Mia notices. She never misses a thing.
The front door is unlocked. It shouldn’t be—the property management company I pay is supposed to keep it secured—but the lock was always temperamental. You had to lift and push at the same time, jiggle the handle just right. I do it without thinking, muscle memory from a thousand entries.
Inside, the house smells like dust and old wood and something faintly sweet that might be rot. Hopefully, there isn’t a dead animal in the walls, though I think my senses would pick up on it. The furniture is covered in white sheets, ghostly shapes in the dim light filtering through grimy windows. Someone has cleaned recently—no cobwebs, no animal droppings—but the emptiness is absolute, the kind that has weight to it.
Mia stands in the doorway, giving me space. She seems to understand I need to do this part alone.
I walk through the living room without stopping. Past the couch where my father used to sit after dinner, staring at nothing. Past the corner where Emma used to do her homework, tongue poking out when she concentrated. Past the spot by the fireplace where I stood the night I pushed my mother down, shaking with adrenaline and terror and something that felt horribly like satisfaction. It was in self-defense, and I never meant to push her so hard, but looking back, it was my first introduction to the darkness. I just didn’t know it at the time.
The kitchen is smaller than I remember. Everything is smaller. The counter where my mother used to lean, glass in hand, watching us with those unpredictable eyes, always cloudy with a mix of hatred—for us, but mainly for herself—and fear. The table where we ate in silence, forks scraping plates, the tension thick enough to taste. The floor where I found her body.
I stop.
My hand is gripping the doorframe. I don’t remember reaching for it.
“Nate?”
Mia’s voice comes from behind me, soft and careful. I feel her approach more than hear it—the slight change in air pressure, the warmth of another body, the comfort of another soul. I’m not alone now.
“She died right there.” I nod toward the spot by the refrigerator. The linoleum has been replaced since then—different pattern, lighter color—but I know the exact location, could draw it blindfolded. “I was twenty. Home on leave. Found her when I came down for breakfast.”
Mia doesn’t ask who. She already knows from our conversation at the diner. What she doesn’t know is the rest of it.
“I stood there for maybe thirty seconds before I called anyone.” My voice sounds strange, distant, like it’s coming from somewhere else. “Thirty seconds. That’s a long time when someone’s dying on the floor. Long enough to think things you shouldn’t think.”
“What did you think about?” she asks quietly.
The question sits between us. I’ve never answered it before, never told anyone about those thirty seconds, about the voice in my head that whisperedlet her stay down, about the relief that flooded through me before the guilt crashed in to drown it. That I was almost happy it was finally all over—until the reality hit me, the reality that I lost my mom and never had one to begin with.
“I thought—” My throat closes. I try again. “I thought,it’s over.Nothelp herorcall 911. Just…it’s over. She can’t hurt anyone anymore. And then it hit me: she can’t be my mother anymore. I never got… I never had…”
The confession hangs in the air, ugly and true. I wait for Mia to recoil, to look at me differently, the way people would if they knew what kind of son stands over his dying mother and feelsrelief.
Instead, she takes my hand.
“You were a child,” she says quietly. “A child she hurt, over and over again. You’re allowed to feel complicated things about someone who hurt you.”
“I was twenty.”
“You were a child when she started. That doesn’t just go away because you got taller.”
Something cracks inside me. Not breaking, exactly—more like ice shifting on a lake, the first sign of spring thaw after a long, frozen winter.
It feels like the longest exhale.
“Come on.” I pull her gently toward the back door. “There’s something else I want to show you.”
The barn is half-collapsed, but the hayloft is still intact. We climb the old ladder—me testing each rung before letting Mia follow—and emerge into a space filled with golden light and floating dust motes.
“This is where I used to bring Emma when things got bad,” I tell her, settling onto a hay bale probably twenty years old and somehow still holding together. “We’d play up here for hours. Make-believe games, mostly. She was always the princess, I was always the knight. Very original, I know.”
Mia sits beside me, close enough that our thighs touch. The contact grounds me, keeps me from floating away into the past.
“She was pretty damn lucky to have her brother as a knight, the role you seemed born to play.”
I smile. “Yeah. Though sometimes, she made me pretend I was a princess too.”
Mia laughs. “I like her already.”
