Chapter 4: Purple Bruises

## Emily

September 15th, 2021

The thing about bruises is that they change colour.

Not the way sunsets change colour — gradually, beautifully, the kind of transition that makes people stop and stare. Bruises change the way lies change: messily, in stages, each one uglier than the last until the original truth is so buried under layers of purple and yellow and green that you forget what the skin looked like before it was hit.

Jordan's latest contribution to my colour palette was on my left wrist. Fingerprint-shaped. Four ovals and a thumb, perfectly preserved, like a forensic exhibit. He'd grabbed me last night because I'd put the dishes away wrong — apparently the mugs go on the left side, not the right, and apparently this was a mistake worth correcting with his hand around my arm and his whiskey breath in my face and his voice, always his voice, that snarling tenor that said you're nothing, you're worthless, nobody will ever want you, you should have been in that car.

I'd heard it so many times it had become background music. Elevator muzak for the damned.

The problem with today's bruise was its location. It was below the cuff of my sleeve, right on the wrist, in the exact spot that would be visible if I reached for anything — a pen, a coffee cup, a gummy worm. I'd wrapped it with an ace bandage and told Ash I'd tweaked it at the gym.

Ash didn't go to the gym. She didn't know I didn't go to the gym either. But she'd accepted the explanation with that tight-lipped expression that said she was filing it away for later cross-examination.

The alcove was warm today. Late September light poured through the stained glass, casting the room in gold and crimson. I was on the windowsill, legs tucked under me, trying to write. The novel. My novel. The one about the girl who loses her twin — the one Professor Navarro had told me to write with such casual authority that I'd gone home and stared at a blank document for four hours before typing a single sentence.

The sentence was: She died on a Tuesday.

I'd been stuck on the second sentence for three days.

The door opened. He walked in carrying two coffees, his briefcase, and a paper rose tucked behind his ear like a pencil. It had become routine now — the two weeks of shared alcove time had calcified into something approaching ritual. He brought coffee. I occupied the windowsill. We existed in the same space and said enough to matter without saying enough to be dangerous.

"How's the novel?" he asked, handing me my coffee.

"It's a sentence."

"One more than yesterday."

"It's the same sentence as yesterday."

He settled into his usual spot — the floor against the opposite wall, back against the stone, legs stretched out, briefcase open beside him. "Read it to me."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because it's one sentence and it's terrible."

"I'll be the judge of that." He pulled his red pen out and twirled it between his fingers with the dexterity of someone who'd spent years manipulating objects smaller and more dangerous than pens. "Read."

I stared at the screen. The cursor blinked. Patient. Mocking.

"'She died on a Tuesday,'" I said.

Silence.

I risked a glance at him. He was watching me with that expression — the one that wasn't quite a smile, wasn't quite anything, but made me feel like he was listening with more than his ears.

"Keep going," he said.

"That's it. That's the whole thing."

"I know. Keep going."

"There's nothing to keep going to."

"There's always something. You've stopped because you're afraid of what comes after Tuesday. So tell me — what comes after?"

I looked at the screen again. The cursor. The white space. The vast, empty nothing that stretched out after that single sentence like a desert I didn't have the water to cross.

"Wednesday," I said. "Wednesday comes after Tuesday."

"And?"

"And everything is exactly the same except she's gone and you're still here and you don't understand why and you keep breathing even though you've forgotten the reason."

The words fell out of me like stones from a broken wall. I hadn't planned them. Hadn't curated or edited or softened them. They just came, raw and artless and true, and the second they hit the air, I wanted to grab them and shove them back in.

He was quiet for a long moment. The stained-glass light moved across the floor between us. My coffee steamed.

"That's your second sentence," he said. "Write it down."

I typed it with shaking fingers. Two sentences. The novel was two sentences now and they were both terrible and they were both true, and that combination made my chest ache in a way I couldn't medicate.

He went back to his grading. I went back to staring at the screen. The silence settled around us like snow.

Then he said, without looking up: "Let me see your wrist."

I froze.

"The left one," he clarified, pen still moving across a student's paper. "The one you've had wrapped in an ace bandage for two days. The one you said you tweaked at the gym."

My heart rate spiked. I could feel it in my temples, in my throat, behind my eyes. "I did tweak it."

"You don't go to the gym."

"You don't know that."

He set his pen down. Looked at me. Not with accusation — with that steady, excavating focus that saw through concealer and bandages and years of carefully constructed walls. "Emily."

Not Miss Glass. Emily.

The use of my first name cracked something. A seam in the armour that I'd been welding shut since the first time Jordan hit me — since the night Charlie and Mom died and my father stopped speaking to me and the world decided that Emily Glass was a thing to be broken rather than held.

"It's nothing," I said. My voice was thin. I hated it.

He stood. Crossed the room. Not fast — deliberately, carefully, the way you approach something fragile. He stopped at the windowsill, close enough that I could smell his cologne — dark, warm, that undertone of smoke that I'd started associating with safety, which was ironic and probably a sign of poor psychological health.

He held out his hand. Palm up. An offering, not a demand.

"Show me," he said.

I stared at his hand. The tattoos across his knuckles. The calluses on his fingers. The paper rose he'd placed on the windowsill that morning, sitting there like a small, patient miracle.

I could have said no. I could have pulled away and deflected and performed fine the way I always performed fine — convincingly enough that most people accepted it because most people didn't want to know the answer when they asked how you were doing.

But he wasn't most people.

And I was so tired of performing.

I placed my wrist in his palm.

His fingers were warm. Gentle. He unwound the ace bandage slowly, each layer revealing more of the bruise — the sickening gradient from purple at the centre to yellow at the edges, the unmistakable shape of fingers pressed into flesh.

He stared at it.

I watched his face.

Something happened behind his eyes. Not anger — or not just anger. It was deeper than that. Older. A violence that had been trained into composure, that lived in the spaces between breaths and waited for permission to exist.

His jaw tightened. A muscle in his cheek twitched. His thumb hovered over the bruise, not touching it, tracing the outline in the air as if mapping it for future reference.

When he spoke, his voice was a whisper. "Who did this?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters more than anything you will ever tell me."

"It's my stepbrother. He's—" I pulled my wrist back, rewrapping it quickly, clumsily. "He drinks. He gets angry. It's not a big deal. It's been happening since I moved in and it's—"

"How long?"

"Since my mom died. Three years."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.

He was standing very still. The kind of still that had nothing to do with calm and everything to do with control — the deliberate immobility of a man who was choosing, in this exact moment, not to do something. I didn't know what that something was. I didn't want to know.

"Does anyone else know?" he asked.

"No. Ash suspects but I've never confirmed it."

"Your father?"

I laughed. It came out broken. "My father hasn't spoken to me in two years. He has a new wife. Helen. She's nice. She tries. But my dad — he checked out the night Mom died and never checked back in."

"And the police?"

"Jordan's father — my father — paid to make the complaints disappear. Twice. After that, I stopped calling."

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the violence was still there, but it was contained now — caged behind whatever discipline he'd spent his life building. "Listen to me," he said, and his voice was so carefully controlled that it vibrated with the effort of restraint. "This is not your fault. This has never been your fault. And this will not continue."

"You can't—"

"I can," he said. Quietly. Simply. With the kind of certainty that closed doors on arguments before they started.

I looked at him. At this man who was technically my professor, who had given me paper roses and black coffee and the first two sentences of a novel that might save my life, who was standing in a forgotten alcove in the East Wing looking at the bruises on my wrist with the expression of someone who had just decided to go to war.

"Why do you care?" I asked.

The question was honest. Nakedly, desperately honest. Because people didn't care about Emily Glass. People tolerated Emily Glass. People felt sorry for Emily Glass. But care? Active, invested, I-will-change-things care? That was a currency nobody spent on me.

He was quiet for a long time. The stained-glass light moved across his face, amber and red, and for a moment he looked like something out of a painting — a saint or a sinner, impossible to tell which.

"Because you remind me of collapsing stars," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"Collapsing stars. When a star runs out of fuel, it collapses in on itself. Everything it was — all that light, all that fire — gets crushed into something impossibly small and impossibly dense. Most people see that as an ending." He picked up the paper rose from the windowsill and held it between his thumb and forefinger, studying it as if he'd never seen one before, even though he'd made hundreds. "But the collapse is what creates the conditions for rebirth. A new star can form from the debris. Smaller. Different. But burning."

He held the rose out to me.

"You're collapsing, Emily. And everyone around you has decided that's the end of your story. But I've read your sentences. I've watched you carry that bear and eat those gummy worms and show up to class every single day even when your body is covered in bruises and your soul is running on fumes. That's not an ending."

I took the rose. My vision was blurring. My throat was closing. Something was happening in my chest that I couldn't name and didn't trust.

"That's the debris," he said. "And debris, given the right conditions, burns brighter than the original star ever did."

A tear slid down my cheek. I wiped it away fast, angry at it, angry at myself for feeling anything at all.

"I have to go," I said. "Ash is waiting."

He stepped back. Gave me space. "Thursday's assignment is about beauty. Find something beautiful and write about it. And Emily—"

I paused at the door.

"If he touches you again, call me." He pulled a card from his pocket and held it out. A phone number, handwritten. Nothing else. "I don't care what time it is. I don't care why. Call."

I took the card. Tucked it into the back of my phone case, where Jordan wouldn't find it, where Ash wouldn't ask about it, where it could sit against the warmth of the battery and hum with the same frequency as the wire in my chest.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded once. "Write your second sentence."

I left the alcove. Walked down the stairs. Passed the music rooms. Pushed through the East Wing doors into the September sun.

My phone buzzed.

Ash: where are you??? it's been an hour

Emily: on my way

Ash: you okay?

I looked at the paper rose in my hand. Number eight. I was running out of room in the jar.

Emily: yeah. I think I am.

Ash: that's new

Emily: tell me about it

I walked across campus with a paper rose and a phone number and two sentences of a novel and a bruise on my wrist that was shifting from purple to yellow, which meant it was healing, which meant it was changing, which meant — according to a man who saw collapsing stars where everyone else saw ruins — that something new might be forming from the wreckage.

I didn't believe it yet.

But for the first time in three years, I wanted to.