“You.” The word was flat. Final. A stone dropped into still water. “He said, ‘I want to see Marlowe.’ Just like that. No greeting, no preamble, no acknowledgment that the last time anyone in this family heard his name it was attached to a phone call that made his sister cry so hard she couldn’t breathe. Just: I want to see Marlowe.”
My fists clenched at my sides. The nails bit into my palms.
“What did you tell him?”
“What do you think I told him?” Rowan’s eyes met mine with the fierce protectiveness that had been his default setting since the day our parents died and he became, overnight, the only wall between me and the world. That look – I’d seen it a thousand times. When the bank called about the mortgage. When the school counselor asked if everything was okay at home. When Sterling first came to dinner and Rowan sat across the table watching him with the quiet, assessing attention of a man cataloging threat levels. “I told him to get off my property. Told him you’d moved on. Told him that if he knew what was good for his health, he’d do the same and never come back.”
“And he left?”
Rowan hesitated. The hesitation was a crack, and through it I could see something he hadn’t wanted to show me – something that complicated the narrative of righteous fury he’d been constructing.
“Not immediately.” His voice dropped. “When I turned to go inside, he grabbed my arm. And when I turned back around…” He paused. His eyes went to the ceiling, as though the memory was projected there, unavoidable. “He was crying.”
“Crying.” I repeated the word with the flat disbelief of someone being told that water had started flowing uphill. Sterling crying. Sterling, whose emotional range historically spanned from “smug” to “smugger.” Sterling, who had once told me that crying was a manipulation tactic used by weak people. That Sterling.
“Real tears. Actual, physical tears running down his face.” Rowan’s expression twisted – a cocktail of disgust, bewilderment, and something more complicated. The reluctant, unwanted pity of a decent man watching an indecent one fall apart, and not knowing whether the performance was real or just a better-quality forgery. “He begged me to tell him where you were. Said he’d made a mistake. Said he couldn’t live without you. Said he’d do anything.”
“Anything.” The word snagged on something in my memory – Sterling in the hospital lobby, arms around me, saying the same thing. I’ll do anything just to see you. At the time, I’d heard it as desperation. Now, replayed against Rowan’s account, it sounded like something else. A thesis statement. A declaration of method.
“I almost – for about half a second – I almost felt sorry for him,” Rowan admitted, and the admission seemed to cost him something. “But I know what he did to you. I was in the next room that night, Marlowe. I heard you on the phone. I heard you crying – not the quiet kind, the kind that shakes the walls. Sterling’s tears don’t cancel yours. They don’t even come close.”
The sentence landed in my chest and stayed there, warm and fierce and permanent.
“So I pushed his hands off me,” Rowan continued. “Went inside. Slammed the door hard enough to rattle the frame. End of story – or so I thought.” He paused. His eyes went distant, traveling backward to a place he clearly wished he’d never been. “I went back to the couch. The TV was still on – some cooking show, didn’t even register what they were making. I was trying to forget about it, trying to let the noise wash it out of my head. And then I heard something.”
“What kind of something?”
“From your room. Upstairs.” His voice had dropped to nearly a whisper, and the whispering wasn’t for effect – it was involuntary, as if the memory itself demanded hushed tones. “Like something falling. Or someone moving. A sound that didn’t belong in a house where I was the only person.”
A chill descended through me – not metaphorically. A physical coldness, starting at the base of my skull and tracking down my spine with the precision of a fingertip on a map.
“I grabbed the baseball bat from the hallway closet.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face – brief, nostalgic, entirely inappropriate for the circumstances. “The one Dad gave me when I was twelve. Aluminum. Louisville Slugger. Still swings fine.” The smile evaporated. “I went upstairs. Pushed your door open slowly, one hand on the bat, expecting – I don’t know. A burglar. A raccoon. Something I could swing at.”
“And?”
“Empty. Completely empty. Everything in its place – your old bookshelf, the desk, the posters you never took down. I checked the closet, under the bed, behind the door. Nothing. Not a soul.”
“But?”
“But the window was open.” He said it quietly, as though the sentence was a door he was reluctant to unlock. “Not wide. Just a crack. An inch, maybe less. I didn’t think much of it – old house, old windows, I figured I’d left it ajar the last time I aired the room out.”
The window. My bedroom window. Second floor, east wall, accessible only by the ivy trellis that Dad had built for Mom’s climbing roses – the trellis that Sterling had seen on every visit, that he’d remarked on once (“Cute. Like a ladder to your room”), that I’d laughed off as a joke.
It wasn’t a joke. It was a route.
“And then,” Rowan said, and for the first time his voice trembled – genuinely trembled, the tremor of a man reliving a moment when his body stopped obeying his brain, “I couldn’t breathe.”
He stopped talking. The machines beeped. The oxygen hissed. I waited, because the silence was his to break, and some stories need their pauses the way music needs its rests.
“It was like-” He searched for the comparison. “Imagine someone vacuuming all the air out of a room. Not gradually. Not like altitude, not like asthma. All at once. Like a switch being thrown. One second I was standing there with the bat in my hand, and the next my lungs were just… gone. Replaced with something solid. The pain – Marlowe, the pain-” His eyes closed. The monitor beeped faster. “Like my ribs were being pressed inward by invisible hands. Like my chest was a room and someone was inside it, pushing the walls together.”
I was gripping the bed rail so hard my knuckles had turned to marble. My nails were leaving crescents in my palms deep enough to last for hours.
“I dropped the bat. I went down. Hands and knees on your bedroom floor – the same floor where you used to sit and read, the same floor where I taught you to play cards when you were six – and I was trying to breathe, and nothing was coming, and I could feel my vision going, darkness eating the edges like a burn spreading through paper.”
“Rowan-“
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.