Page 106 of Torment Me Knot
“You're both eating,” he says. “Whether you want to or not. I need something to do with my hands.”
Espie huffs but sits at the bench and picks up a slice of apple. I sit next to Espie and nurse a cup of coffee Ezra hands to me. Kev picks up his phone. Sets it down again. Looks through the living room to the closed front door.
“There's a nursery on Ferris Road,” Lex says, filling the space. He's looking at the enclosed patio, the terracotta pots still empty along the wall. “Those pots aren't going to fill themselves, and staring at that door won't make her walk through it any faster.” A beat. “I'd rather give you both something real to do than watch us all go quietly mad in here.”
Espie's fingers slide through mine. She looks at the pots. I can feel the same restless edge under her skin — the same pull I've had in the days before every heat I've ever had. Everything needs to be right. Everything needs to be in its place. She doesn't have words for what her body's already counting down toward, but I do.
“Kev keeps his phone with him,” I say. “If she reaches out, we'll come straight back.”
“I’ll set the house cameras too,” Ezra says quietly. “We’ll know the second she comes home.”
Espie keeps looking at the pots for another second before she nods. “If she comes back while we're gone, nothing else matters. We come straight home.”
Nobody argues.
Kev grabs his keys from the counter so fast they jangle against the tile. “Come on. Sitting here isn’t helping anybody.”
Kev keeps both hands on the wheel the whole time. His eyes flick to the phone in the cup holder every few seconds, then back to the road.
Ezra rests his forearm across the back of Espie and me when Kev takes a corner. Usually there’s music on low. Usually he checks mirrors twice and eases around turns like he’s carrying something fragile.
The car rolls to a stop a little too hard at the lights. Kev checks his phone again.
“She’ll answer,” Espie says softly.
Kev nods like he believes her, but we still sit in silence when the light changes to green and Kev accelerates.
The city blurs past outside the window. Silverpine is two hours north. I keep circling that number in my head. Two hours and she’s been out there alone for eighteen of them.
The bond still exists. I can feel it if I reach for it, thin and distant and wrong. But her scent has gone quieter since this morning and every time I notice it panic crawls higher up my throat.
I know what silence feels like. A collar around my neck. A gun pressed to my head. Waiting for a bond that never answered because the people on the other side of it were already dead.
My stomach twists hard enough to hurt. She’s not dead. I would know if she was dead. But people can disappear long before that.
We stop at a set of lights beside a playground. Bright climbing frames. Children shrieking across the bark chips while a woman pushes a stroller along the path beside them, coffee cup balanced in one hand, moving slow and unhurried like none of this could ever break.
I press my fingers against the window. “When did that playground go up?”
“Three years ago,” Lex says from the front seat. He's turned, watching me. “They redid the whole park. There's a new library two blocks over as well.”
Three years ago I was on a leash.
“It's good,” I say, mouth turning to sawdust. “It's a good thing.”
Ezra slides his hand into my hair, his grip drawing tuat just enough to ground me. His purr vibrates through the back seat, and Espie melts more fully against my side.
I unclench my fists and thread my fingers through Espie's. Cedar and chamomile, my own scent going sour at the edges. I pull in a breath and push the sourness out with it.
The further we get from the house, the bigger the world gets. There are buildings I don't recognize, a street corner with a cafe that's new. The world kept building itself while I was gone.
I used to like this. Getting out, moving through the world. I had favorite streets, a market I went to on Saturdays with Thomas, a park where Liam and I used to run in the mornings and argue about nothing. I fit in the world once. Now I want the house. The not-nest beside the bed, our chair on the patio, the small exact radius of safety we've carved out of the last six months.
Axel did that. Him and Mick and Kylie. They took the big world and turned it into something to be afraid of.
I’m not letting him keep this too. He took enough already. He doesn’t get the ordinary pleasure of going somewhere, choosing something, spending an afternoon outside these four walls with people who actually want me there.
This version of me, flinching at open spaces and counting exits, is not forever. It’s not fair to Espie. It’s not fair to them.
