Chapter 34 – Aurora
I lie on my back and watch the ceiling try to decide what color it is in the lamplight. The rain has stopped, but the house still carries the memory of damp wood, cleaned air, and a hush that feels more like listening than silence. My hair is still a little wet from the conservatory; the ends curl against the pillowcase like I touched the sea. The sketchbook is open beside my hip. I didn’t mean to draw him again, but then there were his hands, the span across ivory, the way the scar along his wrist sat quiet while the keys vibrated.
“He’s not just a monster,” I whisper, and I hate how soft I sound, how it lands in the room like I’m confessing to the air. The wordmonsterused to feel like granite. Tonight it feels like cardboard I could tear if I wanted to. I don’t know if that’s progress or danger.
The lamp makes a small pool of gold around the bed. I told myself I would sleep in the dark to prove I wasn’t twelve anymore. The switch stayed on. I used to mock people who said some houses breathe; this one inhales and exhales and waits for you to align with its rhythm. I tune in and out of it, hearing little creaks and the distant hum of whatever keeps the control wing alive under our feet. I flip the page. I should draw the jasmine, the corner of the piano, something that lives outside his gravity. Instead I trace the charcoal along the back of his knuckles and end up smudging the edge with my ring finger until it looks like motion.
My phone is face down where I threw it earlier. I don’t want the world.
The phone buzzes against the cotton with that insect hum cheap motors make. For a second I hope it’s Lila saying she’s changed her mind about leaving on Monday. I turn the screen toward me and momentum dies in my throat.
Unknown number.
We know where you are. You’re not safe. Tell us what you see.
I sit up so fast the sketchbook slides and hits the floor. My pulse is instant. I read it again, scanning for a tell in the rhythm, a typo, anything. The number has no name, no thread. My brain starts cataloguing possibilities in a voice that sounds like Nadia’s: spoofed line, staffer leak, wrong number. My stomach doesn’t believe in wrong numbers.
A second text arrives before I finish the first breath.
He can’t protect you forever.
I feel ridiculous and twelve and angry all at once. It’s not that I believe their sentence more than I believe my own name; it’s the way it reached me here. I check the signal. The phone clings to a bar like it’s eavesdropping through a wall. I hitcallon the number because I don’t know what else to do. It rings once and cuts off.
For a long beat I stare at the screen and feel the old instinct ramp in my bones: pack the bag that’s already packed, put the brushes in the pocket that zips, take the cash you keep rolled in the coffee tin because you don’t trust a piece of plastic when you need a bus. It would be almost funny if it didn’t taste like copper. I could walk down the hall, wake Lila, make up a reason. I could call Nadia and say the wordrescissioninto the phone like I’m spitting. I could leave by the side door I found yesterday when I went counting exit signs like I always do.
I see him in the conservatory instead. Not the man from the studio who makes a room change temperature by standing in it. The one who sat on a piano bench and admittedsometimeswithout having to be dragged there. The scar. The way he said his mother’s name—he didn’t, not out loud, but it was there in how he held the keys. The quiet in his face when he listened to me talk about drawing doors where there were none.
I close my eyes for a breath. When I open them, I’m already moving.
I don’t bother with the big wardrobe. I grab the thin robe from the hook by the bathroom. Under it I pull on a slip I keep for mess—something I won’t cry over if it takes paint. It feels like armor in reverse. My feet are bare because I like the way the East Wing floors are warm in a way that doesn’t match the weather, as if the whole building runs a fever.
“If they want me scared,” I tell the room, “they’ll get the opposite.”
I put the phone in my hand facedown, so the light won’t spill if a third text comes. The hallway is empty as a photograph from a realtor’s site. The sconces throw soft ovals, spaced to keep you from tripping but not enough to make you feel watched. Rain maps the windows in little ribbons that catch whatever moon is left. When I pass Lila’s door I pause because I’m weak, because there’s a line where my backbone trades places with habit and this is it. I listen. She’s asleep. Sometimes she sleeps like a kid with her arm flung over her head, one foot outside the blanket, and her mouth a little open like she snuck a sweet into bed and forgot. Tonight I hear nothing except her breathing and a low snore that is going to embarrass her if I ever tell her about it. I keep walking.
The conservatory door is half-closed again. I push it the rest of the way with my knuckles. He’s there, just like the picture in my head, sitting on the bench. He presses those same slow notes into the piano like he’s talking to something that will not talk back. When the door clicks, he turns. The first flick of his eyes is surprise. The second is a heat I feel like a hand.
“Aurora,” he says, and the way he says my name lands on my skin like a secret. “What happened?”
He stands and comes toward me in that contained way of his that reads as composed until you notice every step is adecision. I hold up the phone before I can decide to hide it. His mouth goes thin when he sees the screen. He takes it from me without touching my fingers and scans the texts, his eyes narrowing only on the second one.
“Caldwell,” he spits.
“You can’t prove that,” I say, because the reflex to argue is built into my spine, but my voice does something I hate—the tiny wobble at the end ofprove. I want to drag it back into my mouth.
He doesn’t hand the phone back yet. He slides his thumb over the glass and checks the number like he could make it give up more by looking at it harder. Then he folds my hand around it and closes my fingers. The contact is brief and precise, as if we both know what a touch can do and we’re going to be careful about where we spend them.
“I told you it was dangerous out there,” he says. He isn’t gloating. If he were, I’d be able to stand upright on fury alone. He just looks like a man who has seen this kind of sentence before and knows the shape it will make if you let it.
“Then keep me in here,” I say. It comes out without forethought. I hear the words as if someone else said them and I’m deciding whether to be angry. “All the way in. No more half anything. If I’m a target, I’m not going to play at the edges of your world and pretend I’m not. Show me the whole thing. Show me your world.”
The look that crosses his face is not triumph. It’s something like recognition and the faintest thread of relief, which I didn’t expect. He takes half a step closer. The robe loosens at my collarbone because my hand on the tie went slack when I lifted the phone. He notices. He notices everything. I don’t fix it because I don’t want to give him a show of modesty I don’t feel.
“What ‘whole thing’ do you think you’re asking for?”
“What you’re fighting,” I say. “Who you’re hiding. What you hide from. The part of you that sits in rooms like this and… tunes the air. The part that can hurt me. The part that already has.”
He stands without touching my wrist and I hate him for it and love him for it. The room is warm, but a draft slips under the glass of the door and brushes the skin at my knee. I’m aware of everything.
