Vows of Vengeance

Chapter 18

His voice had that quality.

The specific one I had heard only once before, the night he called me back from the hospital corridor after the nurse had already delivered the news and I had already called him and he had gone there anyway, unable to stay in his apartment alone with it, calling me from a payphone near the entrance because his phone had died and he needed to hear my voice and could barely produce his own. That quality. The one that lived underneath his usual warmth and only surfaced when something had stripped everything above it away.

"Leo," I said. "Tell me."

He exhaled slowly on the other end of the line, the exhale of someone steadying themselves before something difficult, and I sat very still at my desk and waited with the patience of someone who understood that rushing him would only make it harder.

"I'm okay," he said first, which told me immediately that whatever came next involved a reason to say that. People who were truly fine did not lead with I'm okay. They led with whatever they called to say. I'm okay was a preamble. A cushion placed before impact.

"What happened," I said.

"There was an accident. Earlier tonight. On Cresswell Road, coming back." A pause. "A car came through the intersection while I had the light. It clipped me. I went down pretty hard."

I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them and kept my voice entirely level. "Where are you now."

"Student medical centre," he said. "It's not serious. Bruised ribs, some road rash on my arm. They wanted to keep me for observation for a couple of hours but I'm fine, Aria. I promise."

I believed the medical assessment. I did not yet believe the fine.

"Why are you only calling now," I said, keeping the weight of what I actually meant out of my voice.

"I tried earlier," he said. "Multiple times. Your number wasn't going through. Mara was with me so I wasn't alone, she stayed for a while, but when she left I tried again and it connected." A pause, quieter than the others. "I just wanted to hear your voice."

Something moved through me that I set aside immediately because it needed to be set aside. The distance that had grown between us since Evelyn died, the quiet erosion of closeness that neither of us had named or addressed directly, contracted in that moment into something I felt with a physical specificity that surprised me. We had not spoken properly in weeks. Not since a brief call in which we had discussed practical things and avoided every significant one, the way we had both learned to communicate in the months since the funeral, efficiently and at a careful surface level that protected both of us from the larger conversation we were not yet ready to have.

And now here was his voice, stripped of everything he usually kept on it, and here was I, sitting at a desk covered in shorthand notes from an evening that felt very far away suddenly.

"I'm here," I said simply.

"I know." His voice settled slightly, the acute shakiness of the first moments giving way to something more tired and more human. "How was your evening."

"It was fine," I said, which was the most compressed and dishonest summary I had ever produced, and something in the way I said it made him go quiet in the way he went quiet when he was reading between lines he had not been shown. Leo had always done that. Even as a child he had possessed the particular sensitivity of someone who felt the shape of what was not being said as clearly as what was.

"Are you okay," he said.

"I'm fine," I said. "Tell me about Mara."

He accepted the redirect with the ease of someone who understood that I would tell him what I needed to tell him when I was ready and not before. "She's on my course," he said. "Architecture. We were heading back together when it happened. She stayed the whole time, wouldn't leave until she was sure I was alright." Something in his voice shifted to something warmer and less shaken. "She's good people."

"She sounds it," I said, and meant it.

"She kept telling the medical staff what to do," he said, with a small laugh that carried the specific quality of someone who had been frightened and was now on the other side of it. "They didn't appreciate it but she wasn't wrong about any of it."

I let myself hear that laugh properly, the warmth of it, the specific texture of my brother finding something genuinely amusing from inside a situation that had frightened him, and I thought about how long it had been since I had heard him laugh like that, unguarded and real, without the careful quality that grief had added to everything he produced since Evelyn died.

"How long are they keeping you," I said.

"They said I can leave in an hour if the observation results are clear." A pause. "Which they will be. I feel fine. Mostly embarrassed."

"Embarrassed," I said.

"I went down in front of about four people on the pavement," he said. "One of them tried to help me up and I told him I was fine and then couldn't actually stand for about thirty seconds."

"Leo."

"I was fine. Eventually."

We stayed on the phone for another few minutes, not saying anything significant, just existing in the particular companionship of two people who had grown up inside the same loss and knew how to be quiet together when quiet was what the moment needed. When he said he was going to try to sleep I told him to call me in the morning and he said he would and I believed him and we said goodnight and I set the phone down on the desk.

The dinner sat on one side of my mind and Leo sat on the other and between them was the specific exhaustion of someone who had been performing composure for an entire evening and had then received a phone call that made composure feel like the wrong language entirely.

I thought about the distance that had opened between us since Evelyn died. Not conflict. Something quieter. Leo pulling slightly inward and away in the unconscious manner of someone who had learned to associate closeness with eventual loss. I had felt it and had not addressed it because addressing it required a stillness I had not been able to locate since I walked into the Blackwell building with my father's ghost and my mother's letter and six years of grief sharpened into something I could finally use. I had been so focused on what I was doing that I had not properly noticed what I was allowing to quietly disappear.

I opened my notebook and looked at the notes from the evening and then closed it again.

Whatever the Blackwell empire was building toward could wait until morning.

I went to bed earlier than I had in weeks and lay in the dark and let the evening move through me without managing it, the dinner and River's dropped performance and Caden's tone and Ethan's three words and Dominic's smile and the undersecretary leaving early, all of it moving through the darkness of my room like weather passing.

And then, at the edge of sleep, a thought arrived that I had been keeping at a careful distance since Leo said the words Cresswell Road.

I had visited Leo at university three months before Evelyn died. I had walked with him from the library to his accommodation. I knew that route the way I knew things I had been shown once and retained completely.

Cresswell Road was not on it.

It had never been on it.

Leo had no reason to be on Cresswell Road tonight.

And the car that came through the intersection while he had the light had not stopped.