Chapter 223

Elias sets the duffel bag down just inside the door carefully and quietly, the same way he’s learned to move through rooms where the wrong sound at the wrong moment costs you something.

Neither of them turns around. Neither of them hears the door click shut behind him.

He walks the whole way home. It’s forty minutes, longer than the bus, longer than he has any good reason to choose on a night this cold, but he needs the distance to do something with the noise currently filling his skull, and walking has always worked better than sitting still ever has.

He replays it the entire way, on a loop his brain refuses to switch off. Her hand fisting in Zeke’s shirt. The half second before either of them moved. The way Zeke went still and then didn’t stay still.

He tells himself he has no right to be angry.

He tells himself this with the specific, repetitive insistence of a man trying to talk himself down from a ledge he’s already standing on. He’s the one who