Page 88 of Lethal in Pink

On the other side, I reassemble myself. Boots laced, belt threaded, phone in hand. The post-security ritual is the closest thing modern travel has to a religious cleansing—the hurried reclamation of dignity, one article of clothing at a time.

I shoulder my bag and walk toward the gate.

Fourteen hours in the air. I drop into the exit row, stretch my legs into the empty expanse of the bulkhead, and pull the safety belt tight across my lap. The engines spool up with a deep, structural groan that vibrates right through the aluminum frame. We lift off over the sprawl of Los Angeles—a grid of orange sodium lights blurred by the coastal haze—and then there is nothing beneath us but an endless, featureless sheet of gray cloud over the Pacific.

I stare at the blank seat-back screen. The reflection looking back at me is hollow-eyed and unshaven, a guy running on caffeine and eight time zones of dread.

The secret feels heavier up here at thirty thousand feet than it did on the ground. Down there, it was just a choice—a piece of biographical baggage I left packed away because I wanted one corner of my life that wasn’t audited by a board of directors. Up here, it’s a ticking clock. Amiyah thinks she’s dating a sarcastic grad student with a complicated family and a bad sleep schedule. She has no idea that the man holding her in airport terminals is sitting on a trust fund large enough to buy out her entire university.

The plane banks east, chasing the sun across the dateline. Below us, the ocean is dark, vast, and entirely indifferent. I close my eyes, and all I see is the exact shade of her hair against the cream fabric of her dress, waiting for me to finally stop lying.

Chapter thirty-one

Amiyah

Four days into winter break and my apartment smells like stale takeout and the inescapable funk of someone who has decided that showering is, at best, an optional courtesy to the general public.

The blinds are drawn. Not with purpose, not with any real intention to regulate light or maintain privacy—they’re just pulled. Someone did that, and that someone was me, but the memory of doing it exists in the same vague, underwater territory as everything else that’s happened since I dropped Jae at the airport and drove home with the windows down and my knuckles white around the steering wheel.

The TV has been running for ninety-six consecutive hours. I know this because next month's power bill is going to read like a fucking ransom note, and I will pay it without complaint because the alternative is silence, and silence, at this precise moment in my life, would be fatal.

The takeout containers have formed a small, greasy archipelago on the coffee table. A paper bag from In-N-Out, crumpled and translucent with grease, sits beside a half-empty cup of milk tea from the place on Westwood, the tapioca pearls swollen and sad at the bottom of the straw. Next to it, an open box of garlic noodles from the noodle shop down the street, the noodles congealed into a single, gelatinous slab. I’ve been eating directly from the cartons with a plastic fork that bends if you look at it wrong. I haven’t washed a single dish; an empty dishwasher gapes in the dim light, its stainless steel door gleaming with silent, accusatory disappointment.

The fairy lights threaded through my white canopy bed are dimmed to their lowest setting—a warm, amber glow that turns the bedroom into something that would photograph well for a lifestyle blog and feels, in practice, like being trapped inside a sad birthday candle. I haven’t turned them off because the switch is on the far wall and that’s approximately eleven feet of walking I haven’t been able to justify.

The espresso machine is the only thing in the kitchen showing any signs of life. I’ve been using it to heat water for instant ramen. A dry, unused portafilter sits locked in its cradle, a monument to better days when I cared about things like crema and extraction time. Now it’s a glorified electric kettle, and we both know it.

I finished the prestige crime drama in forty-eight hours. Twelve episodes, eight hours of sleep total, one bag of sour gummy worms consumed in a single sitting while the protagonist’s marriage fell apart in high-definition slow motion. I took notes. Not real notes—mental ones, the kind my brain generates automatically when presented with legal procedure, even fictional legal procedure rendered by actors who’ve clearly never set foot in a courthouse. The chain of custody errors alone would have gotten the entire case thrown out in a real courtroom. The prosecutor’s closing argument contained at least three material misstatements of fact. I found myself yelling at the screen at three in the morning, my voice hoarse and cracked, addressing a fictional district attorney who could not hear me and would not have cared if he could.

The reality competition show was worse. Two full seasons of eighteen contestants building elaborate structures out of household objects while judges with British accents delivered critiques so devastating they should have come with trigger warnings. I developed theories. Elaborate, unhinged theories about production interference and favoritism and the specific contestant—a graphic designer from Milwaukee with an asymmetrical haircut—who was clearly being set up as the season’s villain despite being objectively, mathematically superior to everyone else in the cast. I composed a seventeen-point manifesto in my head about judging criteria and left it there, trapped in the echo chamber of my own skull, because there was no one to send it to.

And then there’s the documentary.

Competitive dog grooming. Two hours of extremely serious people trimming poodles into geometric shapes while a somber voiceover discusses the historical significance of the continental clip. I have watched it twice. I will not be acknowledging this fact to anyone, ever, under any circumstances. The second viewing was not a choice. It was a surrender. The poodles won.

My notebooks sit closed on the dining table in a neat, color-coded stack. Property Law. Constitutional Theory. Advanced Civil Procedure. Their spines are uncracked. The pages inside are virgin territory, the margins empty of my precise, neurotic annotations. I look at them from the sectional and they look back at me, and the mutual understanding between us is that we are currently in a cold war and I am losing.

The encrypted journal—the one living in the false bottom of my nightstand drawer, holding operational notes that cannot exist anywhere digital—remains untouched. The lock hasn’t been cycled. The pen rests exactly where I left it, capped and aligned parallel to the edge of the drawer. It’s been four days. The journal should have at least two entries by now—routine maintenance, if nothing else. The silence of the blank pages is, itself, a kind of data.

The diffusers cycle through vanilla and cherry blossom on a timer I forgot to override. Every ninety minutes, the living room fills with a burst of synthetic sweetness that lasts approximately seven minutes before fading back into the baseline odor of neglect. It’s like living inside a Bath & Body Works having a nervous breakdown.

My skincare routine is still happening.

All eleven minutes of it, down to the exact, exhausting sequence. I know it’s pathetic. I am acutely, painfully aware that pacing in front of a mirror and double-cleansing a face that hasn't seen fresh air in six days is the textbook definition of a psychological tailspin. But the alternative is sitting still, and sitting still means letting the silence rush in.

At 9:17 PM, I drag myself off the sectional and force my leaden legs toward the bathroom. I flip on the light and stare straight into the glass, letting the glare turn my reflection into a coroner’s exhibit. I go through the motions—oil cleanser, foam cleanser, sixty seconds of counting, toning, pressing serum into skin—because the products don't require me to feel anything. They just require obedience.

I stare at my reflection when it’s over. The skin is dewy, plump, and entirely fraudulent. The woman looking back at me is meticulously maintained on the outside and hollowed out by a panic she doesn’t have the vocabulary to fix. I’ve spent my entire life building an armor out of control, and it turns out I have zero idea what to do when someone slips right past it and leaves behind an ache I can't scrub off.

The far corner of the sectional is undisturbed.

The throw pillow rests perfectly placed against the armrest. Fluffed. Centered. Untouched.

Jae would have been sitting there. His long legs stretched out, one ankle crossed over the other, his shoulder pressed into the corner cushion with the unconscious entitlement of someone who treats furniture like it exists solely for his comfort. He would have had opinions about the prestige crime drama. He would have been objectively, provably wrong about the graphic designer from Milwaukee. He would have made some dry observation about the poodle documentary that would have made me laugh despite my best efforts not to, and then I would have hit him with a throw pillow, and he would have caught it one-handed without looking, and then we would have argued about something else entirely, and the apartment would have felt like a place where people lived instead of a set I’m slowly decaying inside of.

I don’t look at the corner directly. I pick up the remote instead. I scroll through the streaming menu for seventeen minutes without selecting anything, the blue light of the screen washing over my face in rhythmic pulses, and then I land on a nature documentary about deep-sea creatures and press play without reading the description.

The narrator’s voice is British and soothing. The footage is beautiful and meaningless. A jellyfish pulses across the screen, translucent and alien, and I think, That’s what I feel like. A gelatinous blob drifting through the abyssal zone, propelled by currents I neither understand nor control.