All Chapters of SIR: Chapter 221 - Chapter 230

The doctor’s words have been looping in Elias’s head for six days straight, the same sentence arriving on repeat whenever the flat goes quiet enough to let it in.You’re very fortunate you got there on time to save her life.He is sitting in the chair beside his mother’s bed, watching her chest rise and fall in the thin grey light coming through the curtains, and thinking about how strange it is that a sentence meant to comfort him has instead become the thing keeping him up at night. Fortunate. As if there was some other version of that afternoon where he came home twenty minutes later and found something he could not have fixed with a phone call and a set of steady hands.He looks at her now, propped against the pillows, her skin still carrying that faint grey undertone the hospital never quite managed to talk him out of worrying about, and he tries to remember what she looked like before all of this. Before the drinking, before the coughing that never fully goes away, before the v

“Right,” Zeke says, already pulling out his phone. “Here’s what’s happening. I need to get this to Marcus properly, not as a half-filed footnote you mentioned to me in passing three weeks ago.”“I love how personal that felt,” I say.“It was meant to.”He scrolls to find the number and then looks up at all three of us like he’s addressing a small, unruly platoon. “We’re not standing in an alley for this. Let’s move somewhere public, somewhere with actual sightlines, and nobody wanders off on their own.” His eyes land on me specifically. “Phones stay on. Location shared with me the entire time. I’ll be back in twenty five minutes, tops.”“You’re leaving?” I ask.“I’m calling Marcus from somewhere I can actually hear myself think, and I’m not doing it with the four of us huddled in an alley like we’re planning a heist.” He looks at Garvin. “You stay in visual range of her the entire time. Not down the street. Not in a shop. Visual range.”Garvin salutes him with two fingers, entirely to

A/N: I’ve actually been writing these chapters for a while and hoarding them instead of publishing them, so I figured this was the perfect time to finally let them out and dedicate them. These chapters are dedicated to Eliza who has been here chapter after chapter, comment after comment, cheering me on, encouraging me, and making this whole writing journey feel so much less lonely. And then you CREATED A SONG for I Hate You Too!!! Like… girl. What am I supposed to do with that? 😭❤️ Thank you for being so ridiculously supportive and thank you for loving this story as much as you do. I genuinely love you so much and you’re one of those readers I know I’ll remember long after this book is finished. These chapters are yours. P.S. Guys ,I’d really love it if you go check out The Ghost In My Name on Youtube, like the video, and drop reviews about the book. ~ Elias doesn’t sleep. He hangs up the phone, sits on the edge of his bed for exactly as long as it takes to register that his

The gym is nearly empty by the time Elias gets there, the afternoon session already wrapped, a handful of stragglers finishing up on the far side of the room. He finds Lucia and Zeke crowded around the bench near the smaller ring, the same bench where he spent weeks teaching her hip throws and watching her get progressively less terrible at falling without hurting herself, and something about the location settles wrong in his chest before he’s even close enough to hear what they’re saying.“Show me again,” Zeke says, and Lucia holds the phone out toward him, her jaw tight in a way Elias recognizes from months of watching her manage fear by refusing to look afraid.Elias crosses the last few feet and leans in over Zeke’s shoulder without asking permission. Zeke doesn’t tell him to back off, which is its own small data point.The photo is exactly what she described over text. Her, mid argument, in the school hallway taken from directly across the row of lockers.“Timestamp’s clean,” Ze

Elias sets the duffel bag down just inside the door carefully and quietly, the same way he’s learned to move through rooms where the wrong sound at the wrong moment costs you something. Neither of them turns around. Neither of them hears the door click shut behind him. He walks the whole way home. It’s forty minutes, longer than the bus, longer than he has any good reason to choose on a night this cold, but he needs the distance to do something with the noise currently filling his skull, and walking has always worked better than sitting still ever has. He replays it the entire way, on a loop his brain refuses to switch off. Her hand fisting in Zeke’s shirt. The half second before either of them moved. The way Zeke went still and then didn’t stay still. He tells himself he has no right to be angry. He tells himself this with the specific, repetitive insistence of a man trying to talk himself down from a ledge he’s already standing on. He’s the one who lied for months. He’s the o