Page 7 of What We Burn

He looks up when the door bangs shut behind me.

“Knoxie.”

The only person I let call me that is Fury. If he’d called me that on any other day, I’d clap my hand against the back of his head. But right now, I don’t have it in me. He looks as rough as the rest of us, his dark curls flopping all over the place, his usually tan face pale and flushed.

I sit down on the step beside him. The concrete cold through my jeans.

After a while, Milo huffs out a bitter breath. “You know, when I saw kitten on the ground, I thought—” He swallows hard enough to hurt just listening to it. “No, actually, that’s a lie. I didn’t think anything. My brain sort of blue-screened. Which is not ideal in a crisis, for the record. Very embarrassing for me professionally. Ten out of ten do not recommend.”

I stare at the opposite wall.

He scrubs both hands down his face. “I keep replaying it, like maybe there’s a frame I missed where this turns into a stupid misunderstanding and she sits up and tells us we’re all dramatic assholes.” His laugh is a dry, dead thing. “But every version ends the same.”

Yeah.

“I can’t make it funny,” he says, quieter now. “I keep trying and there isn’t a joke in it. There isn’t even a bad one.”

I look at him then.

Milo’s eyes are red-rimmed. He doesn’t cry either, but he’s close enough that the strain shows in the set of his mouth.

I lean my forearms on my knees and look at the stairwell door.

“Nothing funny in it,” I agree.

He nods like the confirmation hurts.

I clap him on the back and keep moving.

The lobby is bright. Too bright. I keep my head down and walk past the front desk and out through the sliding doors. The sun is already high over the buildings, traffic on the avenue. A woman jogs past me with earbuds in like the world hasn’t just ended.

The world didn’t end.

She’s holding on.

My truck is in the garage on basement three, and when I slide in behind the wheel, I sit there with the keys in my hand for a long time. The leather is cold.

My hands are shaking. I notice that. Clench my fist to stop it.

It doesn’t work.

I start the engine and drive on autopilot—back to my apartment instead of Holden’s. I stand in the doorway and stare.

I’m not sure what I expected, but my apartment is exactly the way I left it a couple of weeks ago, when the noose was only a threat. I packed a duffel bag then, and I’ve lived out of it ever since.

Still, it feels like it should be different. An explosion has rocked my world. How did my apartment—so sparse and devoid of personality—get spared?

I go into the bathroom and turn the shower on hot. While it’s heating, I strip. The clothes I’ve been wearing since Saturday night go in the hamper. My shirt smells like the hospital and dried sweat.

The mirror over the sink is fogging from the shower steam. I don’t recognize the man in the glass.

His eyes are sunk back into his skull. His stubbled jaw is locked at an angle that looks wrong. His shoulders are set the way they used to be set in the field, before. He looks like a man who has been at war.

Haven’t we?

I turn away from the mirror before it fogs over completely.

I shower and I don’t think about anything. The water hits my hip where the names are. The ink has been there for nine years. Most weren’t any older than I am now when they died. They’ll always be younger. I’ll keep getting older while they stay the same age.