Page 63 of The Ashes of Summer

One of them swallows hard. Then they're both backing toward the hall.

"Understood, Sheriff."

The door shuts behind them.

I brace my bloody hand against the wall and force air through my teeth until the room stops swimming. Behind me, Kurt coughs, wet and broken.

"You want to help her?" I don't turn around. My voice comes back cold. Dead. "Then start fucking talking."

Chapter 20

Someone Else’s Skin

Summer

The tears don't stop after he's gone.

At some point I give up trying to wipe them away and just let them come, soaking into the pillow beneath my cheek until the cotton turns cold and damp against my skin. My face aches. My eyes burn down to the lids. I can't make myself move. So I lie where he left me, on a bed that isn't mine, in a room that isn't mine, and let the walls blur.

Every part of me that he touched feels like it belongs to someone else—like I set my body down somewhere in the middle of it and haven't found the way back into it yet. His voice is in my ear. That name hangs in the dark where he left it.

Annalise.

I don't follow the thought any further than that. I can't. If I let it lead me back into my own skin I'll have to feel all of it, and I'm not ready. So I lie very still and think about nothing—which is worse, because nothing is where the grief is waiting. Mama and Papa are dead, yet now I can’t even mourn my father cleanly, not now that I know what he was. The man I want to cry for and the man in that footage won't hold still long enough to be the same person, and I'm left grieving a lie I was handed every day of my life. Somehow that's heavier than a body would ever have been.

The lock clicks.

The sound cuts through the quiet like a gunshot, and every muscle in my body pulls tight on instinct. I don't look up. I've learned by now that looking doesn't change who's on the other side of the door, and there's a small, cowardly mercy in the half-second before I have to know.

The handle turns. Footsteps cross the threshold—slow, measured, unhurried, the walk of a man who has never once in his life had to rush.

I know who it is before I lift my head. Jackson’s back.

For several seconds neither of us says a word. I keep waiting for him to close the distance. To say something about what he did to me in this room an hour ago—the fact that he raped me in that bed and then walked out like he'd done nothing at all. To flood the space with that suffocating presence he carries into every room like weather.

He doesn't. He stays over by the dresser.

And when I finally make myself look at him properly, I see that he's holding something.

A box. Small. Black. Old enough that the corners have gone soft with handling, the way things wear when they've been picked up ten thousand times. The sight of it sends a chill straight down my spine before I even understand why.

He closes the door quietly behind him and crosses the room, and there's something careful in the way he moves—deliberate, like a man carrying something that might shatter if he breathes on it wrong. He lowers himself into the chair across from the bed, settles the box on his lap, and then he simply looks at it.

The silence stretches until it has a texture.

I watch him despite every instinct screaming at me not to draw his eye, because something is different tonight, and different is the most dangerous thing there is in this house. The anger that always sits just beneath his skin isn't there. Neither is the cold amusement, or the cruelty that usually shows up somewhere behind his eyes like a second man looking out.

For the first time since he took me, Jackson Moore just looks tired.

Not the physical kind. Something far deeper than that—the soul-deep exhaustion of a man who stopped knowing how to let go a long time ago.

Slowly, he lifts the lid.

I wish immediately that he hadn't.

Everything inside is arranged with unbearable care. Photographs. A little jewelry. A bundle of letters tied off with a ribbon that's long since lost its color. A bottle of perfume. My breath snags—not because of what any of it is, but because of the way he looks at it. I've watched people hold heirlooms. I've watched my own mother press her face into clothes that still carried someone's smell. I know what grief looks like.

This is something past grief. Something that never got the chance to become it.