The Unsent Appeal novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Her Room, in Boxes

Elliott shows her the boxes of her old room that he saved from the dump and makes her say sorry; her mother's text asks her to hide the accident from her sister's new in-laws.

He didn't ask me in.

He stood in the doorway with the dish towel on his shoulder and looked at me for a long time.

"Elliott Thackeray," he said. "In case you're wondering whether I know who you are."

"I know who you are," I said.

I had known it since the doorbell. I had known it in the courtroom, when a lawyer read his injuries aloud.

A shattered pelvis. A left femur in four pieces. Three surgeries.

He had been walking a bicycle across Hancock Street, and a sedan had come around the corner too fast.

"You're standing on my porch," Elliott said.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know the house was sold. My mother said nothing."

"Your mother said nothing to me either. She signed in a day and took the first cash offer." He shifted his weight off his bad leg. "Your family left in a hurry, Rose."

He said my name flatly, with no warmth in it.

"They left your room, too."

I looked at him.

"The haulers were here the Monday after closing," he said. "Everything your family didn't want went to the curb. Your room was the last one in the truck."

"My room?"

"Come around the side."

He walked ahead of me down the driveway, and I watched him walk. The left leg swung a little wide at the hip.

I looked away from it, and then I made myself look back.

The garage door was open. Inside, against the wall, stood a row of cardboard boxes, stacked three high and taped.

Someone had written ROSE on the side of each one in black marker.

"I wrote that," Elliott said. "The haulers weren't going to."

I put my hand on the nearest box.

It was my high school yearbooks. Under them, my debate trophies, a lamp with a pink shade, and my father's red flannel coat, which I had left on the back of my bedroom door because I wanted to be able to smell him there.

I held the flannel against my face.

It smelled of cold garage and cedar, and a little of him.

"They were going in the dump," Elliott said. "I paid the driver forty dollars to unload your boxes."

"Why?"

"Because nobody should throw out a person's whole room. Not even yours."

It was the last thing I had expected, and it was said without any warmth at all.

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't."

He leaned on the doorframe.

"I've been in this house for two months, and in all that time not one of you has called. Not a card, not a knock. Eight years, and not one word from you."

"I wrote..."

I stopped, because it was true, wasn't it, that he had never heard from me.

"Say it," Elliott said. "You've had eight years to practice."

I had practiced it for a judge, a probation officer, the lawyer who took my plea, and the ceiling over my bed.

I had never said it to him.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry for what happened to you. I'm sorry for every day of what it cost you."

My voice shook on the last words.

Something crossed his face, quick and hard to read, and was gone.

"Eight years," he said again, softer.

"I know."

"No, you don't." He looked at the flannel in my hands. "But you're not what I pictured."

"What did you picture?"

"Someone who could say it without crying."

I didn't have an answer to that.

"I'll hold these until you have somewhere to put them," Elliott said. "I'm not charging rent."

"I can't take them tonight. I don't have a car."

"I know," he said, and nothing else.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

It was my mother, in a text she must have written while the line was still warm.

Sunday brunch at the new house, 11:00. Address attached. Wear the gray dress, the plain one. And honey, please don't say anything about the accident to the Prescotts. Finley's mother is delicate about things like that.

A second text came right behind it.

You remember Briana is engaged, I'm sure I told you.

I read it twice.

Elliott had come to stand beside me, close enough to see the screen.

He read it too.

"The accident," he said, with no inflection at all. "They're hiding you."

I locked the phone and put it in my pocket.

"They're not hiding me," I said.

But I did not know what else to call it.

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