Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 29 of 60

Eduardo walked home from the bunker with the date fixed in his head. Thirty days. He carried the ledger under his arm and did not stop until his porch was in sight. The house sagged the way it always had. Cracked walls. Broken windows boarded from the inside. A roof that gave up shingles when the wind pushed hard. He sat on the step and opened the ledger to a clean page. He wrote the date at the top and underlined it. He knew the problem before he finished the line. Guardian Noble wanted proof. Not a story. Proof that Eduardo had kept the rules for thirty days without a witness at his shoulder every hour. No one lived here. No one watched him at night. He could write anything on the page and no one could call it a lie except him. He thought of Kiersten then. He did not push the memory down. He let it come. He saw the kitchen in the old house. She sat at the table eating a piece of hard candy. He had asked her three times that week where she had been. She had answered three times the same way. He asked again. She said the same thing. He crossed the room and took her arm and squeezed until her hand opened. The candy hit the floor. She said his name. She said it was sour, that was all, it was a sour candy, please. He kept squeezing until she cried. He said sorry that night. He said sorry the next morning. The week after that he did it again. He sat on the broken step and understood why. He had wanted her to prove something she could not prove. He had wanted a witness inside her mouth. He had wanted her to hand him certainty so he would not have to trust her. Every sorry had been a way of clearing the ledger so he could spend against it again. He closed the book. He would not lie to Guardian Noble the way he had lied to her. He stood and walked inside and pulled a nail from the doorframe. He drove it into the wall beside the stove at chest height. Then he tore a strip from the back of the ledger and wrote on it in block letters. RULES KEPT TODAY. He hung the strip on the nail. Each night he would write the date beneath. If he broke a rule, he would write that too, in his own hand, and carry the paper to the tea house and to Aldric and to Guardian Noble himself. The witness would be his own writing against his own name. If he cheated the page, the page would still exist, and he would know. He lit the lamp. He wrote the first date. Day one. He signed it.