“Yeah.” He still doesn’t look at me. “It’s still yours. Has been since the day—” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. We both know what he’s referring to. “No one’s gone in there. Other than Skylar.”
The name hits me like a clenched fist.
I look at him.
“She stayed?” My voice comes out quieter than I mean it to.
“Yeah, she stayed here for a bit after—” He stops again, choosing his words carefully. “I told her she could stay as long as she needed.” His eyes stay on the car. “But it was too hard for her. Being here. I think you were everywhere in it.”
The breath I draw in doesn’t sit right in my chest.
I hurt her so badly, yet she still stayed long enough to try.
“She still comes by sometimes,” Rainer says. “Not as often as she did at first, but she still comes to see how I’m holding up.”
I drag the back of my hand across my jaw, stare at a fixed point on the concrete floor, and breathe.
Rainer watches me for a moment. Then he does what he’s always done, giving me the out.
“Welcome home, kid.” He pats me on the shoulder, then turns and walks toward his office.
I head for the stairs and, at the top, I stop outside the door. My hand rests on the handle, and I push it open.
The room hits me all at once.
The room is the same.
My clothes are still here, folded on the shelf with a precision that was never mine. Stacked with that particular obsessive neatness Skylar carried everywhere she went, the kind you develop when you grow up in foster homes where if you don’t keep your shit together someone takes it. She washed and folded them, then stacked them here, as if keeping something of me alive while I was rotting behind bars.
I can almost see her right here in the room, breathing the same stale air, sleeping in the same bed, folding my clothes as if it were something she could do for me when she couldn’t do anything else.
I don’t stay to dwell on it.
I pull my shirt off over my head, let it drop to the floor, and head to the bathroom. The fluorescent tube hums to life, stuttering once before it catches, flooding the small space with that hard white light that makes everything look exactly as bad as it is—cracked tiles and rust bleeding down from the tap fittings in long brown streaks.
I reach in and twist the faucet.
When I step under the water, it’s too hot, and I don’t adjust it. I press one hand flat against the tile wall, bow my head, and let it burn. Across my shoulders. Down my spine. Into the muscle, bone, and all the spaces in between that have been cold for seven years.
I’ve lost everything that was ever worth a damn. And I walked away from most of it on purpose. Another mistake I’ve made. One I have to live with for the rest of my life.
Chapter 2
Skylar
The movie has been playing for forty-three minutes and I couldn’t tell you a single fucking thing about it.
Light shifts across the wall. Voices rise and fall. I’ve been staring in the general direction of the screen long enough that my eyes no longer register any of it. It’s simply background noise.
I sit curled at the end of Damien’s couch, knees tucked beneath me, wrapped in a silk robe I saved up to buy, which cost me more than anything I owned before I turned eighteen. The fabric slips off one shoulder every time I move. I used to think soft things meant safety. Silk. Clean sheets. A working lock. A kitchen with food in it, where no one screamed through the walls or counted every bite you took. A bathroom that didn’t smellof mildew and cheap bleach soaked into tiles that nobody had cleaned properly in years.
Now I know soft things can still choke you. They just do it quietly.
Today has sat wrong in my bones since I woke up this morning.
There’s no reason really.
Well, that’s what I told myself at six o’clock this morning, standing in the kitchen with my coffee turning cold in my hand, staring at the benchtop.
