Page 14 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

Mara doesn’t tell me to breathe until I start choking on it. Then she presses the water back into my hand and talks me through one sip, then another, her voice low and steady. By the time I can see the room again, the soup has gone lukewarm and the afternoon light has shifted across the carpet.

I pick up my phone before I can think myself out of it. Dash’s name sits below the missed calls, unfamiliar and formal and clean. He knows the woman he helped out of a police station,a candidate with a strong interview and a life messy enough to require emergency lodging.

Mara stays beside me, one hand resting against my knee, solid enough to keep me from floating away. I call Dash and he answers on the third ring. “Dr. Monroe?”

His voice is careful. I close my eyes because even kindness has weight when I’m this hollow. “It’s Calliope. I’m sorry I missed your calls.”

“You don’t need to apologize.” There’s a pause on his end, quiet enough that I can hear paper shifting, maybe him moving away from whatever work I’ve interrupted. “Are you safe?”

I look at Mara. I look at the order on the table. I look at the cash by my bag and the phone warning still crouched at the top of my screen. Safe feels like too large a word for this room, but unsafe has started to mean something worse than loneliness. “I’m somewhere with a lock.”

Dash exhales softly. “That’s a start.”

“I need to accept the position.” My voice wavers, but the sentence makes it out. “The sister-campus one. Oakhaven. If it’s still available, I’ll take it.”

“It’s available.” He answers quickly enough that I know he’s been waiting without trying to make me feel waited on. “I’ll notify HR and ask them to send everything in writing. You don’t have to remember details over the phone. I’ll include temporary housing, reporting time, benefits contacts, and travel options in the email.”

My throat tightens around benefits contacts because I have to redo everything. I have to rebuild the administrative pieces of my life too. “Thank you.”

“Calliope,” he says, and the sound of my full name from someone who doesn’t want anything from me makes my eyes sting again. “You can take this one step at a time. The offer isn’t going to vanish because you need an hour to breathe.”

I can’t tell him that breathing is the thing I’m worst at now. I can’t tell him my chest only knows how to hold shut around a bond that keeps trying to tear itself open. I only say thank you again, and he lets that be enough. When the call ends, my hand stays around the phone for a long time, waiting for regret to arrive with teeth.

Mara takes it from me before I can open Sloane’s contact. She doesn’t hide it. She sets it on the nightstand, screen down, then moves the soup back into my hands. “Eat the rest.”

“I accepted,” I say, because my brain hasn’t caught up to my body yet.

“I know.” Mara sits close enough that our shoulders touch. “Tomorrow, we go to the doctor. After that, we figure out the phone, the bank, and the cards. Then we figure out the order. We’re not fixing your whole life tonight.”

Theo

I sleep between Sloane and Idris because the bed is the only place in the house that feels like it still knows how to hold people.

Sleep is the wrong word for what happens. My body drops under, drags itself up, drops again, always before I can get far enough away from the house to rest. Every time I wake, Sloane’s hand is somewhere on me, curved around my hip or resting between my shoulder blades or holding my wrist like he has to feel my pulse to believe I stayed. Idris doesn’t move as much, buthe’s there every time my eyes open, dark and steady in the low light, one hand on my ankle beneath the blanket and the other close enough to Sloane that their knuckles brush whenever the bed shifts.

My heat feels like a door slammed shut in the middle of my body. It aches where it should’ve opened. My skin can’t decide if it wants blankets or air, and my stomach keeps turning around food I know I need. Dr. Mercer said interrupted heat response in the careful voice people use when they’re trying to make fear sound medical, but there’s no careful word for what it feels like to call for Callie until my throat hurts and get nothing back. There’s only the place in the nest where her sweater should’ve been warmer. There’s only Sloane going white when her voicemail answers. There’s only Idris writing down every ugly thing Garrett says because Zana told him paper matters now.

At some point after dawn, I wake with my face pressed to Sloane’s chest and my fingers tangled in Idris’ shirt. They’re awake. I know by the way their breathing changes around mine, too controlled, too careful, both of them pretending they aren’t listening to every tiny sound I make. Sloane’s heartbeat is harsh under my cheek. It hits hard, then harder, like his body is trying to break through bone and run toward her without him.

“You can sleep,” I whisper, though my voice sounds scraped thin.

Sloane’s hand slides over the back of my head. He doesn’t answer right away, and I feel the words he’s holding back before he decides which ones won’t hurt me. “I’m good, sweetheart.”

“You’re lying.” I mean it gently, but even gentle truth makes his chest shudder under my cheek.

Idris’ thumb strokes once over my ankle. “He’s very bad at it this morning.”

Sloane exhales something that almost becomes a laugh and dies before it can pretend. “I’m right here.”

Still, the promise hurts because Callie isn’t here to hear it, and I don’t know if she thinks he stayed away because he wanted to.

The phone on Idris’ nightstand vibrates and all three of us go still. Sloane’s hand tightens in my hair for half a second before he loosens it with a rough breath. Idris reaches across him, checks the screen, and his scent sharpens into bitter tea and storm rain before he says, “It’s Zana.”

Sloane sits up too fast. I go with him because my hand is still in his shirt, and the room tips sideways until Idris’ arm catches my back. Sloane whispers an apology against my hair without looking away from the phone. Idris answers on speaker, his other hand steady behind my shoulders.

“Tell me,” Idris says.

Zana’s voice comes through low and awake, with street noise faint behind her. “I tried Calliope again before filing the first inquiry. Yesterday it went to voicemail. Today the number is disconnected.”