CHAPTER 5: The Card Has My Name and I Never Wrote It
1669 Words
•IVY•
My name continues staring back at me from the paper sitting in my hands as I get lost in my head.
Ivy Calloway.
My stomach tightens.
Then I snap from whatever chaos is happening inside me and shakily unfold the paper.
Underneath are smaller words that make the hairs on the back of my neck rise as I hold my breath and tiny sweat prickles on my skin all the while my insides are cold and screaming to be let free.
For the one he left unfinished.
The words don’t make sense. They don’t really have to, but they’re still enough to knock the air out of me.
Beneath them sits a symbol. Two curved lines crossing through a circle, drawn in an ink so dark that it looks wet even though it’s dry under my thumb.
I drag my thumb across it.
I don’t know what it means.
But I do know exactly what my body wants anyway.
And what my body wants is for me to get the living hell out of this place.
So, I run.
My hands are shaking so bad that I miss his contact twice before I finally hit it.
Come on.
Come on.
Please answer.
The phone barely finishes its fourth ring when he answers.
“Ivy?”
“I need you to come here.” My voice cracks, and I hate that he has to hear me in the middle of a panic. “Right now.” The words continue tumbling over each other. “Please. I need you to come here.”
“What happened?” His tone changes immediately. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
Am I? I don’t know.
“I… there’s a card.” I pause and take a slow breath. “I blacked out.” The admission burns my tongue and throat and makes me cringe. “I don’t know for how long. But what I do know is that I woke up somewhere I don’t recognize. And that there was a card with my name written on it. Trust me when I say this… I didn’t write it. And I also don’t know what it means.” My words dissolve into another shaky breath. “So please.” I take another pause. “I’m begging you to please come.”
“Where are you?”
“My apartment,” I say immediately, pressing a hand against my forehead. “Please just… please hurry.”
“I’m already moving.” He says without hesitating. “Lock your doors.” His voice hardens. “And don’t open it for anyone except me.”
“Okay.”
“Ivy.” He takes a pause. “Breathe.”
I nod before realizing that he can’t actually see it. “Okay.”
I hang up and go to lock my door. I make sure to click the lock three times, before I slide down until I’m sitting on the floor with my back pressed against it.
Because if I stand… I think I’ll fall.
So I do what I know how to do best. I count. Because anything right now is better than thinking.
A knock lands on my door from the other side twelve minutes later. I know because I counted every one.
“It’s me,” he says through the door.
I w up from my position on the floor and don’t even bother checking the peephole, even though I’m very much aware that I should. Instead, I unlock the door so fast it bangs against the wall.
Callum stands there.
He’s barely breathing. No wait. He’s not breathing hard at all. How’s that even possible? There’s no way in this goddamn earth that he could have made it across town that quickly. I should probably ask him how he made it that quickly but I think better of it because I don’t think I have room in my head right now to hold that thought.
“Show me.” He says. Not even a hello or a are you okay.
I hand him the card.
The moment it touches his fingers, he goes still. Not still in the sense that tense or surprised. But still in a way that is worse than any idea I would have easily thought of. It’s the kind of stillness that seems as though the ground just disappeared beneath his feet.
“Callum.”
His eyes stay on the card.
“Give me a second.” His voice comes out, sounding different than I’ve ever heard it.
It sounds so rough as if it’s been dragged over broken glass.
“Callum,” I call his name again as fear starts crawling higher into my throat. “You’re scaring me.”
“I know.” He says, closing his eyes for a heartbeat. “I just…” His fingers tighten around the card. “I need a second.”
My eyes catch another line of writing in the paper. It’s a name. I hadn’t noticed that there was another name on it earlier.
“Who’s Elias?”
His head jerks up fast enough to make me step back as his eyes stare directly into mine. Piercing it, and making my skin go hot.
“I didn’t say that name.”
“You didn’t have to,” I say, the lie slipping out of my mouth before I can think about it. “It’s written there.” I swallow hard. “I saw it before I called you.”
Why did I just lie? I have absolutely no idea
It could maybe be because I need him to stop hiding, or maybe because I need him to say it. Out loud.
“Callum.” I say again, my voice dropping a tad bit lower “Who is he?”
He sets the card on the counter carefully, like if he continues touching it, it might burn him.
“He’s supposed to be dead.” He says quietly,
The room feels smaller.
“What?”
“I watched him die.” He takes a pause like he wants every single one of his words to land separately. “I was there.” His gaze drifts back to the card. “And I don’t understand how he’s still writing your name.”
Nothing he says fits inside my head because what does he mean that a dead person wrote my name on a piece of paper?
“Callum, what are you even talking about?” The questions spill out before I can catch them. “You’re not making any sense. Who is he to me? Why will a dead man be writing to me?” I say shaking my head in denial and refusal. “Why—” He stops me halfway.
“Ivy.” His hands close around my shoulders hard enough that I know I’ll feel it tomorrow and it’s going to leave a bruise. But I don’t pull away. I can’t move because his face is inches from mine, doing something that I’ve never seen it do in the short time I’ve known him. It looks just as if something has cracked open inside him. Something that’s far from panic and close to fear and grief that’s old enough to have settled deep into the bones.
“The blackouts.” His voice barely rises above a whisper. “The blood.” He pauses. “The photos.”
Ice slides through my stomach as my breath catches.
“How the heck do you know about the photos?”
His eyes close only for a second. And when they open again, they’re pleading.
“I need you to listen to me right now. Please.”
“No.” I shake my head. “No more pieces.”
No more half answers.
“Talk to me! I need you to speak to me, Callum!” My voice rises so high that it shocks the both of us as I raise my hand higher and cup the two sides of his jaw in them.
I shake my head and pout my mouth. “Please talk to me.”
He takes in a sharp breath. “He’s the reason.” He pauses and takes in a deep breath. “All of it.” Then another. “Everything that’s been happening to you for the last three years…” His grip on me loosens slightly. “It starts with him.”
The words refuse to settle in my head, so I just stare at him. I need more answers.
“Then say his name properly,” I hear my own voice shaking. “Say it like it means something.”
For a long moment, he just looks at me. His hands are still on my shoulders, and his face is close enough now that I can see the exact moment something in him breaks open, like he finally decided that he’s going to stop trying to hold a door shut.
“Elias.” He says quietly. “His name is Elias.”
The apartment falls wrongly silent as if the walls are also holding their breaths alongside me.
“He’s supposed to be dead.” He says it again. But softer this time and almost to himself. “I watched him die.” Confusion ties tighter inside my chest. “I don’t understand how he’s still writing your name.”
I open my mouth to ask him the questions that are crowded in my throat. To ask what this means for me, what any of this means, the unfinished, the symbol, the card that a dead man might have written with the intention of me seeing it. But none of it comes out.
Because over his shoulder in the black glass of my apartment window, I catch my own reflection.
I freeze.
My eyes are no longer gray. They’re completely black.
For one full second, nothing but eyes full of darkness— with no white left to them— stares right back at me.
- Writer
