“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be.” I turned toward the parking lot. “Let’s go home.”
We walked. Side by side, in silence, our heels clicking against the pavement in a rhythm that sounded like a retreat march. I felt hollowed out – emptied of the adrenaline that had fueled the invasion, left with nothing but the dull, heavy residue of having tried and failed. The blue dress that had felt like armor this morning now felt like a costume from a play I’d been removed from mid-performance.
Sable drove. The car pulled out of the lot and onto the road, and the glass tower shrank in the rearview mirror until it was just another building, just another rectangle of light and ambition, no different from the hundred others that lined the skyline. Except it was different, because somewhere inside it, in an office I’d never seen, a man I’d kissed on the cheek twelve hours ago had looked at a phone and said: I don’t have a wife.
I pressed my forehead against the window. The glass was cool. The city scrolled past in a blur of color and motion – other people’s lives, other people’s evenings, other people’s uncomplicated commutes home from uncomplicated days. I envied them with a ferocity that surprised me.
Why had he done it? The question circled my brain like a bird that couldn’t find a place to land. Was he ashamed of me? Was he protecting some image? Was the man who left roses on my bed and notes that said “sunshine” a different creature entirely from the man who sat in that glass tower and denied my existence to a receptionist?
The questions had no answers, and the absence of answers was its own kind of pain.
We arrived home. The apartment building rose before us, tall and gleaming and indifferent, and I felt the bitter irony of returning to the cage I’d tried to escape from this morning – not to leave Caelum, but to find him, and finding instead that he didn’t want to be found. By me.
Inside, the apartment was silent in the way expensive places are silent – not peacefully, but expensively, the silence of thick walls and good insulation and the total absence of anything resembling life. I walked to my room without speaking. Sable followed. At the door, she didn’t ask if I was okay – she’d learned, in these few days, that the question itself could be a cruelty when the answer was obvious.
Instead, she reached for the earrings I was still wearing. Her fingers were gentle against my neck as she unclasped the necklace, removed the jewelry piece by piece, and set them on the vanity with the careful attention of someone handling relics. A small kindness. The kind that breaks you faster than any cruelty could.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice sounded far away.
She nodded. Touched my shoulder once. And left.
I stood in the room. The blue dress. The sensible heels. The perfume I’d applied at my wrists and behind my ears, the way my mother taught me. All of it – the preparation, the hope, the image in the mirror of a woman who looked ready – felt like a joke someone had told at my expense.
I showered. The water was too hot, and I let it be. I dressed in the oldest, softest clothes I owned – a t-shirt from high school, sweatpants with a hole in the knee – and crawled into bed with the determination of someone who intended to sleep until the world improved or ended, whichever came first.
My eyes were closing. The pillow was cool. Sleep was reaching for me with both hands, and I was reaching back-
My phone buzzed.
I groaned. “What now?”
I considered ignoring it. Considered hurling the phone at the wall, or into the toilet, or out the window and into the city below where it could become someone else’s problem. But the screen was already glowing in the dark room, and my eyes – traitorous, curious, incapable of leaving a notification unchecked – had already found it.
A video. From an unknown number.
My thumb hovered over the screen. Unknown numbers had brought me nothing but wreckage lately – Sterling’s texts this morning, Caelum’s initial intrusion into my life. Every unknown number was a door, and behind every door was something I hadn’t asked for.
I tapped it.
The video loaded. Buffered for one agonizing second. And then played.
The image was dark, shaky, the kind of footage captured by a phone held in an unsteady hand. But the figure in the frame – hunched, shaking, illuminated by the sickly yellow light of a room I recognized – was unmistakable.
Rowan.
My brother was on the floor. Coughing. Not the muffled, pillow-pressed coughing I’d heard through walls and pretended not to notice, but deep, wrenching, full-body coughs that bent him in half and shook his frame like a doll in a dog’s mouth. And between the coughs – bright and wrong and terrifying against the dim room – blood. Blood on his lips, his chin, his hands, the floor.
The video ended.
The room went very quiet.
And then something inside me – some last, fragile structure that had been holding everything together through the nightmares and the texts and the lobby and the denial and the long drive home – collapsed completely, and I was on my feet before I knew I was moving, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat, my hands shaking, my breath gone, my brother’s blood still glowing on the dark screen of a phone that had become, in the space of eleven seconds, the most terrifying object in the world.
“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.