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John’s lost count of the amount of times he’s dialed Lisa’s number only to stop short of the last digit. He doesn’t know what he’d say to her if he did finally work up the courage to make the call. Not for lack of trying, either, he’s rehearsed it so many times that it’s ingrained in his memory, but it always falls flat.
He’s spent his entire life running, fleeing from one sinking ship to the next in a growing laundry list of bad choices. When he came home from school one rainy Thursday to find his mother sprawled out on the kitchen floor, her hair spilling out in ringlets against the tile and her skin cold to the touch, he ran. When his pastor recommended for him to begin his path to priesthood at the local Seminary, he threw himself into his studies day and night, trying to find comfort and answers. And for the painful year after what happened in the Martin family home that he’d spent so long trying to forget, he still hadn’t stopped running from that.
But Lisa, the one who’s been with him for so long through it all, the one who held him through all of the nights he’d wake up screaming at the orphanage, the one who picked him up and took him home when he was discharged from Yale Psychiatric, the one who always gave him strength and courage when he needed it. He doesn’t want to run from her, not ever again.
He takes a deep breath before turning to dial the number again and holds it as it rings. The dial tone comes out as almost mockingly loud in the otherwise silent room and he counts the rings in his head with each passing second.
It rings once, twice, three times. He couldn’t blame her if she didn’t pick up at such an awful hour of the night, but the thought of her not picking up scares him in a way that he thought he was long since over. It rings for a fourth time and then there’s a soft click.
There’s a muffled groan from the line before Lisa mutters a groggy “Hello?” She clears her throat and there’s quiet shuffling like she’s sitting up in bed. “Hello?”
John lets out the breath he’s been holding in and opens his mouth only to find he doesn’t know what to say. It’s so like him in the most frustrating way, failing to act at the worst possible moment.
“Is anyone there? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
He swallows the lump in his throat and tries again. “Um, hi, Lisa.”
There’s a beat of silence followed by the sound of more rustling on the other end. “John? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Lisa laughs nervously, almost in disbelief. “Oh my God, John, where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you. I’ve been worried sick. Are you okay? Cough if you need help and I’ll drop everything and search to the ends of the Earth for y-”
“I’m okay, Lisa, I promise. You don’t need to worry about me.” It falls pathetically flat of being reassuring, but he’s not sure what else he can offer.
“What happened back there? At the Daycare, I mean. I… I went looking for you there, at your house, wherever I thought you might be, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. And, God, it was a bloodbath there. I was so worried that you… you know, didn’t make it out.”
“I’m sorry. It’s… hard to explain everything over the phone. Can I see you?” He waits a moment, feeling his heart rattle against his ribcage like a prisoner begging to be let out. “I need to see you,” he says, more sure of this than he has been of anything in a long time.
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. Hold on.” He can hear her getting out of bed, hurriedly shoving aside her covers and throwing on her coat. “Where are you?”
“You remember the house that my father left me when he passed? On the outskirts of town?”
“Um, yeah, I think so. The one by the river, right?”
He leans back against the wall, smiling into the receiver. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
He still remembers the day he first stepped foot in the house. After not hearing from his father in years—even after his mother passed and he was left all alone at age 7—his death still managed to flip John’s world on its axis. He’d already left once and John had made peace with that fact, and then he was gone forever, leaving once again. Lisa had come with him to sort through his father’s things to figure out which things to keep, which ones to throw away, and which things to burn.
She never judged him for grieving over someone he’d never known and now would never have the chance to know. She just waited with him for him to be ready to talk about it and for that, he would forever be grateful.
“Okay. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in the morning.”
And when John says thank you, it’s for so much more.
—
Sleepless nights have become a terrible bad habit for John. First born out of necessity—it’s hard to find the time to rest when every morning might be the day the world collapses in on itself—and then sustained because what else is there to do? Even if he tried to close his eyes and get a full night’s rest, he’d still see that house in his dreams. So he sits by the window until the early hours of the morning, watching the first breath of the newly risen sun filter in through the paper-thin curtains and the shadows dance across the floor.
It’s an absolution of sorts, the closest he figures he’ll ever get to peacefulness again. There is no bounding heart behind his ribcage threatening to burst free; there’s no hyperventilating breaths trying to take in as much air as possible; there’s no demons with gnashing teeth that want to rend his skin from bone. It’s just him alone in a world he’s spent so long trying to distance himself from, afraid that he might break it somehow.
Haunted is a good word for it, he figures. The four-fold chambers of his heart are more haunted than any old mansion with doors and cabinets that slam shut on their own could ever hope to be. It’s a gentle pain, a wound that bleeds and oozes from time to time and never truly closes. A pain he figures he can live with, eventually. Maybe not today or anytime soon, but someday he’ll grow around the pain and learn to love the haunted house his body has become again.
Because even if the lights flicker and fail when he needs them the most and the halls creak and whine, it’s always been him at the end of the day. His oldest friend and a place he can always spend the night.
When John finally gets close to dozing off, there’s a knock on the door that chases away even the faintest thought of sleep. He stands a bit too quickly, bones aching and protesting after the hours of stillness and there’s a terrible crick in his neck, but he’s never been happier for an interruption.
The thought that he should try to make himself look presentable in any way comes too much like an afterthought. He dusts off his shirt, tries to straighten out any wrinkles that he can, and combs a hand through his messy tangle of hair that’s probably three months overdue for a trim. Oh well, she’s seen him looking much less passable, anyway.
There’s a moment after the front door swings open where they both stand there in the doorway, only illuminated by the porch light and stare at each other and nothing else in the world matters. In an instant, her arms drape around his shoulders, pulling her heart so close to his that they beat in sync. Her nose bumps into the crook of his neck and they fight for space that isn’t there.
When they finally part, Lisa presses her hands firmly down on his shoulders and shakes him like she’s trying to pull him out of a stupor. “John Thomas Ward, if you ever scare me like that again there will be Hell to pay. With all of the fire and brimstone you can fathom. All of it.”
And John can’t help it, he laughs. It comes out wheezy and breathless and the thought that he doesn’t laugh the same as he did before this all started is both relieving and quietly devastating at the same time.
“Don’t laugh!” She shakes him again, but there’s no bite to it and she’s smiling now as well. “I mean it! I was so worried for you! I didn’t know if you were alive or dead or worse and…”
Lisa shakes her head, sighs, and folds her hands in front of her. “I just… I thought I lost you, John. What happened back there?”
“I’m sorry for scaring you. It’s just-” He swallows hard and tries again- “It’s Amy.”
Lisa’s eyes soften and she reaches for John’s hand to give it a reassuring squeeze. “I’m sorry, John. I know how much you wanted to save her.”
“No, it’s not that. She… survived.”
“What?” Lisa blinks and then looks at him owlishly. “She’s alive?”
“I know it sounds crazy.” He runs the free hand across the back of his neck, feeling the skin stand on end. It’s a phrase he’s gotten too used to saying as of late.
“John, any number of things we’ve seen sound crazy. I think we’re past that at this point. I believe you.”
“Thank you. I don’t know how she did it, but she’s alive. And I knew I had to get her out of there… So, now we’re here. I’ve been… taking care of her as best I can.”
She looks over his shoulder to the empty foyer and purses her lips. “Poor thing. I can’t imagine what she’s been through. At such a young age too… God.”
“Yeah, it’s… Well, it’s bad, but I believe she will get through it. She’s already done with the worst part. And that has to account for something, right?”
“Yeah. I think so.” She nods solemnly. “So, can I come in or are you going to make me stand out in the cold all morning?”
“Oh, sorry!” John takes a step back, welcoming her into the small house. It isn’t much, not nearly what it used to be after they’d sorted most of his father’s stuff and threw it out or put it in storage, but it’s a place to rest his head.
“Got any coffee? I’m exhausted.”
“Only the instant stuff,” he says sheepishly.
“Good enough. I’d take pretty much anything as long as it's got caffeine in it.”
The kitchen is warm and bright from the morning sun and Lisa stands over his shoulder as he sets out the cups and pours hot water over the coffee powder.
“Gotta make sure I don’t mess it up?” John asks as he hands her the cup that ended up having just a smidge more coffee in it once all the boiling water had been portioned out.
“Well,” she smiles into her mug and leans back against the kitchen counter, “I do remember a certain someone—and I’m not going to name names—being banned from kitchen duty back at the orphanage.”
“Oh, please.” He scoffs in disbelief, hiding his comfortable smile behind his own cup. “I wasn’t that bad.”
“Mhm, I guess we just remember things differently,” she offers. And they stand together for a moment, basking in the morning light shining through the window and drinking their coffee that tastes like Heaven on Earth after a full week of sleepless nights. “So, about the girl- Amy… How’s she doing?”
“Where to even start with that?” John shrugs and looks up at the ceiling like he’s waiting for some sort of answer to be spelled out amongst the popcorn pattern. “She’s okay, I think. Or about as good as can be expected considering all the… Well, you know the worst of it. She asked to go back to her old home to say goodbye and…”
“Please don’t tell me you went back there.” And when the guilty look on his face gives him away better than any admission could she says: “Oh my God. I cannot believe you.”
“I think she needed to see one last time but as herself and no one else. It did her a lot of good. At least she got some of that pain out of her system.”
“And what about you? Are you okay? That house holds a lot of weight and unpleasant memories for you too, you know. All the times you’ve gone to that damned house…”
“I know, I know. I’m okay, I promise. I had to do it, Lisa. I couldn’t just look at her, drowning in her grief, and tell her no—tell her that she didn’t get to say goodbye to the house where she lost everything.”
Lisa pauses and sets her empty mug back onto the counter. There’s a moment where she mulls over her words, unsure of whether this is a can of worms she wants to open so soon. “Sometimes, it kills me just how little you care about yourself.”
“Lisa-”
“I could have taken her there, John. If you had just asked me for help, I would have done it. But you get so caught up in trying to save everyone… Who saves you? Isn’t that exhausting?”
He braces his hands against the kitchen counter. “I’m sorry, Lisa.”
The apology almost makes it worse because she’s never wanted an apology from him. Not now, not ever. She sighs and shakes her head because if she told him that he’d probably just apologize again. Always guilty, never knowing what for.
“I remember that night that Molly called me. She said you were in some type of way, being held at Yale Psychiatric… She figured maybe I could get through to you where she couldn’t. And me, being the idiot that I am, I dropped everything and made the drive to Sterling to come and see you. And there you were. Babbling incoherently… Sedated out of your mind. And I was so scared for you, John. I just… I never want to see you like that again.”
“And you won’t have to,” John says and his voice comes out steady, not quite confident but not wavering either. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but I think… It helps having her here. It reminds me that I’m not the only one who went through those things. It was all real and I’m not alone. And you aren’t either.”
“I trust you. I really do, but it’s just-” the words feel painfully bitter in her mouth- “I don’t want to lose you.”
John nods and his hand—calloused and rough now in a way that makes her chest ache because it wasn’t always like this—reaches across the short gap between them.
She leans into him, resting her head against his shoulder. “I need you to promise me something.”
He spares her a sideways glance. “Yeah?”
“I need you to promise that you won’t go back to it. That if Gary, that bastard, ever resurfaces or if someone else takes his place, I need you to say that you won’t put yourself through that again.”
“I…” John breathes in and it catches in his throat. He’d been so sure of himself when he told Father Garcia that he was done with that life, but it was easy to say that now when there was no looming threat on the horizon. Who knows if he could still bring himself to refuse if things changed? “I don’t know if I can promise that, Lisa.”
“When will it be enough, John?” She holds onto his hand tighter. “You’ve given up so much of yourself already. When do you get to be happy?”
“I am happy,” he says, a bit too defensively.
“You look like you’ve not slept in months.” She tries so hard to not look at the scars peeking out from the edge of his sleeve. She looks at the cross necklace around his neck, the coffee stain on his sweater, the dark circles under his eyes, anything, but she keeps coming back to what looks like burn marks running down his arm. They’re new, still red and blistering in some places, something he didn’t have when they talked in her old apartment. She doesn’t even want to know how he got those. Not yet.
“I can be tired and happy.”
“Still as bad of a liar as you were when you were a kid… You know, you could do nothing else, help no one else for the rest of your days and you’d still have done more than enough. For me, for God, for everyone. You’d still have saved me and saved Amy and people that you won’t ever know. That will never change. And I know that if you keep doing this, if you pick up that cross again, it will kill you. And… I think that after all this time, that might just do me in too.”
“Okay,” he says quietly and then louder: “I promise.”
Those two words almost make her burst into tears. It’s like she’s a little kid again, holding onto her one friend in that orphanage for dear life. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“Any more heavy conversations you want to have before breakfast?” John asks.
And Lisa can’t help but laugh. “You are the worst, John Ward.”
“Oh, come on. You know you love me.”
“I do,” she says and he might never know just how much she means it. “You are the absolute worst, you make me worry constantly, and I think you’d walk straight into traffic if you thought it might help someone, but I do love you.”
“Well, when Amy wakes up, there’s a nice diner nearby if you want to get breakfast with us. I think we’ve been there before—when we were moving stuff out of here, I mean.”
“It’s already half past ten. What time does she normally wake up?”
“I’m sure she’s already awake,” John says and shrugs, “She just stays in bed for hours after, I think. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
Lisa places a hand over her chest. “A girl after my own heart. I think we’ll get along just fine.”
—
It only takes another half hour for Amy to finally pull herself out of bed and come downstairs. She walks slowly, rubbing her eyes as she enters the kitchen. Though the dark rings around her eyes make John worry that she still isn’t getting enough rest.
“Good morning,” John says and offers her a smile.
She looks up at him blearily and then stops dead in her tracks when she sees Lisa sitting next to him at the kitchen table. “Uh. Who is…?”
“Amy, this is Lisa.” John gestures towards her. “Lisa, Amy.”
“Is she your wife?” Amy asks, still standing in the threshold between the kitchen in the living room like she’s not sure if she wants to bolt back upstairs.
John almost chokes on his own saliva at the question. “No, no, nothing like that. We’re old friends. Grew up in the same orphanage.”
Lisa stands abruptly, leaning forward with her hands flat against the table. “Oh my God. I knew you were young from what John told me, but… She’s just a kid.”
She’s spent so long picturing her as just another demon from all the horror stories John’s told her, but here in the light of the kitchen, she looks like a normal teenager. Tired and weary in a way that a teenager shouldn’t be but still just a kid who’s been put through Hell and for what? Her heart breaks for her all at once.
“Lisa,” John says, reminding her that Amy is very much standing right there and can hear her.
“Right, sorry. I had the misfortune of living in an apartment complex owned by Gary.” Amy flinches at the name and Lisa bites down another apology. “Sick bastard. I should have known the cheap rent was too good to be true. But, anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I know what it’s like to… go through those things.”
In a split second decision, Lisa crosses the kitchen and makes her way over to Amy who’s still eyeing her with an air of distrust. After all the things the kid’s gone through, she can’t say she blames her one bit. “I… Can I hug you?”
Amy considers it for a moment before nodding. “Yeah…”
So Lisa does. She wraps her arms around her tightly. She’d spent so long quietly resenting this girl she never even knew and now she realizes that she was just a victim, just as she had been. In the same way Gary isolated her and trapped her in her own home, he’d done even worse to Amy.
“You too, Ward. Get over here,” she keeps one arm wrapped tightly around Amy and uses her free one to beckon him forward, “Bring it in.”
He laughs and shrugs before coming over to join them. They hold each other for a moment where none of them breathe—three people held together only by fraying strings. They’re still the same people they’ve always been—the same bare bones, the same terrible hearts—but there’s a new skin healing around them.
And it sounds like I forgive you. It sounds like can we start over?
Lisa is the one that untangles herself from the hug first and Amy nearly pulls her back in because she can’t remember the last time anyone hugged her. Even before her possession, her mother had very little love left to give out to anyone that wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t her fault, she told herself so many times, mother was sick, but a part of Amy will always resent her for how she chose the ghosts of her brothers over her living daughter.
The anger will always be there, she thinks, rotten insides sitting beneath a pretty exterior. It doesn’t burn like it used to, though, it doesn’t scorch others in its need to be let out. And that is an anger she can learn to live with someday.
“We were just about to go to breakfast,” John says and clears his throat, “Would you like to come with us, Amy?”
—
If this place is ever going to start feeling like a home for Lisa, it has to start with her studio. She’s always loved art even if all of her childhood caretakers chided her for wasting her time with it. For her, it was never a waste of time. She loved doing it, loved seeing people’s reactions to it, loved the way she’d have to wash paint from her hair and even all the times she’d accidentally stuck her brushes into her drinks out of habit.
She makes the daunting trip back to her old apartment with John a couple times to pick up the last remnants of her art supplies. It isn’t easy to go back there—the building looks too familiar in a way that makes her stomach flip inside out and she hasn’t put enough time in between her and what happened there. The blood stains in her apartment may have been scrubbed away and the scattered furniture and scratches she had left on the walls have mended, but it’s still the same familiar Hell. The cult is gone from it now, forced into hiding after their activities were thrown into the light, so now it’s just a building filled to the brim with painful memories.
It’s worth it though, she thinks, for the nights in John’s house where she gets to paint for hours into the night with John always by her side, usually reading but sometimes just enjoying her company. There was never a moment where Lisa decided definitively that she was going to stay—where she decided that this group of people that was just as torn up and hurt as she was going to be her new home. She thinks she always knew.
Amy visits her in the makeshift studio she fashioned out of the spare storage room sometimes. She watches at first, standing in the doorway like a ghost and observing. Then, in time, she asks if she can paint too. It starts simple: blocky horizons and flowers, but she looks more at peace when she’s painting than Lisa’s seen her before in the short time she’s known her that it’s hard not to be happy for her.
“You said that you… knew Gary as well?” Amy asks one night as Lisa’s cleaning up all of their supplies for the night.
And Lisa nearly drops the paint cup she was holding. “Yeah… Well, I didn’t know the guy. I never met him, but… I lived in an apartment owned by him. Even before I found out about the cult and all the horrible things he was doing, I thought he was a major prick.”
Amy laughs which is new to both of them. Before, she had been torn apart and glued back together with very little room for small happinesses or laughter, but now she’s learning to make room again.
“But uh… I don’t know. Things started to get worse at the apartments. I didn’t notice it at first, until one day I couldn’t leave.”
She’s heard that if you boil a frog and you turn the heat up too fast, it will jump out, but if you turn the heat up gradually it won’t even try to escape. It was the same for her. It was small things at first. Neighbors she never bothered to even say hi to in the halls disappearing, odd noises at night, mysterious stains on the carpet. She chalked it up to management being god awful.
“They tried to… Well, I don’t know exactly what the ritual entails, but John told me the gist of it. He’s the one that got me out of there.”
“He did?”
Lisa nods, voice bleeding fondness. “Yeah. I started writing to him when I finally started to get a clue. I was pretty frantic. Things just kept getting stranger and stranger around there. And I uh… I wasn’t myself when he came to see me.”
Amy blinks at her and tilts her head slightly before the realization dawns on her all at once. “You were possessed,” she says slowly like she doesn’t quite believe it herself.
“Yeah. I… I almost—” She takes a deep breath and it comes out as a sigh. She hasn’t had to talk to anyone about what happened in apartment 5a before and she had been pointedly ignoring the subject altogether. “I almost hurt him. Real bad. I didn’t want to. God, of course I didn’t want to, but there was just this voice in my head, so loud I couldn’t hear anything else anymore, even my own thoughts.”
It was like being ripped apart, separated into parts that were her and not her without a hope of knowing which ones were which. She still didn’t know where that entity ended and where she began, which actions were purely her own and which ones were out of her control. Was it her that wrote the letter to John urging him not to come? Was it her that locked herself inside in hopes that no one would come looking for her?
“And when it was over… I just ran. It took me a while to believe I was myself again… And, well, now I’m here.” She shrugs and fidgets with a loose thread at the edge of her sleeve. Her mouth feels dry, her throat a little raw and scratchy, but there’s a morbid satisfaction in finally admitting it out loud. “Sorry, kid, I didn’t mean to dump all that on you.”
“It made me kill my parents,” Amy says, voice small and brave. Lisa already knows this; she’s heard the horrible circumstances that underpin this whole thing a million times over, but she lets Amy talk all the same. “And the priest that came to help me. I watched myself do it. And I keep seeing it in my mind again when I close my eyes like it’s burned into my eyelids.”
It’s a terrible feeling to admit that she remembers the blood splattered across the floor and the viscera caked onto her dress now more than she can remember the way her mother’s laugh sounded or the solemn look her father always wore. When she thinks of them, she doesn’t remember the soft voice her father used whenever she would have nightmares and she doesn’t think of the way her mother always made her favorite meal on her birthday. The memories are still there, but painted over in red. It’s a persistent festering wound that refuses to close.
“You shouldn’t torture yourself like that, Amy,” Lisa offers, setting the supplies she was holding down and putting a hand on her shoulder. “What happened… is a terrible tragedy. My heart aches for you having to go through that at your age, but it wasn’t your fault. None of it.”
“I’m so tired of people saying that.” Amy closes her eyes and takes in a sharp breath. “You should hate me. John too.”
It isn’t self-pitying. She says it calmly, matter-of-factly like it’s the way things just have to be.
“I don’t,” Lisa says immediately, shocking even herself by how instantaneous the response is. She doesn’t realize just how much she means it until the words leave her lips. This girl and the demons that infested her for so long have turned all of their lives upside down and yet she can’t bring herself to even be mad at her, not even a little. “And I know John doesn’t either.”
Amy nods wordlessly, the look in her eye all too reminiscent of a condemned man staring down a firing squad for the last time.
“It’s hard, I know. This isn’t the life you wanted, I’m sure, or the one you thought you’d have, but you’re alive for a reason. I’m sure of it.”
—
“What a terrible movie,” Lisa says in between handfuls of what little remains of the popcorn perched precariously between them.
Movie night had been Lisa’s idea. She’d gone out of her way to rent the vhs tapes, making sure to select a mix of her personal favorites and some new movies she’d been dying to see. Then she raided the hallway closet for all of the blankets in the house and spread them out across the living room floor. Amy, to her credit, joined them for the first movie and made it halfway through the second one before falling into the grips of sleep. And John carried her to her room once she was soundly sleeping because Lord knows that girl needed all the rest that she could get.
“I didn’t think it was that bad,” John says with a shrug.
“Of course you would like that movie,” she teases, jabbing him in the side with one elbow.”
He scoffs at that. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve always been a sucker for the ooey-gooey happy ending crap.”
“Is there something so wrong about liking happy endings?”
“No, I suppose not.” She leans back into the couch, pulling the bunched up pool of blankets closer to her. “Did you… ever think things would end up like this?”
The movie credits have long since ended, leaving the two of them sitting quietly in front of the darkened screen. “End up like what?”
“You know…” Lisa fiddles with a strand of her hair between her fingers. It feels all very foolish now, but there’s something persistent nagging in the back of her mind that makes her keep digging herself deeper. “Me. You. Us, living together again after all this time.”
He considers it for a moment and then shrugs. “Not really. I’m happy things turned out like this, though.”
“Okay, I’m going to tell you something embarrassing. And you have to promise to not laugh.”
“Uh oh.”
“I’m being serious. Promise.” She holds out her pinky finger and he only stares at it for a couple seconds before sealing the promise with his own finger.
“Alright, alright, I promise.”
“I’ve loved you since we were kids, you know?” Lisa says, voice low like a secret. “It was… I think it was that day you fell. I always loved that big oak tree outside the orphanage window. I always wanted to climb it, but I was scared. I don’t know of what… It seems so silly now. But you told me you’d climb it with me so it wouldn’t be so scary. And then you fell and twisted your leg and there was a shit-ton of blood.”
“There wasn’t that much blood-” John interjects.
“There was a lot of blood,” she reaffirms, “And you sit there with your leg twisted the wrong way, splayed out in the grass, and you cry for a whole two minutes. I’m on the ground by that point, crying too now because I’m scared and you’re hurt and I’ve forgotten everything I learned about first aid in my panic. And then you look at me and you stop crying. And you start comforting me. You were the one in pain, but you still took it upon yourself to comfort me and I will never forget that.”
“What a scene that must have been for the poor caretaker who stumbled upon us.”
“I know,” Lisa laughs, breathy and light, “I think they couldn’t wait to ship us off as soon as we turned eighteen for all the trouble we caused them.”
“How come you never told me that story before?”
“You were there. I should hope that you remember it.”
“I know, but you never told me it meant so much to you.”
“I don’t know. Scared to, I guess. And then by the time I worked up the courage, you were going into the Seminary and—”
The memory still tastes bitter in the back of her throat. Watching her best friend drift away farther and farther from her each passing day, seeing that he didn’t need her anymore, not in the way he used to. It wasn’t them, two lonely kids clinging onto each other in the dark, against the world anymore. They’d grown up and Lisa didn’t know if there was still a place for her in this new version of her best friend’s life.
“It gave you so much peace. You were happier than I’d ever seen you before. Like all that grief, all that pain just washed away. I knew I couldn’t take that from you. I was worried that if I told you and if I asked you to give up your studies, you might just do it.”
There’s a moment of comfortable silence that fills the air and Lisa leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder.
“I don’t know if… if I’m allowed to love anymore… After everything that’s happened. I don’t know if that’s ever on the table for me again.” It’s a terrible confession, raw and rough around the edges, but it drips with sincerity all the same. “But I think I love you too, Lisa.”
“You’re terrible at this.”
John laughs and the sound makes Lisa start to laugh as well. It’s always been a contagious sound.
“Well, you knew what you were signing up for,” he offers, still smiling, “Do you regret it?”
“No,” she shakes her head, “Not at all.”
—
The slow, quiet nights are the hardest. Old wounds flare up and it’s harder and harder to ignore the phantom pains.
John has always split his life into befores and afters—before his mother died, after he left the seminary, before the Martin family house—but this time, he hadn’t been so sure there would be an after. Saving Amy was always a lofty, far off goal, one that seemed so unattainable and always just out of reach. Freeing himself from the nightmare was a before, and now he didn’t exactly know how to live in the after.
He’s spent so long with his world constantly on the verge of total collapse that peace is no longer something he’s used to.
He thinks he could get used to it again, though. One day at a time.