Page 60 of Splintered
When Evan was able to, he attended Mass at the hospital.
And when he went to Mass, Ben went with him. Sat with him through the prayers and the blessings. Held his hand as Evan bowed his head and prayed, and waited in the pew as Evan took the Eucharist. He held him close after, stroking his back as Evan prayed on his knees.
It helped Evan. He saw it with his own eyes. Felt it with his soul.
There were things he couldn’t understand, probably wouldn’t ever understand. What had happened that night? What had they witnessed? What had Evan experienced? What had they all experienced?
Had he come face to face with the demonic? With the supernatural? Had he found the proof he’d desperately sought with his own eyes?
How had Evan escaped the restraints? Ben had wrapped the one he was responsible for as tight as it could go. He’d faced Evan in the throes of his violence before. He hadn’t wanted to again.
Had William secured his restraint tight enough? Or had the love of a father overridden the sense of duty he had to Father Mathew?
Doubt worked like worms in his mind, spread through him like black oil. Living in Evan’s old bedroom, he’d found Evan’s high school yearbooks, his old binders and his report cards.
His private Catholic school had offered Aramaic as an elective. Evan had taken it in his sophomore year.
Did one year of Aramaic over fifteen years before equate to speaking in near fluency now, in acute psychological distress?
After the fire, he’d gone back to the house only once, sifting through the ashes for anything that had survived. There was nothing. And he’d felt nothing, standing there, looking at the wreckage and ruin.
Except in the living room. In the center of the whitest ash, in the pinpoint of the hottest fire, the investigators said, lay two gold rings. They’d gleamed, blazing in the sunlight after the fire was out, in the sodden mess of what was left.
Those rings, like their love, had been purified, gold traveling through fire and coming out the other side even brighter than before.
He wore both rings around his neck every day.
When he went to replace their cell phones, both destroyed in the blaze, the technician setting up his and Evan’s phones asked if he wanted to reinstall Find My Phone on both.
“I’ve never had that app.”
“Yes sir, you did. It was installed on…” The technician had searched. “This phone,” he’d said, holding up Evan’s new one. “Or, the one this phone is replacing. This was the parent phone keeping track of the other phone.”
He’d blinked. “When was it installed?”
The tech had rattled off the date, sometime in the hazy period when Evan was just adjusting to his medications and he’d hated to be home alone. He’d wanted Ben with him, he’d said, in his moments of lucidity. He felt too lonely in their home without him. He felt afraid.
Had Evan installed the app on both their phones? Had he wanted to keep track of Ben, his whereabouts, as a sense of safety?
Supernatural powers were a sign of possession. Divining hidden knowledge.
I watched you mow the graveyard. And an hour later, Evan asked me if I’d seen you.
Was it outside the realm of possibility that Evan had tracked him on his phone? Or was it equally outside the realm of possibility that a demon had lived inside Evan, had spoken through Evan in that moment? That a demon had watched Ben, everywhere he went?
Answers he’d never have, questions he’d carry forever.
In the end, he’d let them all go. Everything that had cluttered his mind burned away in the fire, all the doubts, the second thoughts, the wonderings and the confusion. As the flames had risen around them both, as the fire had separated Evan from him, Ben saw their history and their future as a straight line. He’d seen, finally, all the steps in the path, the way they’d woven their lives together and the choices upon choices that brought them to that moment.
And beyond.
Evan had broken on the shores of doubt, wrestling with their love. He’d been afraid. He’d struggled. He’d gotten lost.
And he’d splintered apart.
The answer, then, was to love. To love Evan as hard, as deeply, as fully as he ever had, and to never, ever let that love go.
Because if there was one truth Ben knew in the world, it was that he loved Evan and he always would.
