So… one exit.
Unless I include the mirror.
I laugh. Just once. It disappears into the water before it can become anything else. The mirror isn’t an exit. The mirror is a witness.
I turn and look at it through the steam. My reflection is blurred, broken apart by rivulets running down the glass. Pale face. Dark hair plastered against my skull. Eyes too large, too sharp, too aware. I look like someone who has been holding something heavy for too long without putting it down.
Door. Window. Vent. Drain. Mirror.
Five.
If I count the door, that makes six.
There. Six exits.
Brilliant. I’ve solved imprisonment through arithmetic and delusion.
I sink slowly to the shower floor. The tile is cold at first, then warms beneath the water. My knees draw up without permission. My arms wrap around them as if this is something the body understands instinctively, even if the mind refuses to acknowledge it.
The water beats against my shoulders. Then my back. Then the side of my face when I shift slightly. I can feel my skin already reddening from the heat.
I don’t move.
Six exits. In a shower.
My father would be so proud.
No. He wouldn’t.
He’d be furious.
At me. At himself.
At Dante.
At Alessandro.
I press my forehead against my knees, hard. The tile grounds me. The heat burns just enough to feel real. And then the weightcomes. Not grief. Grief would be simpler. Cleaner. Something with edges you could hold.
People talk about grief like it’s a wave. Which is how you know most of them have never experienced it properly. A wave rises. Breaks. Recedes. There’s rhythm to it. Cruel, but predictable.
This isn’t that. This is an entire structure. Load-bearing. Invisible until something cracks.
My father is dead. That’s the foundation.
Dante killed him. That’s a wall.
Alessandro knows. That’s the ceiling.
I’m inside Alessandro’s house. That’s the locked door.
I refused the exit. That’s the key I put down myself.
No metaphor survives this much structure.
I breathe in. Out. In again.
It doesn’t help.
