Page 64 of My Undead Love Life

“What did you do after?”

“I went home the next morning. My father was alive. He was hungover and furious. He told me I had embarrassed the family. He said Olivia was dramatic, that she’d fallen, and that I’d misunderstood.”

My fingers curled into his coat. “A simple fall couldn’t do all that.”

“No. There were fingerprints on her. I knew he’d pour whiskey at nine in the morning because that’s who he was.” Oxi’s eyes looked almost black in the dim light. “He had oxycodone in his medicine cabinet from some injury he milked for sympathy. I crushed it all into the bottle.”

My breath caught.

“He drank it and died.”

I swallowed hard at how monotoned he sounded.

“My mother knew,” he told me. “Maybe not immediately, but she knew. She chose him anyway. She chose a dead man over her own son. She called the police and told them I’d been unstable for years. She told them that I was violent, delusional, and dangerous. She said I’d attacked my father the night before and then poisoned him the next morning to finish the job.”

My mouth fell open. “You were arrested?”

He nodded once. “At the house. There were officers in the foyer I’d walked through my entire life. My mother stood on the stairs, watching them cuff me. She didn’t cry. She didn’t even look angry. She looked inconvenienced.”

A burning hot anger rose in my chest.

“My grandmother got me a lawyer and bailed me out within a few days,” he continued. “But the Oxford name is its own kind of prison. My mother didn’t want a public trial dragging every ugly truth into the light. So, she arranged for doctors, paid experts, and bribed private evaluations. Suddenly, I wasn’t a son who had protected his sister. I was mentally unstable. A threat to myself and others.”

“That’s bullshit,” I bit out.

His eyes returned to mine. “It was effective bullshit.”

My chest hurt at the acceptance in his green eyes. “Effective how?”

“They sent me to a private psychiatric facility for two years,” he muttered. “It was expensive. Beautiful grounds. The kind of place rich families use when they want to hide a problem and call it treatment.”

The wind moved between us, slipping beneath my coat, but I barely felt it now. “What happened to Olivia?”

“At first, she wrote to me.” The softness in his voice nearly broke me.

“She did?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Small letters with her messy handwriting. She’d tell me about school, about the nurses at the hospital, and about the roses Grandma sent her. She drew stars and bows in the margins because she knew I liked them. She kept saying she missed me and kept asking when I was coming home.”

Tears burned my eyes again.

“I wrote back every time. I told her none of it was her fault. I told her I loved her. I told her I’d come home as soon as I could.” His throat bobbed. “Then, the letters changed.”

“How?”

“They got shorter. Colder. She stopped drawing stars, and she stopped asking when I was coming home.” His mouth twisted with pain. “Then, she wrote that Mom said I had hurt Dad because I was sick. That Mom said I scared everyone. That Mom said Olivia needed to stop confusing herself by remembering things wrong.”

“Oh my God.”

“She was a child,” he whispered. “A hurt, frightened child stuck in that house with my mother pouring poison in her ear every day. And I was locked away where I couldn’t protect her anymore.”

I cupped the back of his coat in both hands, holding on like I could somehow anchor him to the present.

“She stopped writing after six months,” he muttered. “I kept writing her anyway. Birthdays. Holidays. Random days of the week. I don’t know if she ever got them, but she never responded.”

“What happened in the facility?”

He breathed out slowly. “I learned how to be quiet. If I said the wrong thing, it would be written down and used as proof that I was unstable. I couldn’t give them that. Anger made people afraid of me, and grief made them pity me. Neither one got me out.”