Chapter 8: In One's Own Hands
A day had passed since the funeral. Everything was quiet — or at least that was what Ashen told himself, standing in a room that wasn't his, folding clothes into a dresser that wasn't his either. The drawer stuck a little on the second track, and he had to nudge it with his knee to get it to close all the way. Small, meaningless friction. He was grateful for it. It was easier to think about a stuck drawer than about anything else.
Downstairs, Nora stood at the sink, forearms deep in soapy water, humming under her breath without quite realizing she was doing it. The doorbell cut through the quiet like something dropped.
She wiped her hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle. "Coming!"
When she opened the door, a man in a plain coat stood on the porch, badge already out before she could ask. His eyes were calm in the practiced way of someone who had learned to arrange his face for grieving families, tired in the way that suggested the arrangement cost him something each time.
"Detective Renner," he said. "I'd like to ask a few questions about the incident. May I come in?"
Nora thanked him for coming an odd thing to thank someone for, she thought even as she said it and led him into the living room. The house held its usual quiet warmth: the smell of dish soap drifting in from the kitchen, a clock ticking somewhere unseen, late afternoon light falling in long strips across the carpet. Renner lowered himself onto the sofa, opened his notebook, and uncapped his pen without yet writing anything.
"Could I trouble you for a glass of water?" he asked.
Nora nodded and disappeared toward the kitchen. Left alone for a moment, Renner's gaze drifted over the room — a framed photo of Walter and Nora on a beach somewhere, sun-bleached and years old, a small watercolor of a lighthouse hung slightly crooked above the television. Ordinary. Nothing here that explained the file sitting in his car.
Then he noticed the shape in the doorway.
"Ashen," Renner said. "I've come to speak with you — I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you're willing to cooperate."
There was a practiced firmness in his voice, the tone of a man who had said the same sentence to a hundred different grieving strangers and had worn it smooth from use.
Just like every other cop, Ashen thought. But I don't have a choice. I have to cooperate.
He crossed the room and lowered himself onto the sofa opposite the detective. Nora returned a moment later with the glass of water, and Renner drank from it slowly, unhurried, as though there were nothing waiting to be said that couldn't wait a few seconds longer. He set the glass down on a coaster with a small, precise click and looked up at Ashen properly for the first time.
Something in Ashen's chest tightened — heavy, familiar — before it was replaced by something colder. Something he couldn't quite name, but which sat in him with more weight than the grief had.
"I know this is hard," Renner said, his voice gentler now. "I just need to ask a few questions. You can stop me anytime."
Ashen nodded. "Go ahead."
Nora hovered near the doorway, arms crossed tightly over her chest, as though she were the one who needed holding together and hadn't yet found anyone willing to do it.
"Your grandmother went out for groceries around six. Was that normal for her — that time of evening?"
"Sometimes," Ashen said. "She liked to go when the market was less crowded."
"And you didn't think anything of it when she wasn't back by eight?"
"I started to worry a little. But I thought she was still shopping, or that she'd stopped to talk to someone. She did that a lot." His voice didn't shake. He noticed that, distantly, the way you notice weather through a window — present, but not touching you. "I started really panicking around eight-fifteen."
Renner wrote something down, then looked up again.
"The report says you found her yourself. On Miller Street."
"Yes."
"That's not on her usual route to the market."
Ashen met his eyes. "I know. I'd already checked her usual route twice. I was trying somewhere else by then."
Renner held his gaze a beat too long. Something crossed his face — not suspicion exactly, more like a man noticing a draft in a room that shouldn't have one.
"You're very calm," Renner said, "for someone your age, talking about this."
"I've only had a day," Ashen said. "I cried it out already. There's nothing left today."
That wasn't entirely true. But it was true enough to say out loud, and Renner didn't press on it — though his pen paused a half-second longer than it needed to before he finally wrote it down.
"Two stab wounds," Renner said eventually, his voice dropping lower, "along with other lacerations. The coroner believes she fought back. Hard."
Ashen's jaw tightened — just once, just barely. "She would have."
"We think it was a robbery that escalated. The wound pattern suggests at least two people, maybe three. There are also grip marks on her arms, consistent with restraint." Renner paused, watching him carefully. "We don't have a clean lead yet. Was she wearing anything before she left — jewellery, anything identifiable we could trace?"
Ashen didn't hear the question. Three. His mind repeated the number, and it dropped into him like a stone into still water, sending something ancient and patient rippling outward beneath the surface of his grief. It was the first time that thing had moved.
"Ashen?"
The detective's eyes were fixed on him now, steady, searching.
Ashen blinked, the room swimming back into focus a beat too late.
"Yes," he said. "Sorry. What did you ask?"
"I asked whether she was wearing any jewellery we could use to identify and trace the suspects."
"Yes," Ashen replied immediately. "She was wearing a silver necklace — two leaf charms made of glass, and a silver flower on the chain itself, with a small blue marble at its center." He explained it thoroughly, pulling every detail he could gather from memory in that moment.
"That will help a lot." Renner stood. "I think that's enough for today." He told Ashen to stay calm and trust the police, then gave Nora a small nod, as if to signal he was leaving.
"Do you have anything at all?" Ashen asked in a hurry, before Renner could reach the door. "Anyone who saw them?"
"Not yet," Renner said, and the words came out like breeze — light, but carrying no comfort. "We're trying our best. Do you remember anything she might have said — anything that hints someone did this on purpose?"
"No," Ashen said. "There was no one who could do that. At least, that's what she always told me."
Renner studied him a moment longer, the way you'd study a lock that didn't quite look picked but didn't look untouched either. Then he closed his notebook and let himself out.
Ashen stayed on the sofa long after the door shut behind him.
Trust? Trust the police? If they were so trustworthy, crime would be an exception, not a routine. "You people aren't trustworthy," he said, only in his mind. "Only I can do this myself." The detective's words — three people — still lingered in his head, refusing to settle.
Could there really be three? No — there could be more, or fewer. It's a suspicion, not a confirmation. I have to find the clues myself.
Nora entered the room while he was still turning it over, and came to sit beside him.
Ashen looked at her, then dropped his gaze to the floor. "I don't know if I should trust them or not," he said. His hands had started to shake, just slightly. Nora noticed, and took one of them in hers.
"We should trust them. It's their job. I know it's heavy to carry around, but you have us, and your friends who are close to you — so don't take it all on yourself, okay?"
He looked at her and nodded, already knowing he would end up doing things that flatly contradicted her words. But the thought had already stopped feeling like a choice. It felt like a responsibility now — the purpose of his life, a goal he had to pursue.
Three days passed quietly in the house on the surface, and not quietly at all underneath it.
"Did you find anything?" Walter asked into the phone, his knuckles pale around it.
"No. We're trying, but we haven't found a lead yet," the voice on the other end replied.
"Please, do your best."
"We're doing what we can. There's no need to tell us what to do," the officer said, his voice tight with a little anger and frustration of his own.
Walter set the phone down slower than he needed to.
"What did they say, honey?" Nora asked, coming up beside him.
"Nothing. They found nothing." His eyes were filled with sorrow and helplessness.
Nora looked at him and hugged him from behind. "Everything will be alright. We shouldn't lose hope — I'll go to church and pray for good news." Walter turned and hugged her back. "Yeah. We shouldn't lose hope, not at a time like this."
"It's good that Ashen's started going back to school so quickly," Walter said after a moment. "I thought he'd need more time to collect himself."
Nora nodded. "It is a good thing. He should be around the people he cares about — his friends — more than us. We only just entered his life, so I think he should take whatever time he needs to feel comfortable around us." Her voice carried the kind of quiet, genuine care a mother might use after watching her child limp through a hard day.
"Yeah," Walter said. "It really is a good thing."
They sat with that small comfort a while longer, neither of them knowing that comfort was the one thing not currently available in the building where Ashen actually was.
At school, none of it looked the way Walter and Nora imagined.
Ashen now carried dark circles under his eyes and a distance that kept people from drifting too close. No one crowded him. His teachers didn't push him for missing work, didn't wake him when he dozed off mid-lesson — they all knew what he was going through, and no one wanted to be the one who disturbed it. He sat at his desk, lost somewhere behind his own eyes, when Charlie dropped into the seat beside him, Jimmy right after.
"Hey, Ashen. How's it going, dude?" Charlie asked, chirpy as always. Jimmy didn't say anything in particular, just kept his gaze on Ashen the way a friend does when he's listening for something underneath the silence.
Ashen looked at them, managed something like a smile, and went back to staring at his notebook.
"What does the number three mean?" Jimmy asked, looking down at the page. "Why have you written it all over?"
"What?" Ashen said, genuinely startled. "When did I write this?"
He had, in fact, scrawled the number three across two full pages without once noticing himself do it. He hadn't been thinking about it — but apparently some part of him had refused to stop.
"You okay? Why are you writing three all over the page?" Jimmy asked again.
Ashen dragged his tired eyes up to meet him. "I don't know. Just doodling, I guess. Guess three's my favorite number now."
Jimmy accepted that easily enough. "Oh, okay. Not a problem." But Charlie's eyes stayed on Ashen and the notebook a beat longer, something faintly suspicious behind them.
A couple of hours later, Ashen was called to the principal's office. He rose with visible effort, and every head in the room turned to watch him go.
Why is everyone looking at me like that — it's irritating, he thought. He wasn't angry, exactly. Just tired in a way that had no clean word for it, a way you could only endure.
He walked the hallways slowly, steadily — the same rooms, the same color scheme, the same light switches he'd passed a thousand times before — and still nothing felt like it was in the right place. A hollow feeling rose in his chest, clear and undeniable, and he kept walking anyway, ignoring it as best he could.
"May I come in?" he asked, knocking on the principal's door. His hair sat uncombed, like the effort of fixing it had felt pointless; his face was gloomy, the dark circles obvious to anyone who remembered how he used to look.
"Come in!" a voice called from inside.
"Yes, Mrs. Evelyn? You called for me?"
She was seated at her desk, looking over some papers. When she saw him, she waved him toward the chair.
Ashen crossed the room and sat on the small sofa positioned at its center, looking at her with open confusion.
"I asked you here to discuss something," she said, her voice gentle. "I know you're going through a rough time, and I know how you must be feeling." She kept talking, and Ashen sat close, listening without interrupting.
"The board and I have decided to offer you a scholarship — so you can finish school without any fear of financial strain."
His face, expressionless since morning, cracked into something like genuine shock.
"But — why?" His voice shook slightly. "I mean — thank you. Thank you very much." He said it with as much gratitude as he could fit into the words.
The principal looked at him and gave a small chuckle. "If I can't do at least this much for my students, I have no right to call myself a teacher." Her voice didn't waver.
They talked a little longer, and afterward Ashen returned to class.
The rest of the school day passed quickly, and by evening most of Ashen's friends were still at the field, staying late for the upcoming interschool competition, practicing while the light went orange and low.
"Guys, what should we do — I'm bored," Jamson said, the most dramatic member of the group by a wide margin.
"What do you even want to do? Can't you just sit still for once?" Jimmy shot back, half-joking.
The two of them fell into their usual back-and-forth while Arnold kept running his drills a short distance away. Ashen drifted over and sat down among them without quite meaning to say anything. But the silence didn't hold.
"I'm going to find them," he said. "The ones who did it. All three."
For a second, nobody spoke. Charlie's fork — he'd brought food, because Charlie always brought food — stopped halfway to his mouth.
"Find them," Jimmy repeated slowly, like the words needed to be turned over before they'd make sense. "Find them and do what, exactly?"
Ashen didn't answer right away. That silence answered for him.
"Ashen." Jamson's voice had lost all its usual theater. "Please tell me you don't mean what I think you mean."
"I mean exactly what you think I mean." His voice was calm. Too calm. "The blood of those three is the only thing that matters to me right now. I don't care how. I don't care what it costs."
Charlie set his fork down slowly, like he needed both hands free. "Ashen, that's not—"
"I don't care," Ashen said again, sharper this time.
Jimmy stood up.
"You don't care?" His voice cracked upward, disbelief chasing anger right behind it. "Do you hear yourself? You think this is one of those movies where the hero goes off, finds the bad guy, and everything just — works out? There's no music playing. There's no happy ending waiting for you at the end of this."
"Jimmy—" Charlie started.
"No." Jimmy's hands were shaking now, not from fear. "Someone had the courage to stab an old woman to death in the street. You think a person like that doesn't have the courage to do the same to a seventeen-year-old? You think you're special? You think you're going to walk up to whoever did this and just — what — make them pay, and walk away clean?"
"I don't expect to walk away clean," Ashen said quietly. "I never said that."
"Then what do you expect?" Jimmy's voice broke entirely now, grief and fury tangled into the same sound. "Because from where I'm standing, it sounds like you've already decided you don't care if you die too. And you want us to just — sit here? Watch you throw yourself at this? What do you think that would do to us? What do you think that would do to me?"
"I have to," Ashen said. "There's no other option left. I've already—"
He didn't get to finish. Jimmy's fist caught him across the jaw before the sentence landed, hard enough that Ashen staggered back into the bleacher rail behind him.
The gym went silent except for the distant squeak of a sneaker, cut short.
"What do you think you are?" Jimmy shouted, chest heaving, tears finally breaking loose down his face. "Some kind of hero from a stupid movie? Hero beats villain, hero gets the girl, everyone lives happily ever after? This is real life, you idiot! People don't come back from getting killed! Your parents didn't come back! Your grandma isn't coming back! And if you go do something insane, you won't come back either!"
"Jimmy, stop—" Charlie grabbed his arm, but Jimmy shook him off.
"No! Someone has to say it! What happens to the rest of us if something happens to you, huh? Did you even think about that? Did you think about anyone but yourself for one second?"
Ashen touched his jaw, and for a moment something raw flickered behind his eyes — not anger at Jimmy, something closer to being seen too clearly. Then it hardened back over.
"I know what I'm risking," he said, low. "I know exactly what I'm risking. But I'm doing it anyway."
"Then you're an idiot," Jimmy said, his voice cracking apart entirely now. "You're a stupid, selfish idiot, and I—"
He lunged again. Charlie caught him around the chest this time and held on, and Jamson grabbed his other arm, both of them shouting his name, trying to physically hold him back from a fight neither of them fully understood the shape of yet.
That was when Arnold's teammates noticed.
"Hey — HEY!" One of them, a tall kid named Dennis whom Ashen barely knew, was already jogging across the court, two others right behind him. "What's going on over there?"
Arnold turned from the far end of the court, saw the tangle of bodies on the bleachers, and broke into a full sprint without waiting to understand why.
"Jimmy — Jimmy!" Arnold's voice cut through as he reached them, grabbing his shoulder and wedging himself bodily between Jimmy and Ashen. "What the hell is going on?!"
"Ask him," Jimmy spat, jerking his chin toward Ashen, still fighting against Charlie and Jamson's grip, though the fight was already draining out of him, giving way to something closer to sobbing. "Ask him what he's planning to do."
Arnold looked at Ashen. Ashen looked back, jaw already darkening where Jimmy's fist had landed, and said nothing.
Dennis and the other teammates had slowed to a stop a few feet away, unsure whether they'd walked into a fight that needed breaking up or something they had no business being near at all.
"Everyone back up," Arnold said, not looking at them, his voice low and steady in a way Ashen hadn't heard from him before. "It's fine. It's handled."
It wasn't fine. Everyone in that gym knew it wasn't fine.
Jimmy had stopped struggling against Charlie's grip. He just stood there now, chest heaving, tears streaking down a face that had spent years being the one who made everyone else laugh.
"I'm not going to lose you too," Jimmy said, quieter now, wrecked. "I already know what it feels like to lose people. I'm not doing it again. Not you."
Ashen looked at him for a long moment. Something in his chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with his jaw.
"I'm sorry," he said finally. "I shouldn't have said it like that. I let my anger speak for me."
But even as the words left him, they both knew — that an apology wasn't the same as a change of mind.