Chapter 16: Empty Space

By two in the morning the alarm was off, and the whole thirty-first floor was shouting.

I watched it from my porch with the volume turned low.

Declan's mother stood in the middle of the hall in her wet nightgown, swearing that the girl had jumped.

Nobody believed her.

Eleven neighbors had come up the stairs in time to see Declan's hands leave my sister's back.

"I saw him push her," a woman from 3109 said.

"So did I," said the man beside her.

"You saw nothing," Declan's father growled, holding his bruised arm.

Finnegan stood between the family and the door of my old apartment with Britt wrapped in his work jacket.

"She sleeps here tonight," he said. "In her own place. Nobody touches her."

"She's ours," Declan's mother snapped.

"She's a person," a neighbor shouted back, and others joined him.

Declan stood behind his mother with his jaw clenched.

For once he had no smile ready, and nobody was looking at him kindly.

I turned off the feed.

It was a good night's work, and I felt sick.

I sat on the floor of my porch with the rain drumming on the miniature roof and stared at nothing.

I had saved her.

I had saved the woman who stood over me on that roof and pushed.

I could not make it add up.

Someone knocked once on the steel door, soft and slow.

The doorbell chimed, and I touched the speaker.

"It's me," Finnegan said. "She's asleep. I put a chair against the door and sat outside it for an hour."

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