Page 67 of A Series of Rooms
“Do you want more?” Ellis asked.
Jonah swallowed, feeling the immediate difference in the reflex, and shook his head. He sat the cup down on the plastic tray beside his bed and watched as Ellis lowered himself back into the chair.
“So, it’s just over,” Jonah said, strained. “Just like that. He’s dead, and after all this time, I’m just supposed to...” He blinked, realizing he had no idea how to end that sentence. “What happens now?” It came out in a whisper.
He hated having to ask, hated the uncertainty in his own voice, but the fear was creeping in quickly behind the realization. In many ways, Jonah was back at square one. The monster was dead, but that didn’t change the fact that Jonah was still alone in the world, without a dime to his name.
“The house is shut down,” Ellis said, confirming his suspicion. “The rest of the residents will have to work out their individual cases with the courts, but most of them have family they can stay with.”
“How nice for them.”
“Is there anyone you can call?” Ellis asked, more gently than Jonah had ever heard him. His pity added insult to injury.
“If I had anyone, I wouldn’t have ended up here in the first place.”
“Your parents. . . ?”
Are the reason I was on the street at seventeen,he didn't say. Instead, he shook his head.
Ellis nodded, his expression carefully blank. “Look,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend I can understand what you’re going through, or the situation you’re coming from, but you’re going to need a support system in place while you get back on your feet.”
“And if I don’t have it?”
Ellis leaned forward, his eyes intent. “I’m not dumping you back on the street, Jonah. We will figure something out,” he said. Then, after a pause, “I owe you that much, at least.”
Jonah looked away, biting down on the urge to tell him he didn’t want anything from him, of all people. It was terrifying to find himself in a position, once again, where he couldn’t afford to turn down help—in whatever form it came.
“I’m going to give you a minute alone to process everything, but I’m not leaving the hospital.” He rose from his chair, but paused before he walked away. He pulled the cell phone from his pocket and laid it on the tray next to the bed. “I’ll be back,” he said. “If there’s someone in your corner, Jonah, I suggest you call them.”
The silence left behind in his absence was too heavy.
Jonah stared down the phone on the table like an insult. He thought about all the possibilities that could come from dialing his mother’s number, telling her he was in the hospital, that he had almost died, that he was coming off the worst year of his life and had nowhere to go.
She had never been a cold woman. She had cried, the day the pastor sat them down at their kitchen table and discussed Jonah’s “options.” She had screamed the first time Jonah’s father put his hands on him. Despite everything, Jonah still believed that she loved him, even if it wasn’t in the way that he needed, or the way she was supposed to.
Somehow, that made it hurt more—the idea that if he called her now, he would hear her tears on the other end of the line, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
Maybe he couldn’t avoid that conversation forever, but he could at least give himself the grace to put it off for now.
If there’s anyone in your corner,Ellis had said.
In the entirety of his life, Jonah had only ever memorized three phone numbers: his mother’s, his own, and the one he had carried around in his pocket for weeks.
Shepard might have stolen the note from him, but Jonah had committed the digits to memory the very first night he got them.
He picked up the phone.
CHAPTER 30
Liam
The Chicago police station was draped in tacky Christmas ornaments, faded from decades of living in storage between winters. Their presence added more melancholy than the intended holiday cheer, but Liam found that to be a more appropriate setting for the mood anyway.
Time had blended since the events of the dinner party. He could only string together a loose timeline: his mother scraping him off of the Bakers’ garage floor, holding him in the backseat of his father’s SUV, and gently rubbing blood stains off of his knuckles under warm water. She’d had a lot of questions, naturally, and Liam had tried to answer them as best he could, but the majority of his time had been split between inconsolable crying and drifting into fits of exhausted, restless sleep.
Now, the sun was golden-bright outside the single window of the precinct. Liam’s mother was beside him; tense and strung tight with an anxiety that mirrored her son’s in theform of a bouncing knee and rigid shoulders, but she was there. Something in Liam hadn’t quite expected that, nor was he prepared for the warmth it brought in the midst of so much cold.
It hadn’t been an easy decision to come here, and he still wasn’t sure it was the right one. His eyes flicked toward the exit every few minutes, weighing the option of running away against staying.
