Chapter 25 The Weight of a Wrong Door
JAKE POV
He answers because not answering would mean something.
That's the whole argument. That's the entire case he makes to himself in the two seconds between seeing the name and pressing the green button. Not answering would mean something. Answering is neutral. Answering is just a phone call. Answering doesn't mean anything at all.
He knows this is wrong before he's even off the porch.
Brianna talks for twenty-three minutes.
Jake knows the exact number because he watches the timer in the top corner of his screen the way he watches the clock in the fourth quarter, not because he wants time to pass faster, but because he needs to know exactly how much of it is gone.
She talks about the squad. About the regional competition and the new routine, and a girl named Hailey, who apparently cannot execute a back handspring without telegraphing it, which is a serious problem. She talks about a party at someone's house this weekend. She talks about her college applications and how her counselor told her she needs more extracurriculars, which is insane because she has more extracurriculars than anyone.
Jake says, " Yeah, " four times. That's rough twice. Mm, more times than he counts.
He is sitting on his bed looking at the wall.
The wall is where his old football posters used to be before he took them down in his sophomore year because they felt like pressure dressed up as inspiration. The paint is slightly lighter in four rectangles where they hung. He has looked at those rectangles approximately ten thousand times. He has never thought about repainting them.
He thinks about repainting them now because it is more interesting than what Brianna is saying, and he needs something to do with his brain.
"You're quiet," Brianna says.
"Tired," he says. "Long practice."
"You're always tired lately."
He doesn't answer.
"Jake."
"I'm here."
A pause. He can hear her deciding something. Brianna always pauses before she deploys something real; it's a tell she doesn't know she has, a half second of stillness before the actual move.
"Is everything okay at home?"
He knows what home means when she says it. She doesn't mean Lily. She doesn't mean the house, the schedule, or whether he's eating properly. She means the girl. She's been meaning the girl for three weeks and arranging every conversation toward it the way you arrange furniture around a thing you want to force someone to look at.
"Everything's fine," he says.
Another pause.
"She's not," Brianna starts.
"Bri." His voice comes out quieter than he intends. "I'm really tired. I'll talk to you tomorrow."
He hangs up.
He stays on the bed.
He puts the phone face down on the mattress and lies back and looks at the ceiling, which is also not interesting but is at least honest about it.
He said it out loud on the porch.
He didn't plan to. He's been carrying that sentence around for weeks, aware of it the way you're aware of something in your pocket, present, shapeable, not going anywhere. He didn't plan to take it out and hand it to her on a Tuesday night on the porch steps.
It just came out.
And she went still.
He knows her stillness now. He knows the difference between the stillness that means she's closed and the stillness that means she's listening so hard she stopped moving. He knows the difference because he has been paying attention, carefully and involuntarily, for two months straight.
That was the second kind.
He thinks about going back out there.
He doesn't go.
He lies on his bed with his phone face-down and thinks about the way she looked at the street when he said it. Not away. Not dismissive. Like she needed something to anchor to while she processed. Like the sentence was too much weight for eye contact.
He thinks about the name on his screen.
He thinks about the look Penny gave him when he answered.
Not hurt. That would have been easier. It was something more careful than hurt something that pulled back and reassembled very quickly into neutral, the specific expression of someone who expected this and is not surprised and is mildly annoyed at themselves for having briefly considered otherwise.
He knows that expression. He has watched her use it at school for months.
He gave her a reason to use it tonight.
He turns off his light.
He lies in the dark.
The house is quiet the way it always is after ten Lily's small steady breathing through the wall, the heater, the occasional car passing on the street. The sounds that mean everyone is safe and accounted for. The sounds he has been listening for, unconsciously, every night for two years since the night everything changed and he learned that quiet was not the same as fine.
He stares at the ceiling.
He knows he picked wrong tonight.
He doesn't fully understand why it feels like something was lost. Nothing happened. He sat on the porch steps. He said a true thing. His phone rang and he answered it and went inside. These are all normal, ordinary, unremarkable actions. There is no logical reason for the specific heaviness in his chest right now.
But the thing about Jake is that he's good at reading a field. It's his actual skill, the thing that makes coaches call him a natural not his arm or his footwork but his ability to read what's coming before it arrives. He sees the play before it develops. He knows when he's made a wrong read.
He made a wrong read tonight.
His phone lights up.
He reaches for it before he's decided to.
Penny.
Don't come to my room. Don't knock. Just read this.
He sits up.
There's a file attached. Audio. Eleven seconds.
He puts it to his ear.
Her voice.
Her voice, quiet and private and completely unguarded, saying something he recognizes because he was there, because he heard it the first time in the dark on the living room floor while Lily slept between them and the power was out and for one night the walls came down.
I know what it's like to disappear. I've been doing it so long I can't always remember what I look like when I'm not hiding.
The file ends.
Jake sits completely still.
Someone recorded that night.
Not tonight. That night. Weeks ago. Someone was in that house, or close enough to it, with a device pointed at a conversation that Penny had in the dark when she thought she was safe, and they kept it, and now they sent it to her, and
His brain catches on something cold.
That conversation wasn't just the two of them. That conversation had names in it. It had details. She told him about the note on her back. He told her things he hasn't told anyone. They talked about his mom.
He gets out of bed.
He goes to his door.
He stops.
She said don't knock.
He stands in the hallway with his hand raised and his knuckles one inch from the wood and his heart going at a rate that has nothing to do with football.
He lowers his hand.
He presses his back against the wall next to her door and slides down it and sits on the floor in the dark hallway.
He opens his messages.
He types: I'm outside your door. Not knocking. Just here.
He sends it.
He waits.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
The floor is cold. The hallway is dark. Lily's door is half open the way it always is.
His phone lights up.
One word from Penny.
Why.
He types back without hesitating.
Because you said, " Don't be alone when you hear something bad. That goes both ways.
The three dots appear.
They stay there for a long time.
Long enough that he memorizes the exact pattern of the hallway floorboards. Long enough that his back starts to ache from the wall. Long enough that he almost convinces himself she fell asleep.
Then her door opens.
She doesn't say anything. She looks down at him on the floor his back against the wall, knees up, phone in his hand, still in his practice clothes because he never changed.
She sits down next to him.
Not close. But not far.
She holds her phone out. On the screen is a name. An account. The place the audio file came from.
He reads it.
His jaw tightens.
Because he knows that account. He has seen it before. He knows exactly whose second phone number it belongs to because Marcus told him three weeks ago when he was watching out for Penny's schedule.
He looks at her.
She looks at him.
"You know who it is," she says.
It isn't a question.