I sit in the armchair for a long time after he leaves.
The front door clicked shut behind him and I heard his car pull away from Carver Street and still I did not move. I just sat with my hands in my lap and the silence of this house settling back around me and the weight of what I had just agreed to pressing down on my chest like something physical.
Eighteen months. I say it once inside my head and put it away. Looking directly at it is not useful. The next step is useful. That is how I have gotten through everything in five years.
I get up from the armchair. I go to the kitchen. My mother keeps the kettle on the counter and the habit of making tea is something to do with my hands. While the water boils I look at the notepad on the counter, a shopping list in her handwriting that stops mid-sentence. Eggs. Bread. The kind of thing that makes grief arrive without warning.
I pick up my phone and call my sister Claire.
Claire picks up on the second ring, the way she always does, like she has been waiting.
Elena. Finally. I have been checking my phone every twenty minutes. How is she? How are you? Are you eating?
Three questions in four seconds. That is Claire. Warmth arriving before sense. She is twenty-three and still sounds like the girl I left in Portland when I drove out of this city at four in the morning with two bags and a secret I have never put down.
She is stable. Surgery is tomorrow morning. I am fine. Yes.
You are not fine. You have your fine voice on.
I almost smile. Almost.
I am managing, Claire.
That is the same thing.
It is, and we both know it, and for a moment there is just the sound of her breathing on the other end of the line and me sitting in my mother's kitchen with the weight of the last twenty-four hours pressing down on my shoulders.
I tell her what I can.
The surgery, the doctor, the hospital room with the window that looks out over the car park. The blueberry muffin my mother managed half of before the medication pulled her under. I tell her all the surface things, the facts that are true and harmless and give Claire something to hold on to without giving her anything that would pull her toward this city.
That is the line I have always walked. Enough truth to keep Claire close. Not enough to pull her toward this city.
I should come," Claire says. "I should be there.
You have your job. I replied immediately
Elena.
Claire. I have it handled. I will call you the minute she is out of surgery. I promise.
A pause. I can feel her deciding. Claire has always wanted to fix things, to show up, to be useful in the immediate physical way that I have never been able to let her be, not when it involves this city, not when it involves anything close to the world I dragged us both away from.
You will actually call me. Not a text. A call.
A call. I promise.
Okay," she says. And then, quieter: "Elena. Are you sure you are okay?
I look at the shopping list on the counter. Eggs. Bread. My mother's handwriting, the looping g's she has always made that I used to copy as a child when I was learning to write and thought her letters were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
I am sure," I say. "I love you.
I love you too. Call me.
She hangs up. I set the phone on the table and sit with it for a moment, with the particular specific guilt of having told my sister nothing and called it protectio
The things I did not tell Claire:
Our mother borrowed a significant amount of money from a man Claire has never met. The debt has transferred to me. I will be in Voss City for eighteen months, working inside that man's company, keeping myself intact through sheer will.
The other thing I did not tell Claire:
The man is Damien Cole. And I have not stopped thinking about the way he looked at me for the past three hours.
I do not tell Claire these things because she does not know the real reason I left. She knows I was with Damien. She believes things simply fell apart. That it was mutual and sad and the kind of ending that happens when two people run out of road.
She does not know about Raymond.
She does not know that Raymond Cole, Damien's Father came to me in a parking garage on a Tuesday night and gave me a choice: leave Voss City permanently, or watch something happen to her. She does not know how specific he was about her routines, her address, her Thursday morning coffee shop.
I believed him without hesitation. You do not hesitate when someone describes your sister's life in that kind of detail.
And she does not know that the hardest part, the part I have never told anyone, was not leaving Damien.
It was not being able to tell him why.
I make tea because my mother keeps the kettle on the counter and the habit of it is something to do with my hands.
The kitchen is small and familiar and full of things I recognize: the chipped tile above the sink that has been there since I was a child, the corkboard on the wall with takeaway menus pinned to it, a photograph of Claire and me at the beach from years ago, both of us squinting into the sun with ice cream we are about to lose to the wind.
I look at that photograph for a long time.
Claire is laughing, head tipped back, completely unguarded. The way I have spent five years making sure she can stay.
She called back twenty minutes later.
I forgot to ask. Are you staying at the house?
Yes.
Is it strange? Being there without her?
A little," I said. "But it still smells like her. That helps.
Claire was quiet for a moment. Then she said something that landed differently than she meant it to.
I am glad you are there. Someone should be.
Yes, I thought. Someone should be.
What I did not say was that the someone is me, and that the city outside this window is already closing around me the way it always threatened to.
Not of him. Not exactly.
Of what being near him again does to the version of myself I have worked so hard to become.
But Claire does not need to know that. Claire needs to know her sister has it handled.
So that is what I give her.
I hang up, finish my tea, wash the mug, and place it back on the second shelf next to the cracked one that my mother never threw away.
Then I sit in this kitchen in this city that does not let go of people, and I begin to make my plan.