I don’t deserve her. I never did.
“Reth, please,” Sophia pleads on the other side of the door.
You’re going to hurt her, sweet boy.
I scream. “Leave me the fuck alone!”
And the craving detonates.
19
RETH
Ian comes in without knocking. Seven days in, and they don't lock the door anymore.
I notice it the way I notice most things lately—slowly, a half-beat behind everyone else, the recognition arriving after the fact instead of in the moment it should. The lock used to click every night around the same hour, Sophia or Ian doing it without comment, and I never said anything about it because some part of me wanted it locked. Needed the door to do the deciding I couldn't trust myself to do.
Three nights ago, nobody locked it.
I didn't notice until yesterday morning, my hand finding the handle out of habit, testing it the way I'd tested it every day since the driveway, and it just turned. No resistance. No click of a mechanism that wasn't there to begin with.
I stood in that doorway a long time. Just looking at the hallway like it might still be a trick.
Seven days.
The shaking's gone now, mostly—what's left is something quieter, a tremor that only shows up when I'm tired, or when I haven't eaten, or when I let myself think too long about anything that happened before.
My legs hold my weight without complaint. My stomach's stopped rejecting food outright, even if nothing tastes like much of anything yet. The doctor calls this progress. Calls it the body remembering how to be a body again.
Then there’s the other thing. The flatness. The way the mountain outside this window used to look like something worth standing in front of and now just look like scenery, technically beautiful, registering nowhere.
There’s a clinical term for it. Anhedonia. Like the word itself is supposed to make it easier to carry. Like naming a thing changes what it weighs.
It doesn't.
What's changed is smaller than that. Quieter. The cravings used to announce themselves—loud, physical, a hum at the base of my skull. Now it’s more of a vibration than a noise, a feeling that never fully shuts off. But it changes by the hour. Sometimes it’s easy to get through it. Sometimes it’s not.
What hasn't changed is the guilt.
If anything, it's gotten louder the quieter everything else got, like it was always going to be the last thing standing once the noise cleared out around it.
When I close my eyes, I still see her standing in the corner—the wrong version, the ruined one, hair dark and wet, the gap in her throat that breathes when nothing in that room should still be breathing.
She doesn't come every night anymore. That's supposed to be progress too.But when she does, she still looks surprised. Still looks at me like I'm the one thing in her life she didn't see coming.
I didn’t kill her. I know it’s true the way I know my own name is true—Ian's told me, more than once, gentle and certain, that the footage showed Valeria's hands and nobody else's. I believe him the way you believe a fact someone else witnessed for you. Secondhand. Borrowed.
It doesn't reach the place in me that was standing in that room when it happened, the place that still remembers blood on my hands and can't fully separate whose blood it was or how it got there.
Knowing the truth and believing it in your body are two different things. Nobody tells you that until you're the one trying to do both at once and failing at the second one nightly.
"Brought you coffee." Ian places my cup on the table.
"I didn't ask for coffee." The flatness has me acting like a dick.
"I know. That's what makes it a gift and not a transaction." He sits, takes a sip from his own mug, watching me over the rim. "You gonna come sit down, or are we doing the brooding-silhouette-against-the-window thing again? Because I gotta tell you, the lighting's good, very dramatic, but I'm starting to feel like I'm in a perfume commercial nobody asked for."
I don’t respond.
