Chapter 8 – Sleep, Ivy
636 Words
That was when my phone rang.
I knew the ringtone before I had unlocked the screen. I had set it years ago, with hope, the way you put a name to a face you want to recognize at the door.
*Auston. *
Silas did not turn around. He stayed at the door, half in the corridor, half in the room, with the same absurd patience he had used on the marble.
I pressed the green circle.
I did not say hello.
"Where the *f**k* are you."
The volume of his voice through the speaker was loud enough that I knew Silas could hear it. He did not move.
"Ivy. *Answer me.* Where are you."
"Not at the penthouse."
"I can *see* that. Do you know what you have done tonight? Do you have any idea — Tom has been on the phone with me for three hours, the studio is asking what happened on the carpet, Victoria is *furious*, and her father wants to know whether the *assistant problem* is — "
He cut himself off. The pause was the closest he had come to remembering, in months, that I might be a person.
"Where are you, Ivy."
Not *are you all right. *
Not *what happened to your hand. *
Not *are you safe. *
I held the phone to my ear for one more second, listening to him breathe.
I had kept track of these omissions privately for a year. Tonight, there was no privacy left for them.
"One hundred," I said.
"What?"
"Nothing."
I ended the call.
The phone vibrated in my hand before the screen had finished going dark.
*Auston. *
Instead of picking up, I opened his contact card with my right thumb and scrolled — very slowly — to the line at the bottom.
**BLOCK THIS CALLER. **
I tapped it.
A small system message confirmed the action with the bureaucratic indifference of any operating system performing a small mercy at scale. *Calls and messages from this contact will not reach you. *
Then, before I could be reached by anyone else, I held down the side button and turned the phone off completely.
The screen went black in my hand and stayed black.
I held it face-down on the duvet for a long moment, palm flat over the screen the way Renate had held my injured hand. The ceiling did not move. The hum under the architecture did not change. Somewhere far below me a clock did not strike anything.
When I lifted my eyes, Silas was exactly where he had been. He had not moved during the call. He had not pretended not to listen. He had not used the silence afterward to fill in anything I had not asked him to.
His gaze met mine.
"You said *one hundred, *" he said. "What is one hundred."
I looked at him.
The truth had a different weight in this room than it would have had in any other.
"A number I have been keeping for a year," I said. "I just stopped."
For the briefest fraction of a second something happened in his face that was not, I would learn later, what most people would have called expression. It was closer to a tab being saved.
"All right," he said.
He stepped backward over the threshold. His hand rose, just once, in the smallest version of a goodnight a man like him could allow himself.
"Sleep, Ivy."
The door closed without sound.
I lay in the dark with my phone face-down on the duvet and listened to my own heart slow. The wallet alert did not fire again. The Auston ringtone did not return. The hundred did not need to be counted because I had already passed it.
What came next was here.
Now it had a name.
- Writer
