Page 166 of Pucked Around and Found Out

There is still work. There is always still work.

So why does it feel like the ground just shifted under everything?

When I pull up to the mansion, I sit in the car for a moment and just look at it. Home. The word doesn't fit, no matter how many times I try to make it. It's too big and too loud and it reeks of ambition that was never mine to begin with. This was his dream, built to his scale, designed to his ego. I've been living inside someone else's vision for so long I forgot to ask whether I ever wanted any of it.

Why am I still fighting for something I never wanted?

The question follows me inside. Past my men, up the stairs, left at the landing and straight to the room I always end up in when I don't know where else to go.

My sister's room.

There is a specific quality to this stillness that is different from the ones I'm used to. The stillness before a kill is clean and purposeful. The stillness in Em's room is grief-shaped, hollowed out, defined by absence. This is neither.

This is the stillness of a man who just made a choice and is now inside its consequences.

She walked away on her own feet. I watched her do it. I did not call after her. Did not close the distance. Did not say the thing that has been sitting in my throat and every conversation before it.

I didn't say it.

I have been not-saying it for so long that it has calcified inside me, turned from something alive into something geological. Part of the structure. The thought of removing it is more frightening to me than anything I have faced in two years of deliberate, methodical violence.

That is a specific kind of cowardice.

I know that. I'm looking at it directly, standing in my sister’s room in my wet clothes, and I'm naming it accurately.

She told me she loved me in a warehouse with a blade at her throat.

She told me on a beach near where my sister died.

And I stood there and said nothing and watched her drive away and told myself it was the right choice.

I reach into my pocket. The ultrasound. I have been carrying it like a wound for days. I look at it and I let myself see it clearly for the first time. Not as a complication. Not as evidence of a mistake.

My kid.

The thought lands in a different place than it has before.

My kid.

She's gone and she's carrying my kid and I let her walk because I am more afraid of the softness required to keep her than I have ever been of the violence required to destroy things.

That is also a specific kind of cowardice.

I put the scan back in my pocket.

It is considerable.

It is the worst thing I have felt since Em.

I was not expecting that.

I used to be able to stand here and feel her. Some ghost of her warmth, some echo that hadn't faded yet. I used to close my eyes and almost believe she was just down the hall. That if I stayed still enough and quiet enough, I could hold onto the shape of her.

But tonight when I step inside, there's nothing.

Just walls. Just furniture. Just the hollow silence of a room that used to mean something.

I look around… really look, maybe for the first time in two years and I see it clearly. This isn't a bedroom anymore.