Dante.
My almost lover. The boy who took my virginity. The one who could’ve been if life had gone differently.
Then, anger.
While I was dealing with packing up memories of my mother today, Caiden had decided to go to a bar and drink. It didn’t surprise me that he didn’t answer my text. He was probably too fucked up to even check his phone or remember that he needed to pick me up once I was done.
I know he was dealing with his own ghosts, but it hurt how selfish he could be.
The text sat there, blue and unread, as if it were caught on a wire, unable to cross the last inch to my brain.
I felt nothing at first but the jangle of longing and shame, which was its own sort of nostalgia. I wiped at my cheeks, knowing I was a mess, knowing he would remember me this way — salt-streaked, raw, the girl who never learned how to exit a room without breaking something.
If I’d been a different sort of person—a normal one, the kind who knows how to say “thank you” or “it’s good to hear from you, even now”—I might have responded with something like gratitude.
Instead, I stared at his message, feeling all the old, bad electricity running through my chest, and typed.
Not doing great. If you’re serious, you can come get me. At my mother’s house. Don’t want to be here. Caiden is not answering. I think you know the address?
He responded instantly.
Give me twenty. I remember the way.
33
AMELIA
Seven yearsold
The walls in our house were thin, so when you put your ear against them, you could hear anything.
Sometimes I’d do it, just to see if I could hear what the grown-ups were really saying, but tonight it was just big thumps and giggles and the music Mom only played when she was on a good one.
There was a man with her again. Not Glenn this time, someone with a cough that sounded like a truck engine.
Lillian had locked herself in our room, so the rest of the house was all mine.
I opened the silverware drawer and took a butter knife, just in case I needed a weapon.
My hands were always cold in the winter, and the knife slid from my grip, clattering to the floor.
I winced, froze, and waited for Mom to scream at me from her bedroom throne.
Nothing.
Maybe the knife had landed in a parallel universe, maybe I had.
I crept to the edge of the hallway, holding the butter knife in front of me like a tiny sword.
The man’s voice was a low grumble, just words rolling together, until he said something that made Mom squeal, “You’re so bad,” and then the sound of skin on skin, slapping, made me drop the knife again.
This time I didn’t pick it up.
Instead, I went to the window and breathed on the glass, watching my breath silver over until I couldn’t see through it anymore. I drew a smiley face with my finger and wished it would freeze there, permanent, so no one could scrape it clean.
The next time I listened at the wall, I heard something even worse. Not yelling or crying, but the slow, rhythmic thumping of the bed against plaster, a sound you could almost mistake for the washing machine if the washing machine also made Mom giggle and say “oh fuck, oh fuck.”
The man with her grunted like a bear. The whole house felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for something to break.
