“Yes. I’m at the hospital.”
“Good. Do not go home alone. Do not speak to Jackson without counsel. Do not agree to meet anyone from his family privately. I’ll contact you first thing in the morning.”
“Naomi,” I said. “They had my keys.”
Her silence sharpened.
“Who had your keys?”
“Arthur gave them back. He said they were in Genesis’s desk.”
“Elaine,” she said carefully, “has anyone been inside your apartment without your permission?”
I thought of the kitchen drawer that had been slightly open when I came home last week. The faint scent of Genesis’s perfume near my coat closet. The feeling I had dismissed as paranoia because Jackson always said I made mysteries out of dust.
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
“Then you are not going there tonight.”
“I need clothes. My laptop. My work files.”
“No,” Naomi said firmly. “We’ll arrange it safely. Stay with someone you trust.”
The sad, embarrassing truth was that I had let my world get very small.
Jackson disliked my friends. Not openly at first. He simply found faults in them. Leah was too loud. Monica was jealous. Priya filled my head with negative ideas. My colleagues were pretentious. My neighbors were nosy.
Little by little, loving him became easier when fewer people were around to witness what it cost.
But there was one person he had never managed to remove entirely.
My sister.
I called Claire from the hospital hallway after the stitches were done.
She answered with the panicked breath of someone who had been sleeping beside her phone.
“Elaine?”
At the sound of her voice, I began crying.
Not gracefully. Not quietly. The tears came from somewhere old and exhausted, and I pressed one hand against the wall to keep myself upright.
Claire did not ask me to calm down.
She waited.
When I could speak, I told her where I was.
“I’m coming,” she said.
“It’s late.”
“I’m coming,” she repeated.
Forty minutes later, she walked into the emergency department wearing leggings, a raincoat over pajamas, and the expression she used to have in high school when someone hurt me and she was ready to make it the entire city’s problem.
She stopped when she saw my face.
“Oh, Ellie.”
That childhood nickname undid me all over again.
She wrapped her arms around me carefully, avoiding the bandage at my temple, and I held on to her like I was twenty-two again and our parents had just died and she was the only solid thing left in the world.
“I’m sorry,” I said into her shoulder.
She pulled back. “No. Absolutely not. We are not doing that tonight.”
“I should have told you.”
“Yes,” she said, wiping under her eyes. “You should have. And tomorrow I will be furious about that. Tonight I’m just glad you called.”
That was Claire. Honest enough to hurt, loyal enough to stay.
She drove me to her house in Pasadena just before dawn. The city was washed in gray light, palm trees black against the sky. I sat in the passenger seat with a hospital discharge packet in my lap and watched Los Angeles wake as if nothing in the world had changed.
Claire did not ask many questions on the drive.
She handed me a bottle of water. Turned down the radio. Let silence do its work.
At her house, she gave me the guest room, one of her soft old T-shirts, and strict instructions not to check my messages until I had slept.
I tried.
But sleep came in broken pieces.
Every time I closed my eyes, I heard the plate crack again. Saw Genesis’s knife fall. Saw Arthur holding my keys in his trembling hand.
