Page 71 of A Series of Rooms
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jonah cut in. “I hated the way we left things, too. I could see that you blamed yourself, and that wasn’t my intention.”
Liam shook his head. “I never should have risked bringing you home with me in the first place.”
“I took the risk, too,” Jonah argued. “I chose it just as much as you did.”
“Well.” Liam swallowed back the urge to plead his guilt further. “Regardless, I hit a breaking point, and I ended up telling my mom. Everything, I mean. About you, and about how scared I was that I hadn’t done enough to help you, and... I don’t know. After hearing it all out loud for the first time, I...” He made himself look Jonah in the eye when he said it. “I was at the police station when you called me. I was going to make a report.”
Jonah was quiet for a long time, nothing but the near-silent buzz of the television and the sounds of medical machinery in the background. Liam was braced for outrage and betrayal, braced to be kicked out of this bed and this room and this hospital and Jonah’s life, so he nearly flinched when he felt a hand close over his.
“He was going to kill me,” Jonah said. “He would have, I think, if Ellis hadn’t intervened. And if not then, eventually. I don’t hate you, Liam. You were right to be afraid for me. And I’m sorry I made you carry that weight for all this time.”
“You were never a burden, Jonah.”
Jonah smiled, kind but sad. “I know you’re too nice to see it that way, but I’m still sorry.”
“Maybe,” Liam began cautiously, “between the two of us, we’ve had enough apologies for now?”
Some of the tension seemed to leave Jonah’s body. He relaxed against Liam once again, resting his head on his shoulder
“So, you told your mom everything,” Jonah said. “How did she take that?”
Liam thought about it. “Honestly?” he said. “Better than I expected. She drove me here, you know? I mean, she wasn’t thrilled at the idea of me putting myself in potential danger, but she seemed to get it when I told her that I—” He bit his tongue, ears warming. “When I told her about you.”
Jonah went quiet again, long enough to make Liam nervous. Then he said, quietly, “She loves you.”
“She does,” Liam agreed, his voice going a little watery. “I think she’s more understanding than I give her credit for. And Jonah?” He squeezed his hand to make sure he had his attention. “I think that would extend to you as well. If you need somewhere to stay until you figure things out, or for however long...”
“I don’t think you can make that offer on your parents’ behalf,” Jonah said.
“I’ll call them right now, if you want,” Liam insisted, already reaching for the phone in his back pocket. Jonah stopped him.
“I don’t think they’d appreciate the midnight phone call, either.”
He could hear the tick of amusement in Jonah’s voice, but Liam was overcome by a tidal wave of grief. They hadn’t yet talked about Jonah’s plan forward from here, if he even had one, but Liam was suddenly, keenly aware of just how few people Jonah had left to turn to, and keenly aware of how that had landed him in such an impossible spot in the first place. Liam wouldn’t let him be left out in the cold again. He refused.
“Jonah, I’m not going to abandon you,” he promised. “I won’t.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
What are you asking for,Liam wanted to beg.Anything. He couldn’t imagine denying Jonah a single thing.
But he couldn’t put that on him now. Not in a hospital bed, in the middle of the night, when his life had just been ripped out from under himagain. There would be time to figure out the next step, but for now, Liam’s job wasn’t to plan for Jonah’s future. It was simply to be there for him in the moment. That much he could do.
“Liam?” Jonah whispered, so small that he felt the name against his chest more than he heard it. “I think I want to call my mom.”
CHAPTER 32
Jonah
It was almost poetic, how it ended the same way it began: in a nondescript hotel room, with Jonah’s stomach in knots.
The hospital discharged him that morning, and Antonio Ellis stuck to his word about finding temporary arrangements for Jonah.
The hotel the Bureau put him up in was decent, and it was in a nice part of the city. Not that it mattered. It was only for a handful of days, while the agents and the local police needed easy access to Jonah for questioning. There were talks of a trial further down the road, where Jonah would be expected to come back to Chicago to testify against associates of Shepard whom Jonah had been unlucky enough to meet, but nothing was set in stone.
Something no one seemed to consider was how difficult it might be for Jonah to be confined to a room that mirrored so many of his worst memories.
Hotel rooms, give or take a few hygiene standards and choices in decor, were largely the same. It was Jonah’s personal Groundhog Day of off-white walls and mass-produced paintings, sheets that never quite felt clean enough and AC units that always, always ran too cold. There was something about the buried-deep smell in the carpeting, the remnants of stale smoke and mildew the cleaners could never quite shake. Jonah thought that scent might cling to him for as long as he lived.
