“What you’re doing there,” I say.“It’s inefficient.”
This gets her attention.She wants to be angry.Instead, she’s curious.Curiosity is always the tell.It’s the crack that lets everything else in.
“I was going to let him go,” she says.“Tomorrow.I had a plan.And you took that from me.”
“I know,” I say.And then, “You’re right,” because that’s what every woman wants to hear.
“I didn’t ask you to fix this, Luke.I never asked for that.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying I know.”
She looks at me the way I’ve been looking at her for weeks—trying to see what’s underneath.
“I’m going to find him,” she says.“And you’re going to sit here until I do.”
She goes upstairs.The door slams.The lock turns.
I hear her moving.Keys off the counter.The front door.The car starting.The sound of tires on gravel, fading, and then nothing.
So much for the soundproofing.In my defense, I wasn’t working with much.
She’s out there.Searching.Driving the county roads.Checking the ditches and the shoulder and the tree line the way we did the night Charles made it four hundred yards and his legs quit.She’ll check the gas station.The bus stop.The road into town.She’ll drive until she runs out of road or hope, whichever comes first.
I yell.Not because I think anyone will hear.Because the body needs somewhere to put it—the anger, the guilt, the stupidity of a man who did the right thing and ended up tied to a chair in the basement he soundproofed for someone else.
I yell until my throat gives out.It doesn’t help.No one comes.No one’s coming.
The chair creaks when I shift.For a second I think maybe something will give.It doesn’t.She’s too good for that.
Time does what time does in the dark.Stretches.Folds.Lies to you.Thirty seconds ago—or an hour, or a lifetime—I was in a shower with a woman who wanted to know about pressure.Now I’m in a chair with rope on my wrists and a stain spreading across my jeans because the body doesn’t wait for dignity.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.I think about water.The way cold feels going down when you don’t realize how thirsty you are until it’s already there.I imagine the relief and then hate myself for how badly I want something that small.
I don’t know how long I sit there.Long enough for the stain to dry.Long enough for the anger to go quiet.Long enough to think about every decision that put me in this chair and find the exact one where I could have turned and didn’t.
Then I hear it.The car.Tires on gravel.The front door.Footsteps overhead—fast, then slow, then stopped.
She didn’t find him.
The basement door opens.She comes down the stairs.She looks different—dirty, hair wild, eyes conveying the exhaustion of a woman who’s been searching for something in the dark and came back empty-handed.
She walks to the table.Opens a drawer.The sound is casual.Mechanical.I don’t turn.I’ve seen what happens when you move before you’re told.
Something thuds onto the table.Metal against wood.
I brace without meaning to.A hitch of breath.She clocks it.
I close my eyes.Think about how all this started.
Play with fire, get burned.
She sits across from me.Close enough that I can feel the shift in the air.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” she says.
But we don’t get to that.
