HIS TWISTED OBSESSION

Chapter 2

She smiled and picked up. "You're supposed to be in class."

"Probably." He sounded light and easy, nineteen in the way that made her feel old by comparison. "I wanted to check in."

"You wanted to check in or you wanted to ask something?"

A pause. "Can't it be both?"

"Ethan."

"Okay. Ryan is having people over tonight and I wanted to know if..."

"Yes."

"I haven't finished."

"Yes, Ethan. Go. You don't need permission to have a life." She picked a crumb off her jacket. "You're nineteen, not twelve."

"You always say that but then you get that face when I don't tell you things."

"I don't have a face."

"You have a very specific face. It's the one where you don't say anything but your eyebrows do this thing.."

"Goodbye, Ethan."

"I'm serious! Your eyebrows are very communicative..."

She laughed. Really laughed, the brief unguarded kind that happened without permission. A woman on the next bench looked over and smiled without knowing why.

"Go to your thing," Lena said. "Have fun. Don't do anything I'd have to come and collect you for."

"Define the range on that."

"Ethan."

"I'm joking." The teasing dropped slightly, that small shift underneath it, the one that meant he saw her. That he knew about the notepad and the black coffee and the midnight math sessions and felt the weight of his part in it even when she told him not to. "Text me when you get off your shift tonight, yeah? So I know you got home."

It caught her off guard slightly. She recovered fast. "I'm supposed to be the one saying that to you."

"Yeah well." A shrug she could hear. "Text me anyway."

"Okay," she said quietly. "I will."

"Cool." Back to bright. "I'll be home by midnight. Probably."

"Ethan..."

"Midnight. Relax. Love you."

"Love you too."

He hung up.

She sat alone in Bryant Park with her sad sandwich and the pigeon that had decided her bench was public property and let the warmth of that two minutes sit in her chest where it could do some good.

"Ethan is fine" she said quietly to herself. "There's no issue with him and he's going to finish school and get a very good job and all of this will end, no more paying of fees, no more double shifts, at last it will have been worth it."

She believed that.

She had to believe that.

It was the whole point.

Wednesday nights at Barretto's were always the same, always busy enough to keep her moving but it's not crazy enough to make her quit. She'd been there fourteen months. The job worked on muscle memory now, like a song you'd heard too many times. Her body did the work while her mind shifted somewhere quieter.

She liked that about waitressing. The physicality of it. The way it demanded just enough attention to silence everything else.

She was taking drinks to table seven when she felt her phone rang from her apron pocket.

She ignored it.

It buzzed again.

And again.

And again.

Four times. Back to back.

The code.

The drop happened before she'd even consciously registered what she was feeling, that cold falling sensation behind her ribs, the one that only came when something was actually wrong. She and Ethan had set that pattern up years ago. Four buzzes in a row meant this is not a normal call. Pick up right now.

He'd only ever used it twice before.

Both times it had been real.

She deopped the drink at the bar. "please, cover table seven," she said to the bartender, and didn't wait for any reply before she walked out through the kitchen door and into the inner back corridor that smelled of garlic and dish soap.

She picked up on the fifth ring.

"Ethan..."

What came back wasn't words.

It was breathing. The ragged wrecked kind that came after crying had used itself up and left something rawer and worse in its place.

Every part of her went still.

"Ethan." She pressed her back against the wall. Voice low. Steady. "I'm here. Tell me what happened."

A long pause. She heard him trying to pull himself together and not able to say anything.

"Lena." His voice was shaky this time. Hollow in a way she had never heard from him before. "I did something. There was an accident and I...I really didn't mean to, I swear I didn't see him, and I panicked and I drove and I know I shouldn't have, I know—"

"Stop." Firm. Quiet. "Are you hurt?"

"No.."

"Are you somewhere safe?"

"Yes but.."

"Where are you?"

He gave her a cross street. Lower East Side. Twenty minutes away.

"Stay exactly where you are. Don't speak to anyone." She was already moving. "I'm coming."

"Lena..."

"I'm on my way, Ethan. Stay on the line."

She found him on the sidewalk of a street she didn't really know very well, a narrow block of closed storefronts, parked cars and that kind of late night silence that certain parts of a city got after ten. He had his body bent and his elbows wrapped around his knees, his head down and when she got out of the cab and he looked up, she saw his weary face under the streetlight.

She had never seen him look like that.

Something inside of him knew what he has done wrong and he's so scared and afraid merely knowing that.

She sat down beside him. Right there on the cold concrete in her work clothes with the smell of the restaurant still in her hair. She was silent at first. She just sat there beside him until he felt her next to him.

"Tell me," she said. "Everything."

It came out of order, little by little, the way he could pull it out, just to make her understand the moment. He'd borrowed a car from Ryan. He hadn't been drinking, he said that three times, I wasn't drinking Lena, I need you to know I wasn't drinking, he'd just been so tired, distracted, and the street had been dark and the guy stepped out and then

He stopped.

"Then what?" she said quietly.

"Then there was this sound." He pressed his hands over his face. "And I just, I froze. And then I drove. I know I shouldn't have. I just..."

"Ethan." She kept her voice level. "Is he alive?"

The pause lasted long enough to age her.

"I think so. I pulled over down the block and watched. Someone else stopped and called it in. The ambulance came fast." He dropped his hands. Looked at her with eyes that were completely wrecked. "But Lena, I looked him up. His wallet fell and I saw his ID and I looked him up and his name is.."

"Tell me the name."

Ethan told her.

The cold that had been sitting behind her ribs since the four buzzes spread outward and settled into her bones and stayed there.

She knew that name.

You couldn't live in this city and not know that name. It was on campaign billboards on the FDR. It was in the Post and the Times and attached to the kind of power that didn't stay in offices — the kind that reached down into streets and courtrooms and ordinary people's lives and rearranged everything without asking.

Senator Adrian Mercer.

The boy Ethan had hit and left on the asphalt of a Lower East Side street was Senator Adrian Mercer's son.

Lena was quiet for a long moment, trying to figure something out with her small looking head. Around them the city continue to move the way it usaully does, continuous, no difference, and not even concerned with the two people sitting on the ground in the middle of it.

"Lena." Ethan's voice cracked. "Say something. Please."

She breathed in slowly.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay what?"

"We're going to think." She turned and looked at him fully. His face in the streetlight. Nineteen years old. Her whole adult life spent keeping him safe. "Give me a minute."

"I should go to the police.."

"Give me a minute, Ethan."

He went quiet.

She used every second of it.

The options arranged themselves the way they always did when something went wrong, cold and practical and stripped of emotion, because emotion was something she could afford later, alone, when nobody needed her to be the steady one.

Option one: police. Ethan turns himself in. Mercer's people destroy him. A senator's son. A hit and run. Ethan wouldn't survive that.

Option two: run. Not an option. Dismissed before it fully formed.

Option three: find someone with enough power to stand between Ethan and Adrian Mercer.

She almost laughed at that one. Almost.

Where exactly are you going to find that, Lena?

"Alright," she said finally.

Ethan looked at her. "Alright what?"

"We'll get through all of these." She said it the same way she always said I'll figure it out, not a comfort. A decision. Something she was making true by saying it out loud. "I don't know how yet. But we will."

He looked at her the way he always looked at her when she said something like that.

Like she was the only solid thing in the room.

She put her arm around his shoulders and he leaned into it the way he hadn't since he was small and they sat there on the cold New York curb with the city moving loud and indifferent around them and Lena stared ahead and thought and thought and thought...

And somewhere across the city, in offices she had never seen, in the world of men whose names appeared on billboards and on the lips of people who were afraid...

Senator Adrian Mercer's phone was already ringing.