I stood up so fast the couch scraped back against the floor.
"I have to go."
"Matt, wait?—"
But I was already moving, backing toward the door before the rest of me caught up. My hands shook, my chest cinched tight, the room closing in fast. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I just knew I had to get out of there.
"Matt!"
I didn't look back.
CHAPTER 9: ELENA
Iwoke up in my childhood bedroom and, for a moment, nothing made sense.
The ceiling was wrong, as was the light. Even the smell was all wrong—old wood and lavender instead of Matt's cologne and the faint musk of the city. I blinked up at the water stain in the corner, the rabbit-shaped one I used to talk to when I was six, and waited for my brain to catch up to where my body had landed.
Then it all came back in pieces, the way terrible things always do.
The video. The kitchen. Matt’s face when the screen lit. The drive home. My father's arms around me on the porch.
I was home. Except I wasn't, not really. Home was something you built with someone, not the place you ran back to when that someone burned it down.
I sat up slowly. My body ached in that deep, bruised way that comes after a fight. Maybe that’s what last night had been… a fight I'd somehow won and lost at the same time.
My room hadn’t changed much since high school. The pale blue walls I’d picked out at fifteen were still there, back when I thought that color made me sophisticated. The white dresserstill had the chipped corner from the day I tried to rearrange everything by myself and dropped it on my foot. And on the bed lay my grandmother’s quilt, its fabric faded now, the stitches loosening the way old things do when no one’s tended to them in years.
Photos were tucked into the mirror frame. Dad and me at my vet school graduation, squinting into the sun. A prom photo of me and Matt, his hand at my waist and my head on his shoulder, two teenagers pretending they were already a forever. And Mom and me at the county fair the summer before she got sick.
I stood up and walked to the mirror. Pulled that last photo out and held it.
She was laughing. Head thrown back, cotton candy in one hand, the other arm slung around my shoulders. I was sixteen, sulky, wishing I was anywhere but at the fair with my mother. She was forty-seven and had two years left to live. Neither of us knew it.
I traced my thumb over her face. Tried to remember what her laugh sounded like. I used to know. I used to be able to hear it perfectly, play it back in my head like a recording. Now it was just... gone. Faded out like an old song you can't quite place.
She’d had a love like the one I thought I had. Thirty years with my father. The real kind. The sort of marriage that took hits, bent, but never broke. The kind where one glance across a crowded room was enough to see the person you first fell in love with, not just the years layered on top.
I thought I'd had that with Matt.
I really did.
My phone sat on the nightstand. I stared at it for a long moment before I picked it up , turned it on, and watched the notifications flood in like water through a crack in a dam.
Seventeen missed calls from Matt, twenty-three texts. Two calls from Angela.
I didn't read a single one.
I just looked at the numbers. Seventeen, twenty-three, two. Like a scoreboard for heartbreak. What could he possibly say that would matter? What combination of words existed in the English language that could undo what I'd seen on that footage?
I'm sorry. I love you. It was a mistake. Please come home.
I could write the texts myself. I didn't need to read them.
I turned the phone off again and set it face-down on the dresser. Just let it sit there like a dead thing.
The hallway smelled like coffee and bacon. I followed it downstairs, my feet remembering which steps creaked and which didn't, the muscle memory of a thousand childhood mornings. Third step from the top, skip the left side. Seventh step, hug the wall. I used to sneak down here at midnight to steal cookies, convinced I was silent as a ghost. But Mom always knew. She'd find the crumbs in my bed the next morning and just smile.
Dad was at the stove, spatula in hand, wearing the same ancient flannel robe he'd had since I was in middle school. Navy blue, fraying at the cuffs, a coffee stain on the pocket that had never come out. He looked up when I came in.
