Sometimes, he’d swing by the house just to pick me up and let me sit on the bike while the engine idled, one arm wrappedaround me as he told me stories about the road. He smelled of oil, leather, and something warm. Safe.
That was before everything cracked. Before Mom died. Before the drinks became a second language and the debts piled high enough to bury us both.
Now the bikes just sound a warning. A countdown.
I should’ve never come today. All it did was remind me of how far gone he is. How I’ve been trying to outrun this legacy my whole damn life, only to get pulled back in again and again.
I’m not part of their world. I’m just the leftover damage.
But I think about James’s hug. Maggie’s cinnamon rolls. Even Sloane, who barely knows me but looked at me as if I mattered. As if I was seen.
And Malachi.
The way he watched me as if I was something worth wanting. Something worth knowing.
I hate that part. That I felt it. That I wanted it.
I exhale through my teeth and turn onto my street, forcing myself to shove the longing down deep where it can’t hurt me. But as I pull into the driveway, that quiet little ache refuses to go away.
It lingers in my chest, a bruise echoing with every breath.
When I get home and step into that cold, hollow house taking the stairs two at a time, already reaching for my key, everything inside me halts.
My bedroom door is splintered.
Not cracked. Not chipped.
Splintered.
The rhythm in my head halts. Silence swells, a scream in disguise.
The doorframe is warped where the lock used to hold tight. Jagged wood juts out, broken teeth exposed. The cheap deadboltI installed myself hangs uselessly from the knob, twisted at an angle that tells me exactly what happened.
He kicked it in.
I stand there, frozen, one hand still on the banister. My heart slams against my ribs, a dull roar pounding in my ears.
It wasn’t just a door.
It was a line.
It was the one thing I thought I could protect—my space, my things, my money.
The day he first pawned our TV, I knew something in him had shifted.
It wasn’t a nice TV, just a secondhand flat screen James helped him haul in when I was twelve. But it was ours. We’d watch old action movies, karate tournaments, reruns ofWalker, Texas Ranger.It was the one place we still met in the middle. Him with his beer, me with a bowl of cereal on the floor.
When I came home from school and saw the empty wall, I knew. He didn’t even try to hide it. Just said we “didn’t need it right now.”
That night, I went to the hardware store and bought a deadbolt with the tip money I’d been hoarding in a shoebox under my bed. I spent the whole night installing it, sweating in silence while he snored on the couch. Then I pulled up two of the floorboards, cleared out a space, and hid the lockbox I’d bought with Ruby at a pawn shop across town.
My room became the only safe place I had. Now, that safety is shattered.
The doorframe is ruined. The deadbolt hangs crooked, torn from the splintered wood. And the box?
Wide open. Empty.
The cash, the thousands I spent months scraping together, is gone.
