Page 53 of Broken By Silence
Not a reunion.
This is a test, and if I fail, she’ll end me before Lottie ever gets the chance to decide for herself.
Inside, the café smells like burnt espresso and salt. The linoleum floor squeaks under our shoes. The place is nearly empty, a few stragglers hunched over mugs, the hum of the ocean bleeding through the thin walls.
I let Lottie slide into a booth by the window, her eyes fixed on the dark horizon, and only when she’s settled do I take the seat across from her.
Claire doesn’t sit. She leans against the counter across the room like a guard dog, her gaze never leaving me, but she orders for us.
Lottie’s hands wrap around the mug the waitress sets down. She doesn’t drink. She just holds it like it might anchor her to this moment, like if she lets go, she’ll drift out with the wavesagain.
My chest aches.
“I need to tell you something,” I say, the words sandpaper in my throat.
Her eyes flicker to mine, exhausted. “What more could there be?”
“I built you a mausoleum.” The words scrape out, heavy. “Stone. Real stone. Quiet. Somewhere they couldn’t touch you, couldn’t reduce you. And every Thursday, I go there, well used to before we were sent here, and I would sit on the cold floor and talk to you. About everything and nothing. About what I wished I could’ve said before you… before you jumped.” My hands shake against the table, but I don’t hide it. “I buried your backpack and shoes there. So it wasn’t empty. So you weren’t just… gone.”
Silence. The only sound is the crash of waves outside.
Finally, her voice—raw, broken. “Why would you do that?”
I should look away. I don’t. “Because I didn’t know how else to keep you.”
Her eyes flash, pain cutting through them like lightning.
“I needed you to matter,” I whisper. “Even if you were dead. Especially if you were dead, if I let you disappear, I would disappear too. And I couldn’t—” My hands shake against the table. I ball them into fists. “I couldn’t survive that.”
Her tears glint in the light, but when she speaks, her voice slices. “Apologies aren’t enough. Graves and promises—none of it is enough. You can’t erase it. You can’t make it untrue.”
Her words hit harder than Archer’s fist. I nod anyway, swallowing the iron taste of shame.
“I know,” I rasp. “I know, Mouse. I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t expect you to look at me and forget everything I remind you of. But I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll spend the rest of my life paying for it, even if I never clear the debt.”
She stares at me, like she’s trying to read the shape of my soul and finding nothing but cracked porcelain.
“Why?” she says finally, the single word full of every small, shattered thing she ever was. “Why all of this, Elijah? Why make a monument when you made my life a nightmare? You bullied me. You made school hell. You were part of it… You told me you liked me broken—why would I believe anything from you now?”
The question lands like a punch.I should have expected it; I deserve it. I look at her, and everything else seems insignificant.
I can feel the heat rise in my throat, the memory-ash of younger, meaner things scraping the inside of me.
I taste bile when I think of the boy I was. I close my eyes because the images come too fast—the blood-soaked clothes, the crowd’s laugh, her on her knees, the way I felt powerful for five seconds before the emptiness came back like a tide.
“We were raised to say yes,” I say, the sentence tasting false even as it leaves my mouth. “Not in words. In examples. In silence. In the way men around me—my father—took, and no one stopped them. You learn what power looks like by watching it used without consequence. You learn that the world will let you. So you push. You test. You take small things to see if anyone will call you on it.”
I swallow. Her jaw works; she looks like she’s trying to piece something that shouldn’t be whole.
“But there’s more,” I say, because there always is more, and the worst part is the part I have to admit. “There’s a sick part of me that liked it. Not the whole time—never the whole time—but sometimes. I’ll be honest, because you deserve honesty: there were moments when seeing you break under my words felt like power. It felt like control. It felt like my hands could keep the rest of the world quiet if I could make you small enough.” I hate the sound of myself saying it. My own voice recoils. “It was how I made myself feel whole, by stealing pieces of you I never had any right to.”
She flinches, like I struck her, and her tears make her eyes shine like broken glass. “You sound just like him,” she whispers, almost to herself, and I don’t argue.
Because she’s right.
I sounded like him.
I acted like him in ways that haunt me.
