Chapter 85: TO BE PLACED WHERE SHE WAS FOUND LIFELESS...BY ME
Chapter 86
Lumi
The hotel room started to feel smaller by the third day.
Not because it was small but because everything in it belonged to no one. There were no photos on the walls. No mug I always reached for out of habit. No smell that meant home.
Just the hum of the air conditioner and Theo’s dinosaur nightlight plugged into the one outlet by his bed, glowing faintly against carpet that wasn’t ours.
I went back to work that morning. I had to. The two missed days had already cost me more than I could afford to lose.
I dropped Theo at school with his hair combed and his shirt ironed, like if I got every small detail right, no one there would be able to tell that his whole life had been picked up and moved without warning four days ago.
Then I drove to the office and sat at my desk and answered emails, and somewhere around eleven an employee asked if I was feeling all right, and I told her I just hadn’t slept well, which was true in the way that half-truths usually are.
I called Neve on my lunch break, sitting in my car in the parking garage so no one would hear if my voice broke. Still blocked.
I sat there anyway with the phone against my ear, listening to that same flat voice, like some part of me thought that if I just kept doing it enough times, the universe would get tired of saying no and let one call through.
It never did.
I picked Theo up at three, and he chattered the whole ride back to the hotel about a boy in his class who brought a chameleon for show and tell.
I made all the right sounds in all the right places, but underneath it I was doing math in my head about how many more nights we would stay at the hotel before Neve forgives me.
That night, after he fell asleep, I sat at the little round table by the window, opened my laptop and looked up apartments.
I bookmarked three of them and closed the laptop before I could start crying over a spreadsheet.
My phone sat face up on the table the whole time. I’d stopped turning it face down.
I told myself that was progress, that I could look at Ren’s name in my call log now without it undoing me completely... but really I think some small, traitorous part of me just wanted it visible in case, by some miracle, it lit up with his name instead of staying dark.
But it stayed dark.
I thought about Theo asking, two nights ago, in that same small unbothered voice he used for questions that broke me, "Where’s Uncle Ren?"
I’d told him Ren was busy with work. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. It just wasn’t the truth either.
I picked the phone up once that night. Just to look. His name sat there under Neve’s blocked thread, and I let my thumb hover over it the way I had every night since the hotel, and I thought about how easy it would be.
Just one tap. And I’ll hear his voice on the other end within seconds.
I put the phone down and turned off the lights instead.
I lay there in the dark listening to Theo breathe.
Somewhere past midnight, my phone buzzed once on the nightstand.
I sat straight up so fast my heart slammed into my throat before I’d even reached for it, some helpless, hungry part of me already certain it was her.
It wasn’t.
It was an email. Rent increase notice from Neve’s building, forwarded automatically to the email I’d adder to the account alerts, informing whoever still lived there that the unit’s lease was being terminated at the end of the month.
I read it twice before I understood what I was looking at.
She wasn’t just done letting me live there. She was done with the apartment itself...closing it out completely, like she wanted every trace of me, of any of it, gone for good.
This meant, I won’t be allowed back which means I needed to take finding a place serious.
Because the court could take Theo away from me if they find out that I’m homeless.
I knew what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to stay at anyone’s place, I needed my place.
And just the way I got my company, I’d get my apartment too.
The idea sounded stupid to me but then that was what I needed, because what if I rent a place and they end up chasing me away too.
This shouldn’t repeat itself again.
The next day, I picked Theo up from school and told him we were going on another little adventure.
"Another adventure?" He looked up at me with that easy, trusting excitement kids have before the world teaches them to be suspicious of change. "Where are we going this time?"
"I need to go see someone first," I said, buckling him into his booster seat, keeping my voice light the way I’d gotten so practiced at over the last week.
"And then you’re going to spend a few hours with Priya’s boy. Won’t that be fun?"
"Can we get pizza?"
"I bet you can."
He seemed satisfied with that. I sat in the driver’s seat a moment longer than I needed to, watching him in the rearview mirror as he hummed some tune from school and swung his little sneakers back and forth, completely unbothered, completely unaware of how hard I was working just to keep my hands from shaking on the wheel.
I drove straight to the penthouse.
I’d only been there twice before. It was the place she and her boyfriend stayed whenever they were both in the city.
The doorman was standing very straight in a navy uniform with brass buttons that looked like they’d been polished that morning.
He watched me approach with the polite, practiced neutrality of someone trained not to let his face give anything away.
"I’m here to see Neve," I told him, and even to my own ears my voice sounded thinner than I meant it to. "I’m a friend of hers."
"Your name?"
"Lumi."
He picked up the phone at his desk without really looking at me again, said a few quiet words into it, waited, listened, and I watched his expression change almost imperceptibly.
He set the phone back down.
"I’m sorry, ma’am. She’s not accepting visitors."
"Can you just tell her it’s Lumi? Just tell her I’m here, that’s all, she doesn’t have to come down, she doesn’t have to say anything, I just need her to know I’m here..."
"I did tell her." His voice wasn’t unkind, just final, the voice of a man who got paid to be a wall and had long since learned not to feel bad about being one. "She said no."
"Please." The word came out smaller than I meant it to, and I hated how it sounded bouncing off all that marble, how loud my own desperation felt in a lobby built for people who never had to beg for anything. "Just five minutes. That’s all I’m asking."
"I understand this is difficult," he said, and I actually believed that he meant it, in whatever small, professional way a stranger could mean something like that. "But I have my instructions, and I have to follow them. I’m sorry."
I stood there for a long moment with my car keys biting into my palm, tiles cold under my shoes.
And I understood, finally, all the way down into my bones, that this wasn’t something I could fix by showing up enough times.
She’d meant every word that night. She’d meant it in the eviction notice. She’d meant it in the flat, mechanical silence of sixty unanswered calls.
And now she meant it here too, in a lobby with a stranger doing her rejecting for her so she wouldn’t even have to look at my face while it happened.
"Okay," I said, to no one in particular, and turned around before he could see my eyes fill up.
I made it all the way to the car before I let myself cry, and even then only for a minute, both hands gripping the wheel, forehead resting against the cool leather, the engine still off.
I gave myself sixty seconds. I counted them, then I wiped my face, checked the mirror to make sure Theo hadn’t noticed anything through the tinted glass of the back window, and started the car.
I dropped Theo off at Priya’s place first. She was the one friend who’d shown up with soup the week Theo had the flu without me even having to ask, and when I called her this morning, she just said.
"Of course, drop him off, we’ll do pizza and a movie, take whatever time you need," like it was nothing at all, like I hadn’t just rearranged her whole evening with one phone call.
"You okay?" she asked, before I could hang up.
"I will be," I told her, which wasn’t quite a lie and wasn’t quite the truth either.
Theo didn’t even look back when I dropped him off twenty minutes later. He ran straight for her son’s Legos scattered across the living room rug, already forgetting.
Then I drove alone. I knew it was stupid returning there alone, but I needed to.
Whatever belongs to her also belongs to me.
Since I’m here only child, then everything she had belongs to me.
I never believed I’d be making use of any of it. The things I’ve ran away from for years are same things that’s stood for me in time of need.
Tonight, I’d be going back to my mom’s apartment.
To be placed where she was found lifeless...by me.