Page 45 of Rune’s Solace

* * *

Well. Almost nobody.

Sawyer knew something, and Sawyer, who has never in his life been able to leave a thing alone, was, for the first time since I met him, leaving it alone. That was somehow worse than if he’d pushed. He kept showing up early with coffee he didn’t make a joke about. He stopped doing the bit where he narrates the biker. He put his hand on the back of my neck once, in the hall, and just left it there for a second, warm, like he was holding some piece of me together, and said nothing at all, and I nearly came apart right there next to the vending machines.

“You’d tell me,” he said. Friday. Not a question and not really a demand. Just laying it down. “If it was the bad kind. You’d tell me.”

“It’s not the bad kind.”

“Okay.” He didn’t believe me. He let me have it anyway, because that’s our deal, and God help me I used it against him, the way I’d been using it against everybody all week.

Brenda tried twice. Wednesday she stopped outside my door and stayed there long enough that I knew it was her, and I heard her hand touch the wood, then heard nothing at all because she couldn’t make herself knock. Wednesday she skipped the knocking part, came in and sat on the end of my bed, put her hand around my ankle through the blanket and said, “Baby, you look like you’re bein’ eatin’ alive.”

I told her I had a big test coming.

Brenda looked at me for so long I almost took it back.

“Alright, then,” she finally said, except there wasn’t one bit of alright in it.

She went back to her room, and I lay there knowing she was awake because I was awake, which was exactly the problem with Brenda. If I hurt, she hurt. If I couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t sleep.

And Sable called.

I let it ring twice and then I picked up, because it was Sable, and because there’s a limit to how much you can lie to somebody who’s seen the bottom.

“You sound terrible,” she said. No hello.

“I’m fine.”

“Amy Rose.”

“Don’t full-name me, I’m not one of your kids.” I sat down on my bed with the lamp on at eleven at night. “It’s just a rough patch. Sleep’s not — I’ve had a rough week of sleep.”

The line went quiet, and I heard her move, heard a door close on her end, heard the sound of a woman stepping out onto a porch to talk where Malik and Zara couldn’t hear her.

“The dreams,” she said. Not a question.

“Yeah.”

“How bad.”

“Bad.”

“Amy.” Her voice dropped. “How many nights.”

I didn’t answer, and she counted it out of the silence, the way she would.

“Hey.” Very soft. “You can’t do this. You can’t out-tough it, Amy. I know, because I tried. It just takes and takes, and right when you think you’ve got nothing left, it takes that too.”

“I know how it works.”

“Then you know what you gotta do.” A pause. Careful, the way she’d step around a hole in a floor. “You could go see him.”

And there it was, out in the open, said by the one person who knew what this was like.

“No.”

“Amy — ”