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Not that I gave a shit about the square footage of this house but my surging anger and the tight confines of the space we were in had me feeling suffocated.
“Why the fuck are you staring at me like that?”
Kaliq didn’t react. He remained incredibly still and silent which felt more weighted than had he yelled back at me.
“This about the article about you being here?”
“You saw that?”
Of course he did. He kept up with every fucking detail of my life that played a role in us being here. Hopeful that at some point this nightmare of chaos would end. I had no clue if an ending was close but I did know that things had just gotten incredibly complicated.
“Did you know?” His expression was stoic while he waited for my response.
“Know what?”
“Who she is?”
“No. She didn’t tell me. I’m sure she had her reasons.”
Which left me wanting answers.
“She’s good. I wonder how she ended up here.” Kaliq’s eyes were no longer on me but fixated on his phone.
Good?
At what?
“Let me see your phone.”
I dropped the bowl on the counter not caring that milk splashed over the edge nor did I care that he hadn’t actually agreed to offer up the device. I snatched it from his hands and stared at the screen. Cadence.
My Cadence but a much younger version sat crossed-legged with an acoustic guitar in her lap. Thin arms and longer fingers cradled the sleek wood while she smiled bashfully, avoiding the camera while she strummed a melody and belted out soulful lyrics to a song I had never heard before.
It had to have been an original piece because I was well versed in music of all kinds. Not that I knew every song in every genre but this I would have known had I’d experience it before.
The lyrics told a story of love and loss. Heartbreak and contentment that this child singing them shouldn’t have had any understanding of.
“Good, right?”
The tension in my expression drew tighter and I kept my eyes on the screen, not acknowledging Kaliq. When the first video ended another began. Same small room.
One I recognized. The living room of the house she lived in now. The furniture was the same, so was the pale yellow color that coated the walls. This song was a ballad, sad and thick.
Her voice was raspy and heavy with ebbs and flows of riffs that seemed too adept and proficient for the young girl that was releasing them. This had to be years ago. Cadence couldn’t have been more than a teen.
Fifteen or sixteen if I had to guess. There was an innocence to her that no longer existed in those brown eyes of hers. She was untouched by the world’s blemishes and spoils.
“That’s her, right?”
My eyes shot up to my brother’s. He was studying me with a weird expression on his face. I only offered a tight nod.
“And she didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“You think she knew who you were?”
Did I?
