Page 81 of The Ashes of Summer

Maybe I'm never going to be somewhere safe enough.

The worst of it isn't what they did. It's that they did it in front of the camera, and Jackson watched me the whole time—not Donnie, not what was happening—me, my face, cataloging every sound I made like a man checking his work against a drawing. Whatever he was looking for, he found some of it. That's what turns my stomach now. Not the pain. Being studied while it happened.

I feel the weight of that same stare on the side of my face.

I don't give him my eyes.

It's the only thing left in this room that's mine, so I keep it. I fix my gaze on the ceiling, find the crack running out from the light fitting, and I count the places it forks.

Twenty-one.

Twenty-two.

Twenty-three.

The numbers are easier. The numbers don't ask me anything. They don't make me see my mother at the window when headlights swept the road and weren't his. They don't make me count how many birthdays he left early, how many excuses she swallowed, how many times she chose not to ask a question because she loved him too much to want the answer.

Across the room the footage is still running. It's been running this whole time. It was running while they⁠—

Twenty-four.

Twenty-five.

And I understand something, lying here in all this nothing. He didn't just take my body tonight. He put my father in the room while he did it, so that every time I remember one I'll have to remember the other. So the two of them will be welded together in me for the rest of my life.

That's what he does. He doesn't only ruin the thing in front of him. He goes back through everything you loved and ruins that too.

Twenty-six.

For the first time since he showed me those videos, I stopped wondering whether my father loved us. The question that settles in its place is so much worse.

How much of him ever belonged to us at all?

"Jacob is coming."

It comes out in a whisper, ruined, barely a sound at all. I say it again. And again. Not to Jackson. Not really to myself either. Just out loud, because hearing it in the air makes it into something solid, and right now I need one solid thing to hold.

The room stays quiet. Then Jackson laughs.

Low. Genuine. It settles into my stomach like something swallowed whole.

"You really think I don't know that?"

I turn my head before I can stop myself.

A smile touches his mouth. Not a pleasant one. The kind that belongs to a man holding something he's been saving.

"I know your sheriff is on his way." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, close enough that I can smell the blood dried at his lip where I bit him. "I've known every step he's taken since he woke my brother up."

The room shrinks.

"There's been a mic under Kurt's bed for the past two days, princess." A quiet laugh slips out of him. "It's amazing what a nurse will do for an eight-ball of coke."

Not just that Jacob is coming—that I could bear, that was always going to be true. But he's known the whole time. Every hour I've been lying here holding those three words against my chest like a candle in a storm, he's been watching Jacob walk toward this house with the patience of a man who set the table days ago.

I don't know how. I don't need to know how. All I know is that the one thing keeping me breathing has been in his hands this entire time, and he let me keep it. He let me hold onto it. He watched me whisper it to myself in an empty room and he let me, because a hope you're allowed to keep hurts so much more when it's taken.

Jackson watches the understanding land on my face. Waits for all of it to arrive.