He kept it.
For four years.
And he’s returned it.
Inside the lid, etched in the metal, is a message that wasn’t there before:
Mine
My knees hit the stool.
My breath shatters.
And suddenly I don’t know whether I’m shaking because I’m scared…or because a part of me—the part I buried, drowned, smothered—remembers exactly what it felt like to be his.
The locket sits in my palm like a living thing.
Warm.
Heavy.
Wrong.
A piece of someone I buried being forced back into my hand like a punishment.
My thumb drags across the metal, over the tiny scratches I used to trace when I was bored, over the dent he made the night we ran into a fence trying to sneak home drunk, over the edge where my name used to be engraved before I scratched it out in a moment of anger I pretended was strength.
“Mine.”
The word might as well be carved into my skin instead of the metal.
My vision blurs, the kitchen tilting sideways again. The marble counter pulses beneath my fingertips, cool against my overheated palms. I blink hard, but the room keeps swaying, shifting like it’s made of water.
The drug hasn’t fully left me.
My body remembers it before I do.
A sour, metallic taste coats the back of my tongue. My throat feels thick, my stomach roiling dangerously close to revolt. Light throbs behind my eyes, beating in time with a headache that feels stitched into my skull.
My legs almost buckle again.
I grip the counter.
Harder.
The veins in my arms stand out.
“Get a grip,” I whisper to myself, voice cracking. “It’s just a locket. It’s just… a memory.”
A lie.
Even the house knows it’s a lie.
The air feels heavier now, as if something in the walls has shifted, like the foundation itself is holding its breath waiting for what I do next.
I look down at the locket again.
“Mine.”
