LOGINElias presses his forehead against the bus’s cold glass as he retraces the last fourteen days. He spent his two-week medical leave in a cramped, damp apartment waiting to heal, all while the memory of Lucia slamming her bedroom door on his face played an endless loop in his head.He wonders how she’s managing, though. He knows she’s too stubborn to let the world see her break, but he can’t help but worry about her, given everything he’s put her through lately. He checks the black brace beneath his uniform trousers as he admits to himself that he deserves every bit of the silent treatment she’s dishing out.He probably also deserves the bullet her father chose not to fire.The bus screeches to a halt across from Westerfield Academy gates. He tries to recall if the school always looked this intimidating all the times he took the bus before. He steps down onto the pavement, his left leg aching still slightly aching even through the piles of pain meds he shoved down his throat this mornin
“We need to get her into therapy, David,” my mother’s voice drifts up the hallway as I make my way downstairs in the morning . “I think she needs professional help. Since she got back, she’s not eating properly, she doesn’t speak to anyone and she barely leaves her room.” I pause on the bottom step, leaning my head against the cool molding, listening to my parents’ voices as they construct a fortress of clinical solutions around my life.“Don’t you think it’s a little extreme, though?” Dad argues. “Maybe she just needs a little time to come to terms with what happened. Besides, you know your daughter very well. She won’t easily agree to this.”“That’s exactly the problem!” Mom’s whisper is slightly raised now. “She agrees with everything these days. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘Yes Mom’. ‘Are you skipping school today?’ ‘Yes Dad’. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Yes yes yes! It’s almost like she’s operating on autopilot and that is not the daughter we raised!” A brief pause. “What if they… Davi
He left anyway.I lie on my back in the dark room at 3:47am, staring at the ceiling, and that is the thought that keeps completing itself no matter how many times I try to redirect.Eli left anyway. I told him I wouldn’t say a word to my father, I handed him the one thing he came into this house terrified of losing, and he packed whatever he owns that fits in a bag and walked out four days ago without looking back.I know because I heard the door.I wasn’t going to look. I had decided, very firmly, that I was not going to stand at my window and watch him go like some tragic heroine in a film I would normally mock. And then I heard the door and I was at the window before the decision could catch up with the instinct. I watched the tail lights of his cab disappear down the service road, and then I went back to bed and I have barely left this room since.The thing is… I’m not sad.I keep waiting for sad and it doesn’t arrive. What I have instead is this strange, flat numbness that
The hallway outside David Reid’s office is twelve feet long and Elias has walked it approximately four hundred times since he took this job, but it has never felt quite this long before. He spent the last three days in the medical wing while a doctor he had never met stitched his calf and rebandaged his chest, and he used every one of those hours trying to construct a version of events that David would accept. The problem with constructing lies for a man like David Reid is that David has spent four decades in rooms full of people lying to him and has consequently developed a sensitivity to it that borders on supernatural. The uncle story is dead. Elias knows that. What he needs now is something that sits close enough to the truth that David’s instincts don’t fire, but far enough from it that the full picture stays buried. He knocks twice and opens the door. David is sitting behind his desk, staring down at a stack of financial portfolios before looking up with freezing intensit
Eli watches Carver pause with his finger staying completely still against the trigger. A slow smile spreads across his thin lips as he looks at Lucia for a long, quiet moment. “You really have your father’s flair for dramatic negotiation, Miss Reid,” Carver says in a slightly annoyed tone. “Very well. Let’s make a deal... I spare the boy’s life right here, and in exchange, you walk away with us without causing any more trouble.” Like hell. “No,” Eli says immediately. “We have a deal,” Lucia says as she steps forward, ignoring Eli entirely. Eli feels a sudden wave of pure panic crash through his chest. He knows Carver’s patterns better than anyone, and he instantly recognizes the proposal for what it really is: complete and utter bullshit. The second Lucia steps past that door and is locked in the back of a van, Carver will turn around and put a bullet directly between his eyes. “What?!” Eli tries to lunge forward but is pushed back to his knees by the guard in front of h
“Well, well, well.”The voice comes from somewhere behind the cluster of men, cutting through the noise. The men pull back, not all the way but enough, and the grey-haired man in the expensive suit walks through the space they leave him unhurriedly, looking at the two of us with genuine entertainment.“Long time no see, Arden,” he says pleasantly. “I have to say, I didn’t anticipate the ear. That is commitment.”How the hell does Eli know this man?Eli is on his knees, breathing carefully. He looks at the man with an expression that is not fear and not defeat and is, in fact, the most purely homicidal thing I have ever seen on a human face.“Fuck you, Carver,” he says through blood stained teeth. “We both know I’m the one you want. Let her go.”“Aw… how cute. I actually admire the profound love you two share,” the man – Carver – says, a cold smirk on his thin lips as he stops beside Eli’s unmoving body. “It is really quite touching. A true tragedy, though.”I try to break free, twis
I sit on the edge of Lucy's bed long after she falls back asleep, her small hand still curled around mine. The room is dark except for the faint glow of the nightlight shaped like a crescent moon. I stare at it, thinking about how everything I thought I could control is slipping through my finger
Lucy kicks off her sneakers the moment we cross the threshold, leaving them in a haphazard pile by the coat closet. She’s already halfway down the hall before I can remind her to hang her coat. “Daddy!” she calls, sprinting toward him with her arms wide. Vincent is in the livi
The next day, the call comes in while Vincent and I are at work, reviewing a procurement report I have already flagged twice. I know it is bad news the second I see the school’s number on my screen. I stare at it for half a second too long before answering. “This is Nora Calder.”
The room tilts. Not literally. Nothing so dramatic. The glass walls remain upright, the long walnut table stays polished and still, the city beyond the windows continues breathing in its slow, arrogant way. But something inside me slips out of alignment the second he steps through the door. Dav







