“Those nights you called and didn’t talk. You thought I didn’t understand.”
My chest tightened.
Liam squeezed my fingers.
“I listened to you breathe because I knew that as long as I could hear you, you were still there.”
For a moment, the hospital disappeared.
I remembered dark rooms.
The glow of my phone beneath the bathroom door.
Liam’s name on the screen.
Silence between us.
I had believed I was hiding everything.
But maybe my brother had been sitting in his apartment across the city, awake in the darkness, listening for proof that his little sister was alive.
I turned my face toward the window.
The rain had grown heavier.
Detective Ruiz quietly gathered her tablet.
“I’ll give you both a minute.”
Before she reached the door, my phone buzzed on the tray.
All three of us froze.
The phone was new.
Liam had purchased it that morning because my old one had been taken into evidence.
