I said his name the way you say a prayer – not to anyone, not to any god, just to the air, just to the room, as if saying it could keep him alive across whatever distance separated us.
I was already moving. Phone in hand, feet finding the floor, body acting on the ancient, reptilian programming that bypasses thought and operates on pure, undiluted need. My fingers hit redial before my brain had finished processing the video. Ring. Ring. Ring. Nothing. Voicemail – Rowan’s voice, casual and warm, the voice of a healthy person who didn’t know he was being used as a “leave a message” placeholder for his own disappearance.
I called again. Ring. Ring. Ring. Nothing.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no, no-“
Clothes. I needed clothes. I looked down and realized I was still in the high school t-shirt and torn sweatpants, and for one hysterical second I thought: I can’t go save my brother in sweatpants with a hole in the knee. Then the second passed, because my brother was coughing up blood on a floor, and fashion had officially ceased to be a category my brain recognized.
I grabbed the nearest things – sneakers, a jacket, didn’t matter what – and ran. Not walked. Ran. Down the hallway, my bare feet slapping the marble, my heart doing something arrhythmic and dangerous behind my ribs. The apartment blurred past me – the expensive art, the expensive furniture, the expensive emptiness – and then Sable was there, emerging from her room like she’d sensed the seismic shift in the building’s emotional atmosphere.
“Marlowe – what-“
“Rowan.” One word. It carried everything. “I need you to drive. Now. His house. Please, Sable. Please.”
She didn’t ask questions. Didn’t need context or explanation or the full narrative arc. She saw my face and understood that whatever she was looking at was not a woman requesting a ride but a woman trying to outrun a death.
“Keys,” she said.
“I don’t-“
“I have them. Let’s go.”
We ran. Down the stairs because the elevator was too slow and waiting for anything felt like complicity with whatever was happening to Rowan. Through the lobby, past the doorman, into the night air that hit my skin like a slap. The car was where we’d left it, and Sable was behind the wheel with the engine running before I’d finished buckling my seatbelt.
She drove the way people drive when they understand that the person beside them is unraveling and the only thing holding them together is forward motion. Fast. Focused. The city became a smear of light and shadow outside the windows, and I sat in the passenger seat with my phone pressed against my thigh, calling Rowan every thirty seconds and getting voicemail every thirty seconds, and each unanswered ring was a nail driven into something I couldn’t name.
“Have you called Caelum?” Sable asked. Her voice was careful. The question was a minefield and she knew it.
The name hit me like a fist. Caelum. My husband. The man with the resources and the connections and the money to fix anything – the man who’d promised to take care of Rowan’s treatment as part of the deal that had bought my life. I should call him. Logic said call him. Every practical instinct said call him.
But the lobby was still burning in my mind. The receptionist’s voice: he doesn’t have a wife. The glass doors closing. The long, silent drive home.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Marlowe-“
“I can’t call him, Sable.” My voice broke on the last word, and I heard it break, and I didn’t try to fix it. “Not after today. Not after he-” I stopped. Swallowed the rest. “I’ll handle this myself.”
Sable looked at me for one long moment. Then she nodded and pressed the accelerator harder, and the engine roared, and the city blurred faster, and we hurtled through the night toward my brother.
The house appeared in the headlights like a ghost. Our house – the ivy-covered walls, the cracked driveway, the garden where Mom’s rosemary still grew – except it was dark. Every window black. No porch light. No sign of life. The absence of light was a language I didn’t want to translate.
I was out of the car before it stopped. My feet hit the pavement and I ran – really ran, the kind of running you do when you’re not exercising but escaping, the kind where your lungs burn and your legs scream and you don’t slow down because slowing down means acknowledging the possibility that you’re too late.
“Rowan!” I hit the front door with my fists. “Rowan, open up!”
Silence. The thick, suffocating kind. The kind that lives in rooms where something has gone wrong.
I pushed the door. It swung inward – unlocked, which meant either Rowan hadn’t bothered or Rowan hadn’t been able – and I was inside, and the house smelled the same as it always did, laundry detergent and old wood and the ghost of Mom’s cooking, and the familiarity of it was so violent that I gasped.
I took the stairs two at a time. My old room – why my room? why not his? – the door was ajar, and I pushed it open, and-
Rowan.
On the floor. My floor. The floor where I’d sat and read and studied and cried and grown up. He was lying on his side, his knees pulled toward his chest, and there was blood – on his lips, his chin, his hands, a dark pool spreading on the carpet like a shadow with its own intentions. His face was gray. Not pale – gray. The color of concrete. The color of things that are no longer receiving what they need to function.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.