Elle Harper Hayden
New chapters, announcements, and the occasional happy cry over here. If you love a heroine who's finally seen — and villains who don't get away with it — you're in the right place. 🌙🤍
Unburning | Chapter 54 | Clarity
Unburning: Chapter 54 Missed a chapter? Click here to see previous chapters! ✦ ✦ ✦ [CLARITY] It’s a terrible kiss. His nose hits mine first. Then his mouth lands half on the corner of mine and half on my chin. Everything in me wants to pull back, and I don’t, because pulling back is the one thing a girl who snuck out to meet her boyfriend wouldn’t do. So I stay where he put me, crooked, and outside the window somebody starts to laugh. I’m twisted halfway across the gearshift with one hand...
Unburning | Chapter 53 | Robin
Unburning: Chapter 53 Missed a chapter? Click here to see previous episodes! ✦ ✦ ✦ At five to nine there are seventeen of us behind the mess hall, along with a stranger wearing khaki pants and a long-sleeved grey t-shirt. He's standing off by himself at the edge of the light from the kitchen door, dressed like any of the brothers on a work day, with short salt and pepper hair and a craggy, weathered face. Forty-five, maybe fifty. He hasn't eaten a single meal with us, I’d recognize him. Silas...
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Unburning | Chapter 51 | Robin
Unburning: Chapter 51 Missed a chapter? Click here to see previous episodes! ✦ ✦ ✦ [ROBIN] Tuesday at breakfast nobody sits in Whelan’s chair. It’s at the end of the table by the window, and it has been his since the first night, and the guys coming through the line with their trays look at it and go around it and sit somewhere else. Callahan salts his eggs before he tastes them as usual. Tran eats like he's starving. Pete has his schedule flat on the table next to his tray and is reading it...
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Unburning | Chapter 50 | Clarity
Unburning: Chapter 50 Missed a chapter? Click here to see every episode. ✦ ✦ ✦ Chapter 50 — CLARITY On Monday morning I text Paige before I can talk myself out of it. Going to be at the house tomorrow helping Esther with the swamp cooler. Stay for lunch? It's the first thing I've sent her in a month. Every other message between us since then has been hers, sitting unopened or answered a day late with two words. I put the phone face-down on the counter and go rinse the kettle so I have...
Unburning | Chapter 45
Unburning: Chapter 45 | Robin Missed a chapter? Click here to see previous episodes. ✦ ✦ ✦ [ROBIN] Monday runs on bells. Drill at six, which is Father Vaughn and the hill, and the hill is at least as long as it was when I was thirteen. He runs it with us, even though he’s maybe sixty, at the back of the group, encouraging whoever is dying the loudest. By today, the second day, he knows all eighteen of our names, and he uses them every time he talks to us, first names, even at six in the...
Unburning | Chapter 46 | Clarity
Unburning: Chapter 46 Missed a chapter? Click here to see previous episodes. ✦ ✦ ✦ [CLARITY] The text comes right on time on Tuesday, and I read it twice because the first time leaves a taste like soap in my mouth, bitter and thin. Remember the family friend I told you about, who was like a father to me? Silas? He’s here too. It’s great. Silas Locke is at that camp. All month. The man who can read Robin across a room is going to have a month of rooms to do it in. And It’s great. means just...
Unburning | Chapter 47 | Robin
Unburning: Chapter 47 ✦ ✦ ✦ [ROBIN] Eighteen of us show up to drill on Thursday. Vaughn’s at the bottom of the hill counting heads without making a production of it, and I feel myself doing it too — that hope you don’t want to look at directly — as we come out of the hall in twos and threes and nobody’s missing. He doesn’t say anything about it. He says good morning, Robin, good morning, Gabe, and sends us up the hill. Nobody mentions last night at breakfast, and it seems odd but also...
Locked
Unburning | Chapter 49 | Robin
Unburning: Chapter 49 ✦ ✦ ✦ [ROBIN] On Sunday, no one is running the hill. The bell goes off an hour late and half the hall sleeps through it anyway. Mass isn’t until mid-morning, with the amber windows glowing in the morning sun, closer to honey than tea, and Father Vaughn says it without hurrying. At the end he adds a blessing for fathers, because it’s Father’s Day, and that’s the first time I’ve thought of it. After Mass everybody scatters. There’s nothing on the schedule but meals for the...
Unburning | Chapter 47 | Robin
Unburning: Chapter 47 [ROBIN] Eighteen of us show up to drill on Thursday. Vaughn’s at the bottom of the hill counting heads without making a production of it, and I feel myself doing it too — that hope you don’t want to look at directly — as we come out of the hall in twos and threes and nobody’s missing. He doesn’t say anything about it. He says good morning, Robin, good morning, Gabe, and sends us up the hill. Nobody mentions last night at breakfast, and it seems odd but also inevitable....
New chapters, announcements, and the occasional happy cry over here. If you love a heroine who's finally seen — and villains who don't get away with it — you're in the right place. 🌙🤍