There were dead men here. They didn’t attack him in our bed. They knew he’d be ready for that. Last week, when I changed the sheets, I found an arsenal beneath his side of the mattress. So, that was smart of them.
They thought his medical office wouldn’t be ready for an attack. They thought wrong.
I don’t know why he was in there, until I remember the breaker panel is in there. Probably in case his medical equipment trips one when he’s in the middle of surgery or something. So he was checking the breakers when they attacked. Nothing less would have kept him from protecting us.
And then they died. I know it in my gut the way I know the sun will rise in two hours, give or take.
The floor is clean. The surfaces are their usual organized selves. The waste bin is empty. Like it never happened.
I wish he could clean me out just as thoroughly, so I could pretend it never happened. But it did.
I stand in the doorway of this room and feel cold from the inside out. Not afraid. Not angry. Just cold. I get it now. I know why hewanted to relocate. When he says things are going wrong, this is what he means. This is the depth of the machinery underneath the life I’ve been living for the past three months.
Rooms I was never in. Things handled in ways I never knew about. Evidence erased so completely that the evening begins to feel unreal, begins to feel like something I dreamed.
But my hands still shake. They crave the feel of Ed’s throat giving way against my palms. I’ve never felt bloodlust before, but I think that’s what this is.
Opal told my attacker that it was past his bedtime.
My daughter. My five-year-old. Who threw her beloved books at an armed man in the dark and screamed for Dario while she tried to save me.
And she did.
She distracted him long enough for me to gain an advantage. But it’s dumb luck that he was shot instead of me. Or Opal.
A wave of nausea nearly takes my feet out from under me.
I let myself feel it—the full weight of what tonight was and what it almost was and what it says about the world my daughter has been living in for the past three months, even if she didn’t know it. I let myself feel it for thirty seconds, which is all I allow myself, and then I put it where I put things I’m not going to fall apart over.
I need to talk to Dario. Right now. But he’s gone.
I double-check every room, just in case. Balcony, empty. Kitchen, empty. Hallway, his keys missing from the hook.
That’s almost more eerie than anything else. He left without a word.
Maybe ghosts are real.
I go back to the living room, and I sit on the couch, and I know what I have to do when he comes home, and I hate it. I hate it completely, but I’m going to do it anyway.
Opal shouldn’t have had to throw books and scream for help. She shouldn’t need to tell my attacker to go to bed. She shouldn’t have to tell him she’s glad his gunshot wound hurts.
But I’m glad she did all of that.
I sit, and I wait for the sound of Dario’s key in his door. And it is his door. His penthouse. His home. I’ve been thinking about it like this is ours, and that was a mistake. His world can’t be mine.
I think about the version of tonight that didn’t happen. The one where we didn’t win the game. The one where we all ended up dead. Or worse.
I stop thinking about it. I’ve given it the moment it requires, and now I’m done with it. Can’t keep thinking about that. It didn’t happen that way, and I won’t let fear run my life anymore.
What I think about instead is the clean office. The complete, perfect, impeccable erasure of everything that happened in it. The penthouse that looks perfect on paper, just like Dario.
Dr. Dario Spinelli. The man who heals people. The man with too much money and good looks, who made an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I said yes.
There’s no version of this life where tonight doesn’t happen again eventually. There’s no version where Opal isn’t in proximity to this, where the infrastructure of it isn’t in the walls of wherever we live. I can love him—and I do, I know I do, I’ve known for weeks—and still understand that loving someone doesn’t change what they are or the world they inhabit.
Loving my uncle didn’t make him stop being connected. Didn’t stop them from taking him out.
