Everyone's But Hers

Chapter 9: The Door

Elena was still staring at her phone when Nessa appeared in the kitchen doorway.

"You've been holding that thing for twelve minutes."

"I'm aware."

"You haven't moved."

"Also aware."

Nessa walked to the counter and poured herself a glass of water like Elena wasn't currently having a quiet crisis three feet away. That was Nessa. Eighteen years old and somehow the most grounded person in the apartment.

"Is it the shoot?" Nessa asked.

"No."

"Is it Theo?"

"No."

"Is it him?"

Elena finally looked up. "Why would it be him?"

"Because you watched his TV thing on your laptop with the door closed, which means you didn't want me to see your face while you watched it." Nessa took a slow sip. "And now you've been holding your phone for twelve minutes. So."

Elena set the phone face-down on the counter. "He texted me."

Nessa set her glass down very carefully. "What did it say."

"I'm coming to find you."

The kitchen was quiet for a beat. Outside, the rain had picked up. It hit the window above the sink in long, diagonal streaks, and the sound of it filled the space where neither of them spoke.

Then Nessa said, "Okay. What do you want to do?"

Not: what are you going to do. Not: you should or you have to or you can't let him. What do you want to do. It was the question Elena's mother would have asked if she were still alive, and the fact that her eighteen-year-old sister had learned it without being taught was one of the few things that still managed to undo her.

"I don't know," Elena said. "Nothing. I want to do nothing."

"That's also a choice."

"He's going to show up."

"Maybe."

"He's Kai Voss. He doesn't send a text like that and then go to sleep."

Nessa picked up her glass again. "Do you want me to answer the door if he knocks?"

Elena laughed. It came out wrong, too dry, not quite funny. "Absolutely not."

"Okay. Do you want me to stay up?"

She thought about it. She thought about being alone in this apartment with whatever was coming, with three years of careful distance and the two seconds on that screen where his voice had cracked on a word she once asked him never to say in public and he had said it anyway, to forty million people, because she wasn't there to stop him.

"Yeah," Elena said. "Stay up."

They moved to the couch. Nessa put something on television that neither of them watched. The rain got louder. Elena pulled her knees up and looked at her phone twice without unlocking it, then put it under the couch cushion so she'd have to try to reach it.

At eleven forty-two, someone knocked.

Nessa's head turned.

Elena didn't move.

The knock came again. Not frantic. Not the way a desperate person knocks. Measured, like a man who had decided something and was patient enough to wait.

"Elena." His voice came through the door, low and slightly rain-wet. "I know you can hear me."

Nessa looked at her. Elena looked at the television.

"I'm not going to say anything out here." A pause. "I'm not going to perform anything. I just want to talk."

"He sounds like a person," Nessa murmured.

"He's very good at that," Elena said.

Another pause from the other side of the door. Then: "I know what I did. I'm not here to argue about whether it happened. I know it happened."

That was new.

She had played this conversation in her head maybe two hundred times over three years. Sometimes she was sharp and controlled. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she said the things she had never said and he understood them and it still didn't fix anything. But in none of those versions did he lead with I know it happened.

He always explained in her head. He minimized. He said there were things she didn't know about the deal, the label, the pressure, the way the music industry worked. He was reasonable and plausible and she couldn't argue with him and she hated him for it.

Not tonight.

"Just talk," he said. "Five minutes. You can time it."

She unfolded herself from the couch.

Nessa said, "Elena."

"I know."

"That's not me saying don't. That's me saying I'll be right here."

She crossed the room. She put her hand on the doorknob and held it there for a second, not because she was afraid and not because she was softening. She just needed one second where she was still the only person in this space. The last second before whatever came next.

She opened the door.

He looked like himself and like someone she didn't recognize at the same time, which was the most dangerous combination possible. Still the face. Still the shoulders. Still the specific way he stood when he wasn't performing, weight slightly back, like he was always a half-step away from the door. His hair was wet from the rain. His jacket was dark with it across the shoulders.

He looked at her and didn't say anything for a moment.

Then: "Hi."

"You have four minutes and forty seconds," Elena said.

Something moved across his face. Almost a smile and then not.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, I'll take it."

She stepped back. She did not invite him in, but she left the door open, and that was the most he was getting.

He stepped over the threshold and stopped just inside. Nessa was visible from the couch, not pretending to watch television anymore, watching him with the direct uncomplicated assessment of someone who had grown up hearing a name the way you grow up hearing a weather warning.

Kai glanced at her. "Hey."

Nessa said nothing.

He looked back at Elena. "I watched the clip."

"Of yourself."

"Of what Sloane showed them. The framing. The original credit, and then the version that went out." He stopped. Started again. "I didn't know what she changed. I need you to understand that I did not know."

"Four minutes ten seconds."

"I know you don't believe me."

"I didn't say that."

He went still.

"I believe you didn't know," Elena said. "I also believe you didn't ask. There's a difference, and it's the part that matters."

The rain filled the silence. Somewhere in the apartment Nessa had set her glass down on the coffee table with a quiet click that was the only sound in the room.

Kai looked at her the way he used to look at her when he couldn't find the right words and didn't want to say the wrong ones. Like he was measuring the air between them for weight.

"You're right," he said. "I didn't ask. I was twenty-three and terrified and Sloane handed me everything I'd ever wanted, and I took it without looking at what I was taking it from." He paused. "That's not an excuse. That's what happened."

Elena said nothing.

"I want to fix it."

"Fix it."

"Credit. Public. Whatever it takes. A statement, a new release with your name on it, I don't care what Sloane says about the timing, I don't care about any of it. You deserve the credit and I want to give it back."

She had imagined him saying that. She had imagined it on bad nights when the work was slow and the rent was tight and she opened a streaming app and heard the opening bars of a song she had photographed into existence in a shoebox apartment on a Tuesday afternoon. She had imagined it and cried about it and gotten angry at herself for imagining it.

It didn't feel the way she thought it would feel.

"Time," she said.

He blinked.

"Five minutes." She moved back toward the door. "You should go."

He didn't argue. That was the thing. She was braced for it, braced for the version where he pushed, where he used the old pull between them like a lever. He didn't.

He walked to the door. Stopped with one hand on the frame and looked back at her once.

"I'll figure out the credit," he said. "That's not negotiable and it's not contingent on anything. It's just something I should have done three years ago."

Then he left.

Elena closed the door. Pressed her back against it. Stared at the ceiling until the footsteps in the hall disappeared and the building was quiet again.

Nessa's voice came from the couch. "He's taller than I expected."

"He's always been that tall."

"Also." A pause. "He didn't try to make you forgive him."

"No," Elena said. "He didn't."

She slid down the door until she was sitting on the floor. Outside, the rain kept going. And somewhere in the quiet underneath it, in the part of her chest she had spent three years putting walls around, something she had almost forgotten was there turned over once, slowly, like a key in a lock she thought she'd lost.

She pressed her fingers to her sternum.

She did not move for a long time.

And she did not let herself think about the reason it wasn't that simple. The reason five minutes and a promise and a wet jacket in a doorway didn't touch the real thing. The thing he still didn't know. The thing Sloane had made sure of.

The thing Elena carried every single day, a small weight and a whole life, three blocks away at her neighbor Mrs. Carla's place, asleep right now in a bed with a yellow pillowcase.

She pressed harder.

She would not think about it tonight.

Tonight she would sit on the floor and breathe and let herself feel the edge of something she had no name for yet.

Tomorrow she would remember all the reasons why.