Page 175 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Silas lowers the phone very, very slowly.
He does not look at me right away.
That scares me more than if he had.
Because his face is no longer simply furious. It is emptied out into something far more frightening, some brutal place where grief, rage and old memories have all collapsed into one expression that does not know how to be human anymore. The hand holding the phone is trembling. His other hand has curled into a fist so tight I can see fresh blood breaking where his nails bite into his palm.
Cheyenne says my name, but it sounds far away.
Maria is crying openly now.
I can’t move.
Not really.
The call is over, but the motel is still in the room. My mother is still in the room. Her debts are still in the room. His father isstill in the room. Whoever that man is, he has dragged the worst parts of both our lives into one moment and made them touch.
Silas finally turns toward me.
When he does, the look in his eyes is enough to break my heart all over again.
Because underneath the terror he’s trying to bury, underneath the violence already sharpening itself inside him, there is one terrible truth written plainly there.
He believes this is his fault too
CHAPTER 36
Silas
“Ican’t tell my parents.”
The words leave her in a whisper so small it almost disappears between us.
Her forehead is pressed to mine beneath the covers, her whole body folded into me so tightly that I can feel the frantic beat of her heart against my chest. We are wrapped in my sheets, tangled together in the dark after the kind of evening that leaves a person feeling scraped hollow. Her room had become too haunted after the call. Mine was barely better. So I brought her here, shut the door, pulled her into bed, and for the last hour have done everything in my power to keep her breathing in the same world as me.
After the phone call, after the picture, after the recording of her younger voice whimpering through my speaker like somebody had dug pain out of the ground and pressed play, I made her friends leave. Not because they did anything wrong. Because their fear was making the room smaller, and she needed air she could still recognize. Dinner after that was a performance. Steph trying too hard to sound normal, Jacob watching both of us with that awful, steady calm of a man whoknows enough to stop asking in front of other people. Octavia sat through it like a ghost wearing her own face.
Jacob stopped me in the kitchen while she went upstairs.
Keep an eye on her, he’d said.
As if there were anything else I could possibly do.
How the hell am I supposed to explain what happened on that phone? The blocked number. The texts disappearing. The malware in her phone. The way whoever did this knew exactly what picture to send, exactly what recording to play, exactly which pieces of our lives to dig up and lay side by side until both of us were bleeding from places we thought were long scarred over.
The whimpering won’t leave my head.
That old, terrified version of her, trapped in a motel room was piped straight into the present, lodging itself somewhere vicious in me. Every time I think about it, something black and murderous rises in my throat. Whoever put that sound in my hands is still alive somewhere, still breathing, still thinking he can touch her from a distance and call it debt.
My hand slides to her hip, pulling her closer until there is no space left between us at all.
“I know, beautiful,” I whisper. “I know.”
The name comes out soft because I can’t survive hearing how frightened she is and answer her with anything less.
“But you know I won’t let anything happen to you, right?” My thumb strokes once over the curve of her side beneath my shirt on her body. “Whoever this is, whatever they think this is, they don’t get to you. Not anymore.”
She gives the smallest shake of her head, tears sliding freely now, wetting both our cheeks where our faces still touch.
