Ed comes out first, limping slightly. He looks like a man who has been through something definitive—pale, careful with his movements, one arm in a sling. But he’s upright, and he’s weirdly composed.
If Dario wasn’t next to him, I’d grab his throat and never let go.
I was panicked and disoriented before. Didn’t think clearly. Couldn’t see my target. But I see it now. I know exactly how I’d kill him now.
I trust that Dario has him under control, but it takes a monumental effort not to do it anyway.
When Ed’s eyes find Opal on the couch, he does something I didn’t anticipate. He takes a chair from the side of the room, swings it over, and sits down, positioning himself at her eye level in the deliberate, respectful way adults use when they want a child to feel attended to rather than spoken to. He looks at her. “Hey, kid. Remember me from the park?”
Opal looks at him. The weighing look—the forty-year-old look. Then nods. “Your arm looks bad.”
“I owe you and your mom an apology. What happened tonight—” He glances at me, and in the glance is something I don’t have the bandwidth to fully decode right now. “It was a stupid prank that went way, way too far. I scared you, and I scared your mom, and I’m sorry for that. Genuinely. I didn’t mean to at all.”
Opal considers this. The tilted head. The slight narrowing of the eyes. “A prank.”
“A stupid one,” he says. “I don’t recommend it.”
She thinks about it for a moment. “Pranks don’t have guns.”
“No,” he says. He doesn’t qualify it or look for an angle. “They don’t. That was the stupidest part. I didn’t think about that ahead of time, and—” He raises his arm, wincing. “I paid for that.”
Another beat of assessment. “Does your arm hurt?”
“A lot.”
Her tiny glare cuts me. “Good.”
Even Ed’s surprised. Then he laughs. “Yeah. That’ll teach me.”
“Guns are bad.” She looks at his arm, then at his face. “Dario fixed it, though.”
“He did,” Ed says. “He’s a very good man.”
“He fixes everything,” Opal says. Then she looks up at me. Her eyes are too old for her face. They have been too old since the first fever that wouldn’t break. “I need to sleep.”
I start to shift her weight. “Okay, baby?—”
But then she looks at Ed one more time, her head tilted with an expression I can’t fully read. “You probably need to sleep too. You look like it’s past your bedtime.”
She climbs down and goes to her room. Her door clicks shut.
He exhales. “She’s a tough one. You’re gonna have your hands full?—”
“Of your throat if you don’t get the fuck out of my home right the fuck now.”
He swallows. “Yes, ma’am.”
Dario walks Ed out. I hear the front door. The lock. Silence.
More pain rushes in. Some of it is physical. Not all of it. I sit on the couch alone and breathe for a moment. Then I get up.
No Dario. He must have left with Ed. I don’t know if he left to kill him somewhere else or what, but at least there’s quiet for now.
I drift through the halls. Not sure why I don’t just go to bed, other than I’m too wired to sleep, and I know it. I’d probably just lie there and vibrate. So, I drift.
Dario’s office door is open. The light is on. I stand in the doorway.
The room is clean. Not cleaned—clean, in the way a room is clean when nothing has happened in it. The desk is bare. No instruments. No blood on the floor. No evidence, not even a smell, of the things I know were in this room forty minutes ago.
