Page 6 of What We Become

“The best part was watching you kick.” He says it the way other people describe a good meal. “Most people pass out in under a minute. You held on for almost three. Clawing and kicking and making this sound—” He tilts his head, remembering. “Like a screen door in a storm. This thin, reedy squeal.”

Stop. Stop. Stop.

“If your boyfriend hadn’t been sitting outside in his car like the pathetic stalker he is, you would’ve been done that night. I wouldn’t have needed any of this.” He gestures at the room. “But he came simpering along. So I had to recalibrate. Use the old noggin. I have to say, I’m pretty proud of myself for this one.” He looks around and sighs. “The house where it all started. Thematic, don’t you think?”

Mars squirms in his arms. Stephen sets her down and she trots back into the hallway, nails clicking against the hardwood, completely unbothered by anything happening in this room.

Stephen turns back to me. “Here’s how this goes.” He reaches behind him and drags a yellow canister forward, tipping it so I can read the label.

Industrial expandable polyurethane foam.

“Once I close this wall, I run the nozzles through the gaps at the base and sides, and I fill the space. Thirty times its own volume. It gets warm first—nobody ever expects that part. Then it goes rigid. Eighteen hours and it’s stone.” He taps the canister with his knuckle. “By tomorrow morning, you won’t be visible. You’ll be inside the wall. Part of the structure. I come back, skim the surface, paint it to match the rest of the room. This space stops existing. Not on any blueprint, not in anyone’s memory.”

He sets the canister back and picks up the trowel. The wall is at my shoulders now. The gap above it is maybe eighteen inches—a bright rectangle of light that’s the only thing keeping this room from being a coffin.

“Your boyfriends are going to look for you—of course they will. It’s a given. But the only clue they’ll find is my car. It lost control and went off the bluff, Sage. Turns out Jamie wasn’t so good at being a designated driver. The sucky thing is, the current took the bodies out to sea. Two best friends, taken too soon. No bodies, no leads. They’ll look forever. But they won’t find you.” He starts on the next row. “Because you won’t be anywhere they think to look.”

Scrape. Tap.

The last row.

He doesn’t rush it. Each brick is placed with the same measured care as the first, mortar spread smooth, edges squared. He hums while he works—something tuneless and absent.

I watch the light narrow. Eighteen inches becomes twelve. Twelve becomes eight. The rectangle of warm hallway light shrinks to a slot, and through it I can see his knuckles, gray with mortar, pressing the final bricks into place.

“Stephen, please.”

He pauses. One brick left. I can see his eye through the gap, lit from behind.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “you’re the first best friend I ever had. I mean, I hated every moment of your company. But you were my first bestie—I can’t take that away from you.”

The last brick slides into place.

They’ll come. They’ll save me.

The light dies.

What if they don’t come?

The darkness is total. Not the dark of a bedroom with the curtains drawn, where the clock face still glows and the smoke detector blinks its little green eye. This is constructed dark. The absence of light so complete that my eyes ache from straining against it.

My breathing sounds loud. Too loud. Each exhale bounces off the plastic and comes back to me, warm and used. I’m already recycling my own air.

For a long moment there’s nothing. No sound from the hallway. No footsteps. No Stephen.

He’s gone. The door is locked. The house is sealed. I’m inside a wall in a dead man’s beach house and the only person who knows is the man who put me here.

I pull at the zip ties. The plastic bites. Nothing gives.

Then I hear it.

A hiss. Low and insistent, coming from somewhere beneath me. The nozzles at the base of the wall, right where Stephen threaded them through the gaps in the brickwork.

Warmth pools around my ankles, over the straps of my sandals. Soft, thick, wrong—like stepping into something alive. It spreads across the floor of the sealed space, slow and patient. An acrid smell rises with it sickly sweet beneath the sharpness. The smell of something that was never meant to touch skin.

Foam.

It’s warm against my ankles. Rising.