My chest was tight. My heart ached, but not in a way I was used to. That box inside my chest felt like a dozen knives had been shoved into it, at all angles. Sharp, new steel that slid through my heart like the organ was thawed butter. It hurt to breathe. It was agony to exist.
Yet people did this every day. People lived with this sort of pain all the time. Here I thought I was stronger than this. Here I thought nothing could bring me down.
How wrong I’d been. It only took my dad’s corpse for me to see how blind I was.
A police car showed up, flashing its lights. The world around me grew fuzzy as a pair of cops rushed toward me. I was pretty sure I threw a thumb over my shoulder and said somethingalong the lines of, “He’s in his office.” But I couldn’t say for certain. Everything was still blurry; I could hardly think straight.
One of the officers left to check on him—but it was too late. He was dead. There was no saving him.
I thought the other officer asked me some questions, but I didn’t have answers for him. I couldn’t speak. My voice had been taken away, stolen, the moment the gravity of the situation fully hit me.
My dad was dead. He was killed while I was away. What kind of fucked-up game did this turn out to be?
EMS showed up, and they hurried in the house past me. More police came, and soon enough the house was surrounded, the driveway full of flashing lights. One of the officers put me in the back of their car, and I didn’t stop them. I couldn’t. They wanted to talk to me down at the station.
I couldn’t fight them. I couldn’t tell them to screw off. I was nearing zombie territory, barely meeting the legal definition of being alive.
The world passed me by, or maybe I passed the world by as the officer took me downtown. I didn’t say a word, not when we arrived, not as I was escorted to an interrogation room, not when that officer asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I wasn’t fully there. My mind was gone, still at that house with my dad’s body.
It wasn’t my first dead body. I’d seen much more gruesome things, much fresher bodies, and yet I knew at the time they were bad men who deserved every ounce of pain they got. Some people deserved to die. I’d never claim to be a saint.
But when it hit home, it hit differently. No one warned me. No one told me how much worse it was when the body you were looking at belonged to the only family member you had, the one who raised you, the one who tried to give you everything.
Another police officer came into the interrogation room, this one not wearing the typical police uniform. I assumed hemust’ve been some kind of detective or something, someone whose job it was to get to the bottom of crimes like this. An older gentleman nearing fifty, but he had none of the appeal that, say, Jason had.
“Before we get into things, I want to say I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Hawkins. Your father was a credit to what this city is becoming, and we’re worse off with him gone,” he started, but his niceties meant nothing to me. I didn’t know this man, so why should I give a shit about anything he said?
I stared at a spot on the metal table that had a dent. I didn’t know how a table like this could get a dent like that, but I imagined if it was created by someone’s head meeting it, it would hurt something fierce.
“I hope you understand this is just procedure. When we have a high-profile case like this, a case that’ll definitely draw national attention, we need to do it right,” he went on. “So, tell me what you were doing leading up to the moment you found your father.”
I lifted my gaze. Above the detective, in the corner of the room, was a camera with a red blinking light, pointed directly at me. Was I a suspect? Did these people think I could’ve done this? The thought was enough to enrage me.
But, with how out of it I was, that anger was futile.
There was no point in lying, so I said, “I was out last night with my boyfriend. I didn’t get home until…” I tried to think back, to what time it was when I got out of Kieran’s car. I couldn’t recall a specific time. “Maybe twelve. Or one. I showered. I was going to make something to eat, but figured I’d call my dad to let him know I was home. When I called him, I heard his phone ring in his office, so I went to check and… that’s when I found him.”
I didn’t sound like myself. It was like I was listing off things on a grocery list and not describing what I was doing when I found my dad’s body.
“And this boyfriend of yours can corroborate that? We will need his name.”
“Kieran Miller,” I said, and though I was out of it, I noticed the way the detective’s brows raised. He thankfully resisted saying anything stupid and wrote down Kieran’s name.
“Can you think of anyone who would want your father dead?”
That got me to stop staring at the camera in the corner and to gaze steadily at the man. “Are you kidding? He was the mayor. In a city like this, that puts a target on your back no matter what.” Of course, I didn’t say the one person I thought was responsible. I couldn’t. It’d make me look like I’d lost my mind—and that was probably exactly how she wanted this to play out.
The detective nodded along with me. “I’m well aware of that. Tell you what, I can get you some food to eat while we work on contacting Mr. Miller.”
All I did was shake my head and mutter, “I’m good.”
The expression the detective gave me told me a few things: the biggest one was that he felt sorry for me. The next thing was that he was not looking forward to the eye of national news being on this city. And, of course, the final thing was that he simply did not know whether or not he could trust me at my word.
As if I was the killer. As if I’d done it. The mere thought was beyond insulting, and yet I couldn’t exactly fault him for it. He didn’t know me. He was simply a cop trying to cover his bases.
He left the room, and once again I was alone. Alone in a cold, sterile room full of walls, a two-way mirror, and a camera in the upper corner recording me.
Being alone, but I didn’t really feel alone, because mentally I was back in that house, reliving the moment I turned into my dad’s office and saw him. Those few split-seconds before thewound on his chest registered in my brain, when I thought he was in there, working, before I realized he was long gone and I never got to say goodbye.
