No witnesses who weren’t chosen.
That was the night we stopped trying to speak to crowds.
But some stories…some stories want a bigger stage.
I drag my attention back to the present, to the motel’s peeling wallpaper and the cheap television humming static in the corner. The room smells like old smoke and lemon cleaner, the kind that never quite hides the ghosts.
The local news has already run the clip twice in the last hour—“Incident at Local Toy Store,” “Woman Abducted, Rescued in Alley Behind Floyd’s.” Grainy footage of the front of the shop, the festive window display, the line of children bundled in coats and scarves.
No footage of the back hall. No footage of my hand over her mouth, her body thrashing once, twice, then going slack.
But I remember it.
I close my eyes and replay the feeling of her weight shifting as I lifted her higher, adjusting my grip, calculating distance and angle and time—how far to the car, how long before anyone noticed the elf was gone, how many heartbeats I could steal.
And then: the crack of a shot, the hot bite along my arm, that moment of choice.
Drop her and run.
Or hold on and die.
I've never been particularly sentimental. So I dropped her.
Let the Irishman catch her. Let him slam into the wall instead of her skull. Let him bleed on the concrete while she breathed against his chest like a little broken bird.
I watch them on the screen now, in my mind if not on the TV—him bending over her, his big hands shaking, his mouth forming her name like a prayer.
It was almost sweet.
Almost.
“Enjoy it while you can,” I tell his ghost calmly. “You’re just the man who caught what I threw.”
Tallulah Gentry was always going to belong to someone. The difference is, I wanted to be the one tomakeher.
The one who took her apart and put her back together again, the way we did with the others. The way we learned how to after we swore never to light up a whole field all at once again. There was no poetry in that.
That’s the part Brady doesn’t understand. He thinks he’s protecting her. He thinks if he circles the wagons tight enough—Irish muscle, county cops, family with guns—he can keep the story small.
But he’s the reason I had to drop her. The reason the alley filled with lights and sound before I was done.
He’s the one who shot me.
He’s the one who made me choose.
On the TV, they cut to Brady giving some bland statement to the press—“No comment on an ongoing investigation,” and “We’re following several promising leads.”
He looks tired. Driven. Righteous.
I smile, slow and sharp.
Maybe it’s time someone gavehima bigger audience.
Tallulah can have her Irish Hulk, for now. Let him play bodyguard and boyfriend and whatever else he thinks he’s earned. Let him put up trees and string lights and pretend he’s won.
He hasn’t seen the whole board.
Neither has she.
