Quiet. Absolute silence was the sound that roused me. The silence seemed wrong, but not entirely unusual. It’d been just as silent when only Angelica and I had been home alone the day prior. She was typically a quiet girl and, when she did speak, it was most likely because someone else had spoken first.

She wasn’t like that with me, however.

Whenever she was in my presence, whenever it was just the two of us, she talked like it was her first time hearing her own voice in years. She rambled and asked questions far too personal for my taste and never seemed to know when to stop. It would take the raising of my voice to still her lips or some level of threat on my part. I hated that almost as much as I sometimes hated her.

I didn’t like having to yell at Angelica.

It felt as sinister as a mere human damning an angel from above.

I was seated on the filthy floor, back pressed to the wall, when I heard the unmistakable commotion of the door being unlocked. Not even a couple of seconds later, Atticus emerged from behind said door but not completely. For a moment, he just stared, only his head in view as he hesitated with himself. For what reason, I didn’t understand at the time.

Nonetheless, he eventually gathered the courage to enter and shut the door behind him with a foreign gentleness I’d never before witnessed from him. Or perhaps, I’d never looked close enough? Maybe it had always been directly before my eyes but I’d refused to see; refused to believe someone so awful and fiendish could possess the noble human quality I like to call a heart.

“Hungry?” he whispered, nodding to the bowl in his right hand. His lowered tone was odd. I knew he wasn’t supposed to be in my room, that Delaney would be absolutely livid should he find out Atticus had given me company and a meal within my bedroom-turned-cage.

But Delaney wasn’t here. He’d left early morning, and I had no clue when to expect his return. It baffled me the power that wretched man held even when at a considerable distance.

“What do you want?” I asked in return. The smell of the contents of that bowl was absolutely delightful; especially considering I hadn't eaten in two days. But I understood there was a catch, an ulterior motive for Atticus’s sudden visit, and I wanted to know the terms of this odd contract before I signed on the line. 

He crossed the room to stand before me, kneeling down to get to my level and setting the bowl down in front of me. I was reaching for it before my mind could even comprehend what I was doing, but Atticus took firm grasp of my wrist before my fingers could so much as graze that porcelain bowl.

“My journal…” he trailed off, looking away and clearing his throat. “What… What did you read from it? What do you know?”

So that’s what this was about. If the way he’d almost taken my life two days prior didn’t tell me, this surprise visit certainly told me everything I needed to know. That journal, the private and personal affairs that lay within those worn pages, meant the world to him.

“Who is Jules?” I asked curiously, unable to fight the temptation to know just a little bit more about the man that knelt nervously before me. Jules seemed to be the key to that.

Atticus’s eyes widened and his fingers curled until his hands were balled in fists. 

“That doesn’t—” His breath caught. “That shouldn’t matter to you.”

“No, it shouldn’t,” I agreed. “But Jules mattered a lot to you, right? Who are they?”

Atticus began to shake, his eyes appeared far off, and then those wide orbs began to water.

He stood abruptly, almost tripping over himself in his own haste.

“Look,” he whispered, visibly shaken down to the very core of his being, “none of that is true. It’s just some of the things I wonder about every now and then. Whatever you read— whatever you think you know— you might as well erase it from your memory.”

He left, the lock clicked, and I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. 

I did him the favor of hiding the bowl he’d provided me against Delaney’s wishes in my dresser drawer the second I finished my soup.

It was the least I could do.