I remember your voice. I remember your smell. I remember your hands on my face like you never left.
I laugh under my breath, harsh and low.
“You lied in court better than that, little sister,” I say to the ceiling, to the shrine, to the ghost of the girl who used to sit at the end of my bed with paint on her fingers and ask me what freedom tasted like.
She tasted like it.
That’s the fucking problem.
The message plays through to the middle, to the part I can’t stop rewinding even though every time it hits, it digs into places prison didn’t manage to rot.
I’ve spent four years pretending I forgot you when all I did was fucking drown in you.
My hand curls into a fist on my thigh.
The scars across my knuckles go white.
She doesn’t even realise what she’s giving me. How every word she spills into my voicemail is another thread I can wrap around her throat. How confession is just another kind of collar.
I loved you so much it felt like dying.
“That makes two of us,” I murmur, voice flat, eyes still closed.
My thumb drags across the screen.
I don’t need to watch the little bar crawl along the bottom. I already know every pause. Every breath. Every crack in her voice. I could recite it back to her word for fucking word, hold her jaw open and feed her own guilt down her throat until she chokes.
The recording jumps, her voice softer, shredded at the edges.
No. No, that’s a lie. I still love you.
There.
That’s the line.
That’s the one that took me from wanting to haunt her life to deciding I’m going to fucking dismantle it.
I open my eyes.
The room looks smaller now. Closer. The edges of everything sharper in the low light from the phone.
“I still love you,” I repeat, letting the words drag over my tongue like I’m tasting them. “You have no idea what you’ve just done, Scar.”
The voicemail goes on. Her explaining herself to the empty room like I’m not pressed against the walls of her mind already.Like I haven’t been living in that head for four fucking years while she tried to bury me.
I lied in that courtroom because I thought it would save you.
My lip curls.
I push off the wall, restless, pacing the small strip of floor that isn’t drowned in paper. The boards creak under my boots. The radiator ticks. A car goes past outside and fades into nothing.
She thought she was saving me.
She stood there in that too-big blazer, hands shaking around the Bible, voice cracking, eyes begging me to understand while she put a bullet through everything we were.
I watched her sell me out with tears on her lashes.
I watched the judge look at her like she was some tragic little angel who’d survived the monster in the defendant’s chair.
