로그인Chapter 110ELIThe sound kept coming back.Not the whole sound. Just pieces of it. The engine, too loud. Then the other sound, the one I did not have a good word for, the metal sound and then the softer sound right after it, two sounds stuck together like they belonged in the same box even though they were not the same thing.I kept trying to put the sounds in order.The detective always put sounds and clues in order on the show. First this happened, then this happened, and once you had the order right, the whole thing made sense and stopped being scary. I sat on the window ledge in the waiting room with my notebook on my knees and I tried to do that.First: the headlights, too high, too fast.Second: Jules said move.Third: his arm, around me, fast, not gentle, not like his normal hugs.Fourth: the doorway. Cold stone against my back. Mum's arms around me so tight it almost hurt.Fifth: the sound.I stopped there every time. I
Chapter 109VIVIANI sat down.I did not decide to sit down. My legs simply stopped holding me up properly, and I found myself in the chair beside his bed, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I did not arrange my face into anything. I did not perform composure. I did not perform its collapse either, the careful theatrical falling apart I had done in that hotel corridor weeks ago, the speech I had delivered with such precision even in the middle of what felt, at the time, like genuine devastation.I simply sat there.Unguarded. Tired. Entirely without an audience to perform for, because Julian, half-conscious in a hospital bed, was not an audience anymore. He was just a person who had told me the truth as he saw it, without needing anything from me in return."Thank you," I said, finally."It's just true," he said.We sat in silence for a moment, the machines beside him marking time in small electronic beeps, and I thought a
Chapter 108VIVIANI did not slow down. I did not look at him. I kept my eyes forward and my pace even, and I felt him notice me, felt the particular quality of his attention shift as I passed, and I did not give him the satisfaction of acknowledgment. It was petty. I knew it was petty even as I did it, and I did it anyway, because there was a small, mean, entirely honest part of me that wanted him to feel, for even a few seconds, what it was like to be dismissed by someone he needed something from.I found Julian's room two corridors further on.There was a security guard near the nurses' station, young, earnest, clearly working from a list of names that did not include mine, and when I told him I needed to see Julian Hale he began, politely, to explain visiting hours, family only, the sort of gentle bureaucratic wall that exists in hospitals to protect patients from exactly the kind of chaos this particular hospital was currently full of."I'm Vivian Lau
Chapter 107VIVIANMy mother called me at four in the morning, and I could hear in the first syllable of my name that she was pleased about something, which meant, immediately, that something terrible had happened."Vivian," she said, and there was a warmth in it that had no business existing at that hour, a warmth I recognized from childhood, from the specific register she used when I had won something, a competition, an audition, a small victory she could carry into a room and repeat to her friends."What is it," I said, sitting up in bed, already braced."Julian Hale was in an accident tonight," she said. "A car. Hit him in the street. He's in hospital." A pause, and I could hear her arranging her voice into something appropriately solemn, though the solemnity did not reach all the way through. "The violinist and the boy were there too. Unharmed, apparently.""Mother," I said. "Why do you sound happy about this.""I am not happy," she said, to
Chapter 106ARIAI turned away from him.Eli was watching.He had not moved from his chair, but his whole body had turned toward us, his eyes going between my face and Adrian's the way they did when he was building something in his head, cataloguing, recording, the exact expression I had come to recognize over the last weeks and had come, if I was honest, to dread. Evidence. He was gathering evidence, right now, of the two adults who loved him standing three feet apart in a hospital waiting room at three in the morning, one of them shaking, the other one absorbing something without fighting back.I went to him.I expected him to come into my arms the way he always did, the way he had earlier that night, pressing his face into my shoulder and letting himself be held. I reached for him.He did not come.He slid off the chair instead, and walked, on his own, to the window at the far end of the room, and sat down on the low ledge beneath it, his b
Chapter 105ARIAI heard them before I meant to.I had gone looking for a bathroom, or maybe just for somewhere that was not the waiting room, somewhere with a door I could close for thirty seconds and breathe without Eli watching my face to see how frightened I was allowed to look. The corridor near the vending machines was quieter, dimmer, and I had almost turned the corner before I heard Adrian's voice, low, urgent, and stopped instead."—the Laurents," he was saying. "I need you to look at all of them. Her mother, anyone connected to the family, anyone who might have decided to—""I don't believe it was them," Ethan said.I stood very still against the wall."You don't know that," Adrian said."I don't know it with certainty," Ethan said, careful, the way he always sounded, like a man setting something down without wanting it to break. "But the vehicle left no plates. No registration trail. The driver did not slow before or aft







