Page 16 of Into Ember

I decided the corner was fine. I made it a whole policy.

“— and it was you. Standing in my corner. Watching me flail around my living room in a sports bra, so, what I need from you right now is—”

“Elara.”

Something in his voice makes me stop.

He’s not red anymore. That’s the first thing I notice. The color is gone, all of it, and the guilt is gone with it, and what’s left on his face has no business being there — Erik, who got between me and Kyle at the coffee shop, Erik who is never surprised by anything, is looking at me like he wants to kill something.

“What corner?”

My stomach drops through the floor of me.

“The one by the bookshelf, obviously, the—”

“Elara,” he says carefully. “Four times.”

“…What?”

“Three years. I have been inside your apartment four times. Passing through. Seconds, each time. Nights I heard you crying through the wall, and then couldn’t hear you at all, and I stepped through to make sure you were still breathing, and I stepped out. That’s what I was going to explain.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “I can stop, inside the shadow. I never stopped in your apartment. I have never stood in a corner and watched you. Not Wednesday. Not ever.”

Four times.

Nights I was crying. Nights I thought nobody— he heard me. Through the wall. And he came to make sure I was still breathing and then he left me my privacy and my pride and never said a word for three years, and I am trying so hard to stay angry and the anger keeps losing its footing—

“But—”

“Wednesday morning I was nowhere near the building. I was across the city.” He’s not talking to me anymore, not really. He’s talking to the table. To the others. “I can’t prove either of those things. But whatever stood in your corner, it wasn’t me.”

The fire is the only thing still making noise.

I press my hands flat on the table to stop the shaking. It doesn’t stop the shaking. It just moves it inward, up through my wrists and into my chest, and my breathing has picked up somewhere in the last minute — fast, high, useless. I try the thing where you breathe in for four counts. It gets to two and quits.

Beside me, Leif sets his fork down without a sound. Rayner’s grin has been gone for a while, I realize. I don’t know when it left.

“Okay,” I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I authorized. “Okay, well. Then it was — the light was weird, or I was tired, or Gerald was — plants just do that, probably, sometimes, it was probably—”

Nobody agrees with me.

Why is nobody agreeing with me?

I am offering them perfectly good explanations, the same ones I sold myself at the time. Excellent explanations, and not one of these men will pick one up, and Erik is looking at the dark stacked in the corners of this room like maybe I wasn’t the crazy one after all. I understand now, all at once and way too late, that I would give anything to have him be guilty.

Something was in my apartment.

Something stood in my corner and watched me do jumping jacks and talk to my plant, and it wasn’t Erik, and I want it to be Erik so badly I could cry.

My skin is hot.

Too hot and too small and my heart is a fist on a door, and there’s a sound building somewhere under my sternum. Low. Rolling. Like the growl in the clearing — except the clearing is three hours away, and Leif’s mouth isn’t moving, and it’s coming from —

“Elara.” Brock’s voice, very calm, very quiet. “Breathe.”

I can’t.

That’s new information. I’m trying. I am trying, and my breath is doing a panicked stutter-step at the top of my chest and getting no further down, and every man at this table has stopped looking at the corners and started looking at me — and not one of them looks confused about what they’re seeing.

Which is somehow the most frightening thing that has happened all day.