“You love me like a headline. You love me because I made you look good and because I let you. You measure me in compliments and invitations and in the way you smiled when I said something clever at the right moment. You don’t care about my feelings, only how I make you look.
But Zane… Zane is the only reason I survived. The only reason we survived you and Dad is because we had each other. You broke him. You called him soft like it was a crime. You punished him for being human. You trained him to hate himself and tried to make me hate him too. You’re the worst kind of narcissist, making everything about you.
There’s something rotten in you, Mom. You used me the way some people use air freshener, to hide the smell of something festering in the walls. That rot is you. You preferred the illusion of a perfect child to the messy, painful work of raising one.
I pretended I was blind because it was easier. I wanted your approval the same way you wanted my loyalty. I wanted to be the son you could show off. I’m not proud of that. I’m not proud of how I traded my voice for your praise. I’m not proud of distancing myself from a brother who loves me unconditionally for a mother who only loves me under the right conditions. But don’t confuse that with forgiveness. Don’t think because I wanted your smile that I ever forgave you for what you did to him, to me, to us.
If you ever doubted how deeply I hated what you did, read this and know: I hated it enough to try and stop feeling at all. I hated you enough to want to disappear. I hated your choices. I hated your selfishness. I hated that you taught him to measure himself by your contempt and then acted surprised when he learned to despise himself.
You loved me. You loathed him. That’s the truth you live with, and one day you’ll have to hear it without excuses. Maybe it will shame you. Maybe it will make you furious. Maybe you’ll find a way to explain it away to yourself again.
But don’t ever tell me you didn’t know. Don’t let the comfortable life you built make your conscience soft. You knew. You always knew. I hope you never know peace, and I hope that, if there is a god, he’ll forgive me for not standing up to you.
Felix wiped at his tears with the back of his wrist. There was no way Avi made that up. Had Calliope been sitting on that for all these years? Why? Had Zane known?
Even the air seemed heavier, thick with the echo of Gage’s words. Poor Gage was clearly racked with guilt. When he turned back to Bev, she looked shell-shocked, like Avi had taken a baseball bat to her reality. Her lips trembled, her breath whistling through her teeth, and for the first time all night, she looked small.
“That’s quite the track record, two sons who both hate you. As someone with kids, that would break me. But if one of my boys chose to protect his brother over my ego, I’d be proud. Gage was going to cut you out of his life and choose Zane. You made his life miserable with your impossible expectations. Do you really think he’d love you knowing how you treated his only brother?”
“Half-brother,” she spat through clenched teeth. “And you’re lying. I know you are.”
Felix huffed out a laugh he didn’t feel. “You don’t know, though. Do you? I’d say pretty soon you’ll be able to ask him yourself, but I’m almost positive you’re not landing in the same place. If heaven is real, then I imagine eternity with you is hell…especially to someone like Gage.”
She blinked hard and a tear tracked through the grime on her face. “You didn’t even know him. You’re—you’re just making it up.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Bev,” Avi said in a sing-song voice. “Denial right til the very end.”
“Zane knew him. Zane loved him. Zane cared about him so much that he talked to him every day after he died. Right up until Zane met Asa,” Felix said. “And it’s funny — I never really believed in ghosts. Maybe in the abstract, sure. But after seeing what grief does to someone who loved him, I think Gage chose to keep protecting Zane even in death, because you wouldn’t let him do it while he lived. When Zane met Asa, Gage knew he could move on.”
“If there is life after death, I’ll haunt you all,” she said, but the words were weak, brittle.
Avi rolled his eyes. “No, you won’t. The world is going to forget you. Most of it already has.” He kicked at a coil of wire on the floor; it skittered uselessly. “Most people were lucky not to know you at all.”
Felix scoffed. “Besides, when we’re done with you, there won’t be enough left of you to even scrounge up a corpse, bitch.”
The statement hung in the air while Bev started to realize she was at the beginning of the end.
Avi began to pace, the soles of his shoes whispering across concrete. “Meanwhile, Zane will only become more loved, more adored, more famous…more rich. Maybe he’ll even reach out to his real father. You said he didn’t want Zane, but I’m willing to bet that’s a fucking lie. But even if it’s not, it doesn’t matter. Zane has us. A huge family who loves and adores him.”
Felix imagined Zane—his soft, sweet boy—slowly relearning his own value inside the house they’d built around him. Felix felt that steady, warm boom of love whenever he pictured Zane curled into their bed, sleeping under the weight of their protection.
“Is this how you sick freaks get off? Torturing an old woman?” Bev spat, voice small and brittle with outrage. Her words trembled on the edges.
Avi tapped his finger on the tarp. “We have all sorts of ways to entertain ourselves,” he said, lounging like a bored predator. “We used to play a game called ‘Let’s kill Bev.’ Think Pictionary but more fun. We would amuse ourselves thinking of all the ways we might kill you. Tossing you off a cliff, dropping you into a wildfire, eaten alive by those giant crabs on that one island. We’d drink champagne and eat leftovers in our underwear and when the game ended, we’d all take turns fucking your son.”
Bev physically recoiled.
Avi grinned, unrepentant. “Oh, sorry. Is that TMI?”
She shuddered. Felix hid a smile.
Avi floated closer. “The point I’m making, Bev, is yes—this is how we get off. By punishing shitty people. We aren’t ageist or sexist about it. If you’re a rotten person, we off you. That’s it—nothing else factors in. And we’ve been waiting to kill you for a long, long, long time. So we plan to savor every second.”
Bev’s eyes started to swim. Her bravado thinned.
Avi snapped his fingers. “I was beginning to think Dad would never greenlight your death, that you were just a permanent thorn in our side. But then you ran to the press, hoping to blackmail us for more money?—”
“You got Zane,” she spat. “If he’s so great, why shouldn’t I be compensated? I made him. I raised him.”
