“He, um—” My voice cracks again, and shame rises fast, bubbling and frothing inside me. I’m a grown man, yet I can’t form a single, complete fucking sentence. “He beat me. Regularly.”
She pauses, her gaze steady on me. “You told me you were always on alert. Locking yourself in the closet, even when he wasn’t home.”
A sharp discomfort coils in my spine, like thorns scraping under the skin. I shift in the chair, pulling my back away from it, suddenly too aware of every inch of my body. “Yes. Because I was scared.”
My jaw twitches, tightening painfully. My eyes lock onto a point ahead of me, refusing to move. “I didn’t want him to find me. And one day, I was looking out the window, terrified he’dcome back, and I didn’t notice how far I leaned out. My hands slipped, and I fell.”
The words spill from me—the same story I’ve already shared with her—but this time they feel heavier, as if they carry more weight than before. Something pierces from beneath them, making them taste even more acidic on my tongue.
“Where was your mother, Dante?” she asks, her words thin and trembling, threaded with tears. I can’t bring myself to look at her. I can only feel the faint shiver running through her body, her unease rising in perfect sync with mine.
I shake my head before I can stop myself, and the sensation strikes me like needles piercing through my skin from the inside out. The old, dangerous itch awakens beneath the surface, urging me to rip myself open, to claw the truth out of my own flesh.
“She was home,” I manage, clinging to the frayed scraps of memory. Each piece is jagged, embedded deep in the folds of my mind, and speaking them aloud feels like pulling them out one by one—each removal ripping open a wider, bloodier wound. “She came to my room to ask how I was doing, and I got scared, so I?—”
My vision darkens at the edges, closing in like a shutter, and my hands tremble violently. The rest of the memory tries to surface, but it feels like shards of glass pushing deeper into my skull, grinding as they go. The longer I hold them in, the more the wounds rot, festering in the dark.
But I can’t say it. I can’t. Not when everything inside me is collapsing.
“You weren’t looking out the window because you were scared of when your father would come home,” she says, each word pulled through her own pain. “You were doing it because?—”
“No.” The protest slips out, barely a whisper, soaked in uncertainty. “It’s not true.”
“You heard her coming into your roomagain,” she continues, despite my shaking head, “and you panicked.”
My chest tightens, then seizes while air turns to shards in my throat. My breathing spirals into rapid, jagged gulps. I squeeze my eyes shut, but the memories don’t disappear—they rearrange themselves, falling into place like puzzle pieces that have been waiting too long for someone to notice them.
My head keeps shaking, desperate to stay inside the cocoon of denial I’ve wrapped around myself for years. My mind refuses to let me understand what my body has always remembered.
“You panicked because you didn’t want her to take control again,” Estella whispers. “You didn’t want her to put out the fire your father lit—the heat you’d learned to survive—only for her to freeze it, turning it into shards of ice that sliced through your veins.”
Every word hits with the force of a hammer, breaking through the barricades inside my skull. With each impact, another jagged fragment falls away, revealing more of the wounds beneath—ugly, raw, and far too familiar.
“That’s why you always need control, Dante,” she says, a sob rattling through her. “Because you can’t bear the thought of feeling what she made you feel whenshetouchedyou.”
The final shard rips free, dragging its serrated edge through every hidden corner of my mind. The shock spreads through my body in violent, crackling waves. And then, the clean picture snaps into focus, untouched by time. A memory quietly preserved in the back of my mind, waiting for someone to wipe the dust away.
My father beat me. Regularly. He locked me in a cage to ‘make me stronger’, to shape me into the man he believed Ishould be. The pain became routine, even bearable. My skin broke, but inside I grew numb. So numb I couldn’t move.
And that’s whenshecame into my room.
“I couldn’t make her stop,” I choke out, a breathless, broken chuckle trembling in my chest. There’s no humor in it—just the hollow, dry echo of what I felt the first time she did it. “I thought she wanted to comfort me, but then it started to feel so strange, and I couldn’t… Fuck, I couldn’t…I can’t breathe.”
My knees crash against the floor, the impact sending a violent shudder through the room, but my body barely registers it. A scream claws at my throat, desperate to escape, but the only sound that comes out is a thin, strangled sob as the last pieces of me splinter apart.
Her arms wrap around me instantly, pulling me into her as she sinks with me, collapsing to the ground like the weight of my confession has dragged us both under. Her tears slide into my hair, mingling with the tremors rippling through me.
She holds me as I crumble, piece by piece, our hearts finding the same aching rhythm—a duet written in misery, carried on shared breath. Her warmth is the only thing anchoring me, the single thread tethering me to the present while my mind forces the memory to replay in brutal, unforgiving loops, drowning out everything else.
My hands wind into her hair, gripping desperately, clinging to the only anchor in the world that can steady me. I bury myself in it, inhaling her as if she’s the only air left that won’t cut my lungs.
We fall together, our skin burning with the heat of everything we’ve tried to outrun. The wildfire cracks open inside us, raging fast and merciless, consuming every corner of the darkness we’ve carried for far too long.
The night absorbs it all—the grief, the shame, the sorrow bleeding from our pores—and holds it for us.
And when the fragile dawn finally rises within us, it will find us still bound together, forever intertwined in the place where pain has finally met its match.
There’s a precise limit to the amount of truth our bodies and minds can endure before shattering completely. It took me hours just to stop reminding myself to breathe, to pry myself off Estella’s lap and stand on my own.
