I'm going to make it be okay.
Elijah leans his cheek against my temple.
"I hope so, Angel. I really fucking hope so."
16
A BLANK CANVAS
ELIJAH
Ididn't always hate my birthday.
Mom and Dad always made it special. Dad would make his famous buttermilk pancakes for breakfast. They'd do the whole thing with the balloons and the streamers. One year, Mom hand-painted a card for me that Dad later framed. It'salsopart of the family collection that we no longer possess.
No, I didn't really start wanting to ignore my birthday until after Mom passed. Then, indifference grew into hate after what I did in that room as Ambrose's hostage. I'm not sure if I had the dates right. I didn't start keeping track of them until a couple of weeks in, but I think it was right around my birthday when I shattered my hand.
Maybe it was part of the reasonwhyI did it. As if the date of my birth should also be the day that I severed this visceral part of my soul from my body. The day that part of me should die.
In truth, I thought it was the dayIwould die. Once I couldn't paint for him any longer, Ambrose would have no use for me. I expected a bullet between the eyes. A quick, clean, quiet death to put me out of my misery. My only request would be that he sendmy body home to my brothers. So they wouldn't spend their lives looking. Hoping.
But he sent me home.
For a long time, I thought that was worse.
I don't anymore.
Because ofher.
It was my angel who haunted my nightmare last night. The same dream, but with a different protagonist. An alternate view.
It wasn't me trapped in the room. It was her. It was Aurora pounding her fists on the door, crying to be set free. It was her marking the days on the bed frame, breaking her fingernails scratching them into the wood. It was her being whipped and beaten when she didn't obey.
And then it was her who pried the loose bit of stone from the wall and lifted it high overhead while I screamed and screamed for her to stop, even though she couldn't hear me.
In last night's dream, I really was the ghost I've felt like for the last couple years. Unable to do a thing to help her.
"Haaaappy birthday," Sev calls, and I turn from the front window to see him holding a ridiculously massive cake with Aurora and Atticus on either side of him.
It's hard to put on a smile until I see her, and the way she beams at me when she starts to sing with Sev.
Even Atticus joins the song, which heneverdoes, and Ellie rushes in at all the noise to add her little barks to the melody.
And I'm not sure when it happened, but when Aurora comes to hook her arm through mine as Sev brings the cake with all its lit candles for me to blow out, the smile isn't so fake anymore.
"Happy birthday to youuu," they all finish, and Aurora squeezes my arm.
"Make a wish!"
I gulp past the lump in my throat, and the first and only thing that comes to mind to wish for isher.
That she'll stay. That she'll be safe. That I can keep her.
I blow out the candles, and she claps.
"Okay, presents!"
Atty frowns. "Don't you want cake?"
