digital life Jamie Mercer handed us—and the thread I’ve been pulling since four this morning.

Somewhere inside it, Jamie becomes Stephen.

I just need one knot to give.

Holden wipes his thumb over the steering wheel, slow and methodical. He hasn’t really eaten. He took two bites of the burrito and then held it in one hand like he forgot food requires follow-through. His eyes are bloodshot. His jaw looks engineered by a company that hates happiness.