Chapter 21: Get Off the Phone

"Bryce," I said. "Where on the bridge?"

"The walkway. The north side. It's raining over here."

"Are you hurt?"

"No. I wanted you to hear it."

"Hear what?"

"What it sounds like. You said I left you out here. I wanted to see what it was like."

My hand was cold on the phone.

I got off the window seat and went down the hall in my socks, and I stood outside Quinton's door.

I knocked twice with my knuckles, hard.

He opened it in half a second, awake, in his T-shirt.

I held up the phone and mouthed his name.

Bryce.

Quinton's face went still.

I pointed at his phone on the dresser and made the numbers with my fingers.

Nine. One. One.

He took it.

"Sabina?" Bryce said in my ear. "Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"Come get me."

"No."

A long silence.

"What?"

"I'm not coming, Bryce."

Quinton stood in the doorway with his phone to his ear, speaking low and fast.

I heard him say the George Washington Bridge, the walkway, the north side, a man alone, his brother, he won't say what he'll do.

"I have nobody," Bryce said. "Everyone's gone. Mom put me out. Quinton took my job. You left me."

"I did leave you."

"You left me on the worst night of my life."

"It was the worst night of mine," I said. "I had a hundred and two degrees of fever, and you locked the doors."

"I came back for you."

"You came back at nine the next morning with the girl you'd paid."

He was crying now, in a loud broken way I had never heard from him.

It would have crushed me a year ago.

I stood in a quiet hallway in Montclair with my knees shaking, and the old pull came up in my chest, the one that says go to him, fix it.

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