“Will he know it was me?” I asked.
Ruiz gave me a look that was honest rather than comforting. “Yes.”
Nina arrived in scrubs and sneakers, dark curls shoved into a messy knot, still wearing her hospital ID from the pediatric clinic across town. She took one look at the staples hidden under the bandage in my hair and swore under her breath in Spanish. Then she wrapped her arms around me so carefully it nearly hurt worse than the injury.
Not physically. Somewhere deeper.
At two in the morning, I sat in her passenger seat with a discharge packet in my lap and watched the hospital slide away in the side mirror. My phone buzzed six times before I turned it face down.
Three texts from Mom.
One from Logan.
Two from an unknown number that turned out to be my aunt in Indianapolis, already saying family should handle family.
At Nina’s apartment, I showered with one hand braced on the tile wall and pink water threading down the drain. She gave me an old college sweatshirt and put clean sheets on the couch even though I said the recliner was fine. I barely slept. Every creak in the building sounded like someone outside the door. At 5:12 a.m., I checked my phone and read Logan’s message.
You really called the cops over an accident?
Ten minutes later another came.
After everything I’ve been dealing with, you do this to me?
No apology. No denial. Just the same gravity field he had always tried to pull us into, where his suffering bent every fact around itself.
Karen had told me not to respond, so I took screenshots and emailed them to myself.
At 9:40 a.m., Officer Bell called. They had picked Logan up at a gas station off Interstate 75, two counties south. He had spent the night driving. He was being booked on felony domestic violence and assault charges because of the severity of the injury and prior documented intimidation. There would be a hearing. I might be asked to testify. A no-contact order would be requested immediately.
I thanked him and sat on the edge of Nina’s couch staring at the blank television screen.
I had imagined that hearing he was arrested would feel victorious, or devastating, or at least dramatic. Instead it felt like stepping off a carnival ride and realizing the ground under you had been shaking for years.
Mom called three times before noon. I answered on the fourth.
“How could you let them take him?” she asked instead of hello.
I looked out Nina’s apartment window at a parking lot shimmering in pale winter sun. “I didn’t let them do anything. He assaulted me.”
“He is your brother.”
“And I was bleeding on the floor.”
She started crying then, not softly. The full, outraged grief of someone mourning consequences she had spent years inviting in by denying they existed. She said lawyers were expensive. She said Logan was not a monster. She said I had embarrassed the family. She said people make mistakes.
