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I folded my arms, regarding Vic. About an hour after Lennox had texted Vic the picture, he’d shown up. Lennox had kissed him on the cheek and gone upstairs to take a nap. I’d nearly begged her to stay, feeling uncomfortable with the prospect of being alone with my brother. Instead, I kept my mouth shut, watching Lennox slink away. Soon after, Vic asked me to follow him upstairs. Reluctantly I agreed.
We went to a room that I hadn’t known existed. The door was hidden in the wall of the hallway, invisible to the naked eye. When I walked inside I was immediately taken aback by how high-tech everything looked. Wall-to-wall computers, monitors, and wires blanketed the room. My first question had been if Lennox knew the room existed.
Vic shot me a look. “Of course she does.” My next question would have been what in the world the room was for, but Vic quickly cut me off. He pulled up the picture of Vera and then all I could do was focus on her.
“What are you going to do?” I asked after he shut down the computer. I hugged myself, feeling cold in the dark room lit only by blue computer screens. Vic didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and ushered me out of the small, secret room.
“I’m going to find her,” Vic replied. I opened my mouth to ask how he could do that, but he was already shutting me out. I had been so keen to leave the room, but now that he was closing me out, I wanted nothing more than to stay. How was he going to find her? I wanted answers. As Vic closed the door, locking me out, it was almost as if I had never been there.
I walked down the stairs and into my new room, recalling recent events. I wondered if I had imagined it all. I was a far cry from the girl who’d hitchhiked her way from Georgia. First Vera—Vera Araya—was taken, kidnapped in her own room. A room in an apartment that we’d shared. Then, Lennox told me my brother could help, a brother whose skills I’d previously thought were limited to brooding and glaring. Lastly, my brother showed me his secret lair, completely equipped with everything the modern day spy needs.
That still wasn’t the craziest part. The craziest part was that I was starting to accept it all. Sighing, I fell back on my new bed and reached an arm out for my phone. I dialed before I could talk myself out of it. Eli picked up on the second ring.
“I just wanted you to know that I’m not at the apartment any more,” I said before Eli could say anything more than “Hello.”
“Bug—”
“Vera’s kidnapped or gone or missing or something,” I continued, interrupting him yet again. “I got kicked out of my old apartment and now I’m staying with Lennox and my brother. It’s the historic building about three miles south of where I was before. That’s the end of this conversation.” I hung up. I didn’t know why I’d even called him and told him where I was staying—okay, that wasn’t true. I did know why.
Back when Eli and I had been together, if I so much as got a paper cut, I needed to tell him. I felt like he needed to know every single minute detail of my life. Some of that still lingered.
I tucked my phone under a pillow, hoping that it would suffocate the sound of Eli ringing me back. When that didn’t work, I took a long time to unpack what little I had, trying to distract myself from my thoughts. It was a useless task. My mind wandered to Vic up in his secret lair, acting like Batman.
It was ridiculous, the opposite of sanity, yet I needed him to don his black cape for me. For Vera. I looked at my ceiling, imagining Vic upstairs in some weird amalgam of spandex and bulletproof fiber as he searched for her.
Laughter escaped my mouth without warning. I’d imagined Vic in a lot of different scenarios. Back in Georgia, I had thought Vic was living happily ever after without me. After coming to California and meeting him, I’d imagined many things about Vic—some not so pretty, but none of them had ever included him playing superhero.
I sat back down on my bed, allowing the laughter to flow. It gave me a brief respite from the terrible cloud of doom that was covering me. Vic wasn’t a superhero. He wasn’t going to step into some leather suit and save Vera. Truth was, despite what Lennox said and what I’d seen upstairs, I still didn’t believe he could find her.
It was nice to laugh for a moment, though, and it was nice to imagine Vic in the role of superhero. Normal younger sisters thought of their big brothers as superheroes. For a few minutes, I was normal.
My mind was once again about to be sucked into the vicious cycle of how abnormal I was when there was a knock on the front door. I couldn’t tell you what came over me as I padded my way across the living room to open the door. Maybe opening the door was a hard habit to break as I adjusted to being a guest, or maybe it was because deep inside my soul I could sense him. When I unlocked the door, Eli burst into the room before I had a chance to think.
“You can’t just keep calling me when you feel like it, Bug. You’re either in this or you’re not.” Eli rounded on me, barely giving me enough time to shut the door he’d just flown through.
“And what is this, Eli?” I raised my hands out in front of me, as if trying to grasp something. I loved Eli so much it hurt. It physically hurt me. I felt like my heart was being spooned out by an ice cream scooper every time we weren’t together.
“This is love, Grace.”
“You wouldn’t love me if you knew,” I whispered, mostly to myself.
“I know everything about you,” Eli said, taking a step toward me. “You know everything about me. That’s how love works. I love you not despite your flaws, but b
ecause of them Grace, just like you love me. Just tell me the truth!”
I opened and closed my mouth, feeling like a fish out of water as I tried to find the words Eli needed to hear. The truth? He wanted the truth? If he knew what he was asking for, he wouldn’t be so quick to demand it. The truth sounded nice. It sounded honorable and strong when talking about it as an idea, but in reality, truth was ugly. Truth tore people apart and created chasms too deep to ever cross or fill.
He didn’t want my truth. My truth would destroy him as surely as it had destroyed us. When I didn’t respond, Eli shook his head away from me in frustration.
“God dammit, Gracie! I replay the months before I left for college over and over again in my head and I just don’t understand why we broke apart. It was all so good and then it wasn’t.”
I turned away, tears forming in my eyes.
“So I started to think,” Eli said, his voice getting low. “I love you. I loved you the minute I saw you on the street all those years ago and I will always love you. I never stopped.” Eli moved toward me, his steps slow and deliberate. I kept my eyes glued to the wall. “I don’t think you stopped either.”
I hugged myself, refusing to look at him.
“But you pushed me away, Gracie. You pushed so hard that I didn’t think to look further. I thought you stopped loving me. I know now that wasn’t true.” Eli was so close to me now that his words echoed in my head.
