I moved it closer to the edge of the desk, where it couldn’t be missed, then twisted the cap shut with more force than necessary. The sound snapped through the room.
That’s when I saw it—a flash of white at the edge of my vision.
A single, tri-folded piece of paper sat diagonally across my desk, weighed down by my stapler.
Annoyance burned hot through my bloodstream.
I kept my office locked for a reason. I didn’t like people messing with my shit, and I certainly didn’t like receiving letters when something could’ve been a fucking email. I didn’t want to interact with anybody I didn’t have to.
Setting the stapler aside, I unfolded the paper and smoothed it flat against the desk.
My spine went rigid against the back of my chair, jaw ticking.
Some fires don’t stay buried.
My thumb pressed harder into the edge of the paper, just enough to crease it.
…Shit.
6
ARCHIE
Ididn’t think of myself as particularly brave.
That’s something people liked to say when you survived something quietly.
But surviving isn’t the same as being unafraid.
It just meant I learned which parts of myself weren’t allowed to move.
My mother taught me that.
Not on purpose.
She wouldhatethe idea that she passed anything broken on to me. But when Abel disappeared, fear moved into our house and never left, and I learned early that loving someone doesn’t mean you can save them.
You can’t love someone’s trauma away.
You can only love them with it—on good days, bad days, and the long nothing days in between.
I got really good at that.
I learned how to be calm when she wasn’t. How to shrink my needs down to something manageable. How to exist in ways that didn’t ask her to follow me out into the world.
Iloved my mother… but loving her always felt too much like pretending I wasn’t hurt. Like pretending nothing was missing. Like agreeing, over and over again, that the house was safer than everything outside it.
It was safer forher.
For me, it felt like standing in a room where the air never moved.
Like if I stayed too long, I’d forget what breathing felt like anywhere else.
Thatwas why I struggled to visit. Every time I went home, I felt myself reverting into the version of me who learned how to survive someone else’s fear instead of his own grief.
My childhood home was my prison, and none of the trauma courses I’d taken so far could tell me how to deal with how fucked up I felt each time I visited.
Mom’s house was yellow in an aggressively optimistic way, with white trim and a porch that looked like it belonged in a stock photo labeledSafe Suburb, Spring. There were bikes leaned against mailboxes up and down the street, chalk still smudged into the sidewalk from some kid’s abandoned hopscotch grid.
