She just needs a break.
He peers around the dollhouse, owlish and innocent. “I didn’t do it.”
“Get in bed. Now.” She pushes to her feet, relieved he detects the warning in her voice and decides to flee to his woodland bed.
He flops around on the mattress as if his limbs are soft elastic and he is an untethered thing, liquid and unmanageable.
Tucking him in becomes impossible when all he does is wriggle around, so she gives up and leaves him to his ritual of tracing the woodland carvings with his fingers, his thumb in his mouth. She snaps the mushroom night-light on with a little more force than necessary.Offer him a story. Hug him. Sit with him until he falls asleep. Any caring, attentive parent would.
Her fingers throb.
As if he wants her in here anyway.
She storms out of the nursery only to have guilt catch up with her right as she’s about to shut the door. She pauses, one hand gripping the edge of the doorframe as she closes her eyes for a second and breathes out. If she lets that teacher get in her head, the frenetic spiral of self-doubt will never end. Nothing bad has happened to Jude since they moved here. She won’tletanything hurt him again. He is safe and healthy and—
The nursery door hurls forward with such force, she doesn’t have a chance to think before it slams on her hand.
Pain explodes through her fingers like a thunderclap, so intense and consuming that she forgets to scream. Air punches from her lungs as she shoves her shoulder against the heavy mahogany door and wrenches it back open. She’s going to pass out. But there is only pain condensing into a drumbeat through every bright red finger. A gasp hisses through her teeth as she clutches her jammed hand and checks for broken bones.
Deep in the moody dark of the nursery, Jude flings himself onto the woodland bed and pulls the covers over his head.
As if he’d just run back across his room after shoving the door closed. On her hand. On purpose.
Everything in the room stays perfectly still, only the wind tapping softly at the windowpane like a winter fairy pleading entrance.
“Jude,” Elodie grits out.
His voice is tiny from beneath the blankets. “The house did it.”
The shot of sickening unease that splits through her chest is visceral and terrible. A dark, primal fear cracks open in her mind, and for a second she believes him, the truth of it slamming rationality aside. The house hates her. It already tried to kill her.
Stop it,stop it, STOP IT.
Her throbbing hand curls into a fist, her eyes squeeze shut, and fora second she wantsso badlyto scream at him. But part of her knows he couldn’t have run across the nursery so fast without any lights on. Toys still lie scattered across the floor like wounded soldiers after an aggressive playtime, and she would’ve heard them crunch and scatter if he’d slipped out of bed to follow her to the door in order to slam it. Wouldn’t she?
“Go to sleep,” she says, harsh and low.
“It’s scary in here,” he whispers.
She ignores him. “If you get out of bed even once, you will regret it, young man.”
This time, she takes firm hold of the nursery doorknob and closes it carefully, listening to the latch click and wishing she had a key and could lock it. She is so goddamn sick of today and needs it to be over before she bursts into tears and dissolves into her own salted devastation.
In the kitchen, she ices her hand with frozen peas and then makes herself a comfort sandwich of peanut butter and melted chocolate. Somewhere deep in the house, Bren’s battery drill gives off a high-pitched whine punctuated by wood hitting the floor and the clink of screws. She doesn’t even know what he’s fixing, which room he’s in, if he’s trying to manage the wall problem or if he’s just avoiding her.
She leans against the kitchen sink with her sandwich and looks at the torn-up floral wallpaper below the beautiful handcrafted shelving Bren put in to display the antique kitchenware he thrifted. A butter churn and an apple peeler, tin mugs and a retro scale. The kitchen looked nice up until today.
She really did ruin everything. But even now, with only a small light on over the stove, she stares at the torn wallpaper and swears the plaster behind it has a fleshy surface riddled with veins. It throbs. One beat, two.
soft
s l o w
beatbeatbeat
“No.” She says it with a calm factuality she doesn’t feel and then lowers her plate into the sink and walks out.
Whatever is wrong with her overtired, strung-out brain needs to stop.
