“Well, you don’t get everything you want.” She tries to grab his wrist, but he snatches the keys right from her hand.
He runs.
“Jude!” She grabs for him, but he’s lithe and quick, ducking across the dead grass and up the porch steps.
The huge mahogany door yawns open under Jude’s touch, and all she can do is thinkshit shit shitshe forgot to lock it. She flies up the porch stairs, everything in her head an unsteady blur as she reaches the door just as Jude darts inside.
The door slams behind him, monstrous and loud, and she snatches her arm back just in time to avoid broken fingers.
The lock turns over with a dullthunk.
Silky silence falls, the only sound that of Elodie’s ragged breathing. For a second, she stands still as understanding burns through her insides. There is no way he did that so fast, wrangled the keys and figured out the lock. It’s almost as if the house did it for him.
“Jude! Open this right now.” She rattles the knob, but it doesn’t turn. Her voice cracks in a whisper-shout of desperation. “Jude William.I’m warning you.”
He has her keys.
He has her keys.
He is alone in the endless dark of an unlit, unfinished house and she can’t get to him. She can almost feel the house’s smug satisfaction at the snack caught between its teeth.
“Jude. Unlock this fucking door. RIGHT NOW.” She slams both fists against it, her breath a globe of white in the dark, but all she can hear on the other side is the light scuffing of shoes running away.
Her heart is in her mouth, her pulse racing so fast she can’t get a full breath. She’s hyperventilating. She’s freaking out. Even as scared as he is of this house, he chose it over being near her for a second longer.
There is still paint on her hands and it’s transferred to the door in smears of gory red, and in that moment all she can smell is the hot, coppery rush of blood.
Her son is gone. She can’t get to her son.
SIX
The cold has cracked Elodieopen, and she can’t think around the fog slowly numbing her brain. No key has been left under the front mat and a quick circumnavigation of the house reveals the back door is locked as well. She decides to sit in the car to warm up and call Bren—except, of course, the car has locked itself. Her phone stares at her mockingly from the cup holder.
She slams her palm against the window.
A murky, smothering dark coats the world as she jogs back up the porch steps, rubbing at her arms and trying to stop her teeth chattering as the temperature plummets. Rattling the doorknob yields nothing, shouting for Jude does even less. No little footsteps can be heard. No lights come on. If he hurts himself, she can’t comfort him. If he starts playing with tools or knives or electrical sockets, she can’t snatch him back to safety.
Don’t panic. That will do nothing.But she vaguely remembers Bren mentioning he’d be home late, and the thought of standing out here in the cold for an interminable amount of time compounds the situation with such brutal finality she begins to cry. The tears are all pent-up frustration, hot and wild, and they do nothing but ice her already cold cheeks. If she knocks on the neighbor’s door, she’ll have to explain this situation—my son locked me out because I can’t control him—and then confess she can’t use their phone to call Bren because she doesn’t know his number. They’remarried. Why hasn’t she memorized his number?
It still doesn’t feel real that Bren is hers, that he slid an expensive heirloom ring on her finger and eloped with her without hesitation. Her visa situation is still complicated, applications and paperwork for permanent residency never-ending, but Bren is unfazed and assures her time will smooth everything out and she will stay in his country. They bound themselves for life, their throats run through with a needle and bloody-red thread. Now she has his life, his name.
Elodie January.
My lovely wife, my sliver of perfection.
She has become the cold. Pacing doesn’t ease the frigid ice slid through her guts, so she drops into a crouch by the front door, huddled with her arms around her middle as if to provide another layer of insulation for the baby.
An hour passes before she tries all the doors again, the windows, and begins to imagine the baby’s face glazed over with black ice and frostbite. She can’t breathe. When she presses a palm to her chest, she expects a frantic, fluttering pulse, but there is nothing.
By the time headlights splash over her face, she’s grown still sitting there on the front steps, one arm draped limply over her knees, the other propping up her chin. A car door opens, music blares into thenight and then shuts off, keys clink. Bren’s whistle is cheerful. He is almost upon her before he pulls up with a startled yelp.
“Elodie! What the— Why are you waiting outside?”
She can’t feel him as he gathers her hands in his, tilts her chin up, his thumb on her cheek as he swears.
“You’re freezing. Why are you outside? Why—” He hauls her to her feet, half carrying her to the front door. “What happened?”
“Jude locked me out.” Her voice sounds distant, each word chipped off a block of ice and laid before him to melt. She should be frantic or at least full of rage, but she can’t seem to break though the layer of ice crystallized over her skin. “He destroyed your car. There’s paint everywhere.”
