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“We don’t know anything yet,” someone else says.
“Is he alive?” I ask, and I’m scared, terrified. I yank away from the EMTs.
“I don’t know yet, m’am,” she says again. It’s easy for her to be calm, because it’s not her life, her family, that we’re talking about.
I break away and run from the bedroom, and there is a body covered by a sheet in the living room. A giant bloodstain seeps into the floor, and through the sheet, and oh my God, that is Natasha. I know it. She’d dead. I know that, too.
I pause in my tracks, and my hand is over my mouth and my breath is in my throat, and then…
Then…
“Mila?”
My sister is rushing toward me in a jacket and she smells like the cold outdoors. She grabs me tight, scooping me into a hug.
“Oh, my god,” she moans into my hair as she rocks me to and fro. “Oh my God. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
“What about Pax?” I say simply, and she pulls away and looks at me.
“I don’t know yet.”
29
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Pax
I’ve used everything.
Everything is empty.
The boxes, my heart, my soul. All of it.
I am a vessel and I have been used up. Depleted.
Now, all I can do is wait.
I am sprawled on the bed, and I’m not sitting, or lying. I’m halfway in between. I don’t have the balance to do one or the other.
I am flailing in time, in the moment. I am existing, and not much more.
I am only waiting.
For the end.
For the last thing.
It is night.
I will die at night.
It’s fitting, I decide, as the door opens and the moonlight shines in on the floor. I will die in oblivion. It’s where I belong, anyway.
“You have done well,” the man tells me as he eyes the empty pile of cardboard. He has the last one in his hands. “Are you ready to finish?”
I nod, because I am. When I am gone, nothing can hurt Mila again. She can take Zuzu and start anew somewhere, with someone who isn’t fucked up like me. I will save them by doing this.
“This is how it will work,” the man says, and he sets the box next to me. “Everything you need is in that box, including the last journal page. It will tell you what you’ve been wanting to know. After you’ve read it, you will finish it. Once it is done, I will take your daughter back to your wife. They will live happily ever after. Do you have any questions?”
