He doesn't answer, but I think I hear him chewing.
"Were you in the gym again?"
He still doesn't answer.
"Wait, what are you doing here? I thought you were on the night shift at the laundromat."
There's a heavy gulp, and when he speaks, it sounds like it's around a mouthful of something. "Called Eli to sub in."
"Dude, you sound like shit. Have you slept?"
I open the fridge for a Gatorade and almost drop the thing when the light reveals him leaning over the kitchen island.
"Whoa…"
He's in his sweaty gym clothes, but he's not munching a protein bar before his shower. Atticus leans over the half of Eli's birthday cake we didn't finish, eating it straight off the fucking cake plate with a fork, and from the look of things, he's already worked his way through a pound of it.
I close the fridge and flick on the light beneath the cabinets, approaching him like someone might approach a bomb they mean to diffuse.
"Atty?"
He stuffs another bite of chocolate cake into his mouth, getting some crumbs in his stubble as he stares off distantly.
"Atticus," I try again, not liking how my stomach is already pooling with dread. "What the hell happened?"
"That woman," he says around the mouthful of cake, gesturing pointedly with his fork in a way that makes the next bite fall from its prongs. He stabs the cake again, shoveling an even bigger bite onto it. "She's going to be the death of me, man."
My skin pricks. "What are you talking about?"
He sags into his seat and drops the fork, finally looking at me. His eyes are red, bloodshot, and squinted. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he's been crying, but I have never in my life seen Atticus cry. Not once.
"She blew up her fucking car, Sev." He gestures violently with his hands. "Drove it right off an unfinished bypass."
An immeasurable sense of dread and fear fills me in an instant. Fear unlike any I've felt since I was a child. Fear I didn't know I was even capable of anymore.
"What?" The single word is a whisper of a thing, and if he doesn't keep talking, I will shake the answers out of him. "Atticus,what?"
I shove his arm harder than I mean to. "Atticus!"
"Fuck, man." He recoils to glare at me. "She's fine."
I deflate and throw two shaky hands through my hair, inhaling deep through my nose.
"Maybe lead with that next time, bro."
But I'm still not following. Atticus picks the fork back up, but doesn't get himself another bite, pushing crumbs around with the prongs as he stews in his vat of anxious rage.
"Tell me what happened?"
"She found the tracker I put on her car is what happened."
I frown. "Did she not know it was there?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I didn't fucking tell her."
