Unspoken

Wren POV

The last time I left home, I came back without my voice.

Two years later, my mother still looked at me like I might not come back at all.

"You have the list," she said.

I held up my phone so she could read the note she'd made me save on the drive.

Vitamins with breakfast. Text when you get to class. Text when you get home. Doors locked. Windows locked.

Under it, in my own words: Mom. I'm twenty.

She read it twice, as if it might say something different the second time. Then she pressed a small white bottle into my palm anyway. My vitamins. She'd been handing me that bottle since I was six, the way other mothers handed out lunch money.

"Every morning, Wren."

Every morning, I signed. I promise.

Behind her, Dad was unloading the trunk with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. He'd driven six hours without turning on the radio. He was always away on business, and when he wasn't, he was this. Quiet. Watchful. His eyes following every car that slowed down on the street.

They'd agreed to let me go. They just hadn't agreed to like it.

"Wren!"

My sister came flying down the steps of the building, all long legs and sunglasses and the kind of laugh that made strangers turn around. Tessa was twenty-three. She'd left for college at eighteen with one suitcase and a hug, and nobody had made her save a list.

I loved her more than anyone in the world.

Some days I also wanted to be her so badly it made my teeth ache.

She crashed into me and lifted me off my feet. "You're here. You're actually here. Mom, you can let go of her arm now."

Mom let go of my arm.

"Okay," Tessa said, turning. "Muscle has arrived."

A tall guy in a faded team T-shirt jogged across the lot, grinning. Dominic Reyes. Tessa's boyfriend of two years, built like a door and friendly like a golden retriever. He shook Dad's hand, kissed Mom's cheek and signed a clumsy Hi at me that he'd clearly practiced in a mirror.

I signed it back and meant it.

Then the wind shifted.

It came from the far end of the lot, where a black motorcycle was parked half on the curb. Someone was leaning against it, scrolling on his phone like the rest of us were a commercial he couldn't skip.

And his scent hit me like a hand flat against my chest.

Woodsmoke. Frost on a winter morning. Something underneath it, warm and sharp and impossible to name, like black pepper on the back of my tongue.

My knees actually went soft.

Under my skin, something rolled over in its sleep.

I hadn't felt it move in two years.

I gripped the bottle of vitamins so hard the cap creaked. Not here. Not now. Not with Mom two feet away, watching my face the way she always watched it, searching for cracks.

"Silas," Dom called. "You planning to help or just look pretty?"

The guy looked up.

He was older than me, maybe twenty-two, with dark hair pushed back like he'd been running his hands through it and a jaw that looked like it had never once been talked into smiling. There was a fading bruise along one cheekbone. Broad shoulders. A university hockey jacket slung over the seat behind him.

His eyes moved over all of us.

They didn't stop on me.

"I said I'd come," he said. "I didn't say I'd lift."

Then he pushed off the bike, walked to our trunk and picked up the heaviest box without being told. The one with all my books. I'd watched Dad struggle with it that morning.

Silas carried it like it was full of feathers.

As he passed my father, he gave him a short nod. "Sir."

Dad looked at him for a long second. "Thank you."

That was all. Two words. But Dad didn't thank strangers like that. He said it the way you'd say it to someone who'd already done you a favor.

I filed it away. Filing things away was what I did best.

My room was on the third floor, at the back of Tessa's apartment. It was small. The window looked out over a narrow street, a streetlight and a strip of dark forest beyond the last row of houses.

It had a door with a lock, and the lock was on the inside.

I stood in the middle of the empty floor and tried not to cry.

"Where do you want it?"

I turned.

Silas was in my doorway with the box of books, and the room was suddenly much too small. His scent filled it. I could hear his heartbeat, slow and steady, the way I could hear everything I wasn't supposed to: Tessa laughing in the kitchen, the couple downstairs arguing about dishes, the buzz of the streetlight outside.

I'd spent years pretending I couldn't.

I pointed at the corner by the desk.

He set it down. Straightened. Finally looked at me, but only for a second, and only the way you look at an item on a list you've been told to take care of.

Thank you, I signed.

His gaze dropped to my hands. A small line appeared between his eyebrows.

"I don't know what that means," he said flatly.

And he left.

I stood there with my hand still half-raised, my face burning.

"Ignore him," Tessa said from the hall. "He's like that with everyone."

Is he? I signed.

"Mostly." She hesitated. Just for a second. "He's Dom's friend. He's fine."

Tessa never hesitated.

I filed that away too.

My parents left at sunset. Mom hugged me so hard I felt her shaking. Dad held my face in both hands and looked at me like he was memorizing it.

"Anything feels wrong," he said quietly, "you call Tessa. You call me. Day or night."

I nodded.

I didn't tell him that something already felt wrong. That it had felt wrong for two years. That the thing under my skin had woken up in a parking lot because a stranger had walked past me.

I didn't tell him because the last time I'd been honest with my body, it had turned into something with teeth.

Two years ago, in a locked room I still saw every time I closed my eyes, I had stopped being human for one long, screaming night. I had felt my bones break and my mouth stretch and my hands become something that could never sign again.

Then it was over, and I was a girl on a concrete floor, and a man's voice had told me the truth.

Nobody will ever keep what you are now.

So I'd kept it myself. I'd never told anyone. I never would.

That night I unpacked half my books, put on my noise-canceling headphones until the world went soft, and checked the window lock twice, because it was on the list.

Locked. Both times.

I fell asleep in my own room for the first time in my life.

When I woke up, the clock on my phone said 2:13 a.m., and I was cold.

The curtain was moving.

I sat up slowly. Cool air slid across the floor and over my bare feet. The window was open. Six inches, maybe seven. Enough for the night to come in.

Enough for something to get out.

I stared at it. I had locked it. I had checked it twice.

My phone lit up in my hand.

UNKNOWN: Lock your window. It's open.

I didn't remember opening it.