Watching My Fake Sister Dig Her Own Grave novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: Alone

"No," Dez said, before Verity had even hung up.

I put the phone face-down on the cushion between us.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"I was going to say it's the first real offer she's made."

"It's the same offer," he said. "Thursday before Thanksgiving, she told Uncle she'd bring you to him herself. Nessa says there's a van coming round the back after the party. This is her doing it early."

"I know that."

"Then why are you looking at the phone like it's a door?"

Because it was one.

Five kids were behind it.

He sent two cars to watch the Wacker Drive building on Tuesday night.

He didn't send me.

He brought me to his place instead, because Verity knew where my flat was.

He lived on the top floor of a brick building on Halsted, above a hardware store.

Three rooms, a cast-iron radiator, a Sox pennant over the couch, and a kitchen table with one chair.

I sat in the one chair.

He leaned against the counter and watched his phone.

At eleven, nothing.

At eleven-ten, a white van went around the block on Wacker once, slowly, and didn't stop.

At eleven-twenty a text came to my phone.

You didn't come. That's okay. I'll find someone else to talk to.

I showed him.

He read it twice.

"Good," he said. "Let her talk to the walls."

That was when I lost my temper.

"You don't get to decide that," I said.

He looked up.

"Decide what?"

"Where I go. What I risk. You sent cars tonight and put me in a chair in your kitchen, and you didn't ask me once."

"Because you'd have said yes."

"Then that was my answer to give!"

It came out of me loud.

Louder than the dinner with the scars.

He pushed off the counter.

"You want to know what I think about every night?" he said. "The two-flat. You on that floor. You weighed eighty-four pounds, Annabelle. I carried you down those stairs, and you didn't even put your arms around my neck, because nobody had ever carried you anywhere good."

My throat closed.

"I am not carrying you out of another room," he said. "I can't. I won't."

"Then don't keep me in one," I said.

He went still.

"Twenty-one years," I said. "Twenty-one years, somebody decided which floor I slept on and which corner I sat on and whether I ate. Every person who ever said they were keeping me safe kept me in a room."

My voice broke on the last word.

I hated it.

I let it.

"I didn't go tonight," I said. "Not because you said no. Because I decided not to. You have to let me be the one who decides. Even when you hate it."

Dez looked at me for a long time across that little kitchen.

Then he nodded once.

"Okay," he said, hoarse. "You decide."

The radiator ticked.

Outside, it had started snowing on Halsted.

I looked past him into the living room.

On the bookshelf by the window, between a softball trophy and a picture of his nieces, there was a paper cup.

Stained, crushed at the rim, with a coffee-shop logo half worn off.

I knew it.

I'd held it on the floor of the two-flat for two days, because it was the only thing I had.

"You kept my cup," I said.

He didn't look at it.

He looked at me.

"I couldn't throw it out," he said. "It felt like throwing you out."

I stood up.

I crossed the kitchen.

It was four steps, and he didn't come to meet me.

He let me do all four.

I put both hands flat on his chest, under the hoodie this time, on the warm T-shirt.

His heart was going like it had in the car above the beach.

"I'm warm," I said.

He closed his eyes.

"Annabelle."

"You said when I kissed you, you wanted me warm. I've been warm since the porch. I'm deciding."

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