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4
ELARA
I’m standing in my old apartment again.
That’s how I know something is wrong.
The place has been gone for nearly a year, technically still standing somewhere across town but no longer mine, and yet every detail is exactly the way I remember it: the narrow living room with the cheap gray couch pushed against the wall, the water stain spreading across the ceiling, the lamp I bought from a thrift store because Evan complained the overhead light made the apartment look like an interrogation room.
Even the air smells the same, stale coffee mixed with his cologne.
My stomach tightens before I see him.
“Where were you?” His voice comes from behind me.
I close my eyes. No. Not this.
When I turn, Evan is standing beside the kitchen counter with my phone in his hand, wearing the same pale blue shirt he wore the night I finally left him, his sleeves rolled to his elbows and his expression unnervingly calm.
He was always calmest right before things became bad.
“I told you I had an interview,” I say.
Evan looks at the phone. “Your interview ended at four-thirty, and you came home at six-twelve, so I’m asking you where you were for the other hour and forty-two minutes.”
“I took the train home.”
“It doesn’t take that long.”
“It did today.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
His mouth tightens.
It’s that tiny movement that used to make every muscle in my body tense before I even understood why.
“You always do this,” Evan says as he walks toward me. “You make me ask twenty questions when you could just answer the first one honestly.”
“I did answer you.”
“Then why are you getting defensive?”
“I’m not getting defensive.”
“You are.”
He is closer now. I step backward.
His gaze drops immediately to my feet. “Why are you moving away from me?”
“I’m not.”
“You just did.”
My back touches the wall.
