Daniel shook his head. He seemed torn up by thoughts burning behind his eyes.
“Emily,” he said, sounding like a man confessing something dark. Like cheating. Or worse. Something that might get him killed if he said the wrong thing. At this point, anything felt possible. The woman in the basement. Or maybe I really was some violent lunatic. Maybe I stabbed dogs. Maybe I’d hurt someone next. A deranged woman, like the ones in movies with titles that give the twist away.
Silence fell over the room. Even Mochi was quiet.
“Emily,” Daniel said again. His voice cracked.
“No,” Hudson warned. “You can’t. It’s too much.”
This seemed to hit. Daniel turned his head slowly, then looked right at me. “We...need to leave,” he finally said. Clearly hiding what he was really about to say.
At that simple sentence, something inside me snapped. Maybe because it meant I was no longer someone whom my husband trusted with the truth. Or maybe I was just at a breaking point.
Either way, it felt like betrayal.
“I’ll stay.” That was all I said. Short. Cold.
Daniel stared at me like I’d smacked him.
“Goddamn it, Emily!” he suddenly screamed.
In a burst of rage, he grabbed the kitchen chair and hurled it across the room. It slammed into the cabinets with a deafening crash. Doors flew open. Cups shattered as they hit the tile floor, exploding into countless white shards.
Mochi launched off my shoulder, his feathers hitting my face as he took off into the hallway.
My heart heaved into my ribs. The whole thing felt like a scene from a domestic violence movie.
What. The. Fuck.
Who was this man?
I stared at him, stunned, barely breathing.
In an instant, his body language shifted. His hands flew up, palms out, like he was trying to undo what had just happened.
“Honey, I’m sorry, I—”
“Fuck off,” I said and stormed after Mochi.
If this was his idea of keeping me from going full Jane Eyre attic woman and burning the place down, it wasn’t working. I was shaking with rage. But beneath that, I felt heartbreak.
How could he?
He was all I had left—him and my bird. And now it felt like even that was slipping away.
“Mochi?” I called out, my voice soft and sweet—the kind of sweet that was fake as hell because I was one second away from crying.
“Monster,” Mochi answered from somewhere down the hall. “Monsters. All of them.”
I followed the voice into the library and spotted him on one of the bookshelves. He was too high for me to reach. His message was clear: Stay away.
“You’re right,” I said quietly, reaching out my hand anyway. “That was bad. Really, really bad.”
Down the hall, Daniel and Hudson were arguing again. Their voices came in waves, but I tuned them out.
“Come here, Mochi,” I whispered.
“Monsters,” he repeated, pacing along the shelf like a frantic little sentry. His feathers puffed. His eyes darted. He was scared.
