“I wasn’t trying to make you forget.”
“Then what were you trying to do?”
I don’t have an answer.
I don’t have anything except the hollowed-out shell of a man.
“Get out,” she says. “Sleep somewhere else tonight. We’ll figure out the rest in the morning.”
I can’t speak.
I walk to the door on legs that don’t feel like mine, and I grip the handle. I look back at her one more time because I need to see her, need to remember the way she looks standing in my bedroom wearing my jacket with my blood under her fingernails and my love rotting between us like a corpse neither of us knows how to bury.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
I step through the door and close it behind me, and I stand in the hallway staring at the wood while my chest heaves and my hands shake and my whole body comes apart.
Then I lock the door from the outside.
Not to keep her in.
To keep the monster away.
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold marble floor with my back against her door and my head in my hands.
Inside the room, silence. She’s not crying. She’s not screaming. She’s not doing anything at all.
I sit there in the dark.
And I listen to my wifenotcrying.
And I understand, finally, what it means to destroy something you love.
ANYA - Mansion Lab, 03:14
The door isn’t locked anymore, and I don’t know when that changed, don’t know if he unlocked it an hour after he walked away or if he never locked it at all, if the whole thing was just the sound of metal clicking and my own assumptions filling in the rest.
I found out at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t stop staring at the ceiling. I got up because the walls were closing in and my skin felt too tight, and I needed to know if he’d caged me.
The brass turned under my palm, and the door swung open into darkness, and the hallway stretched empty in both directions, cold marble and silence and the faint smell of alcohol drifting up from somewhere deeper in the house.
He wasn’t there.
The floor where he’d been sitting when he closed the door, where I’d heard him slide down the wall and stay for hours while I lay in bed refusing to cry, that floor was bare and cold, and he was gone. I stood in the doorway for what felt like forever, trying to understand why his absence made me want to scream louder than his presence ever had.
I should have run.
The front door was probably unlocked too, and there were cars in the garage, and I had Luka’s passports hidden in my bra. I could have been gone before anyone noticed, could have disappeared into the night and found my brother and never looked back at this house or this man or any of the wreckage we’d made together.
I went to the lab.
* * *
The compound takes two hours to synthesize, and I have all night and nothing left to lose except the answer to a question I can’t stop asking myself: what is he, really, underneath all that violence and devotion and carefully constructed armor?
Monster or man.
