Page 96 of Boardroom Mask

“Hours, I think. I don’t know. It felt like hours. Then I heard footsteps. and when I looked out… He walked right past the closet carrying her. Her head was hanging back and her eyes were closed and her mouth was a little bit open and she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t moving at all.”

“Kir…”

He starts to rub the tip of his finger around the rim of his glass, again and again. “He took her out the front door. I stayed in the closet. I told myself he was taking her to the hospital, the pills were medicine, Dad loves Mom,Dad loves Mom.I even started to believe that—until he came back.”

A keening wail begins to rise up from Kir’s finger on the glass. It sounds like a ghost crying. “When he did, I saw that his shirt and hands were muddy and covered in blood. He looked like he’d been digging.”

“What did you do?”

“I kicked the door open. Asked him what he did to her.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to go back to bed.”

My eyebrows lift. “That’s it?”

“I pressed as much as I could. I told him I saw. I told him I saw him crush the pills. I told him I saw him carry her out. He said she was very sick and she was in a lot of pain and that I didn’t understand. I said I understood fine. I said he killed her.”

“Did he deny it?”

He shakes his head. “No. No, he didn’t. He just looked at me and said I’d understand when I was older.”

I feel sick in a way I’ve never felt before. Sick from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. But we’re at a treacherous moment, and he needs me right now. So I ask, “Do you? Understand, I mean?”

Kir nods. “Yeah. I do.” He throws back the last dregs of his liquor. “I understand that my mother wanted to leave him, and so my father decided that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could. That’s how he works. He doesn’t let go. He’d rather destroy something than watch it walk away from him.” He plunks the glass back down. “She was the purest thing I’ve ever had in my cursed fucking life, and he took her away. Maybe we could’ve found a way past that—I don’t know how, but maybe—if he hadn’t then spent the next two decades erasing every trace of her. He closed up the house and burned every photograph. He made sure she was gone for good.”

My throat aches, but not only for the obvious reasons. There’s something in me that recognizes the guilt that Lukas must feel—because I’ve erased things, too. A hidden photo album labeledTax Docs 2019hides my greatest shame.

I know what it’s like to bury someone who’s still alive.

And before I can think about it, before I can weigh the words or wonder why they’re coming out shaped this way, I ask, “What do you think she’d say if she could see you now?”

It’s a strange question. I know it the second it leaves my mouth. A good reporter would askWhat happened nextorWhere is she buriedorDo you have proof for what you’re saying.

But then again, the question is not really about Elena.

It’s about a hospital bracelet on a tiny, chubby wrist. A little girl whose hair must be red, though I can’t possibly know for sure. It’s about whether I did the right thing.

Kir goes completely still. For a long time, he doesn’t speak, move, or breathe, and I mirror him.

Then he sets the glass down, pushes his chair back, and stands. “She’d say I waited too long to avenge her.”

He walks away. The window opens.

And Kir melts into the night.

38

JILLIAN

“Hail Mary, forgive me / Blood for blood, hearts beating”

— “King for a Day” by Pierce the Veil

I wake up with my cheek stuck to the kitchen table and a crick in my neck that feels permanent. The apartment is gray and cold, an icy, pungent wind trickling through the open window. The whiskey bottle is still out, both glasses where we left them, his empty, mine half-full. My phone says 4:28 A.M.

I don’t remember falling asleep here. I remember Kir leaving through the window, and I remember pouring myself another drink, and I remember putting my head down for just a second.