I want to see you. I want you to come back. Just don’t hate me anymore.
“That’s the funny thing, Summer,” I say quietly, using the name that still makes something soft ache beneath all the broken bits. I look up at the photo above the window—her on some charity flyer, wearing a dress that costs more than this entire building, eyes hollowed out under the gloss.
“I don’t hate you,” I tell her paper face. “I never did.”
I hate Noah.
I hate the system.
I hate every person who sat in that courtroom and looked at me like I was dirt while they polished their shoes on my back.
I hate the version of her that bought the lie that she could survive without me.
But her? The girl who bit her lip until it bled trying not to cry because she thought tears would make them harder on me?
I could never hate that girl.
I sit back down, phone balanced on my knee, and finally let the voicemail run to the end without touching it.
Her breathing goes ragged.
Her voice drops to that small, shattered place I’ve only heard twice before—once when we watched the paramedics wheel our mother out, and once when she stood outside the police station and told me she couldn’t lie for me anymore.
Now she’s lying for me again.
For a different version of me.
For the story she told herself to sleep at night.
Just don’t hate me anymore.
The beep cuts her off.
Then silence.
My silence, recorded earlier, slides in over hers. The message I sent back. The one she’s already replayed enough times to carve into her bones, if the look on her face last night was anything to go by.
“I told myself I wasn’t going to pick up…”
I don’t listen to it again.
I don’t need to. I remember every syllable. Every calculated pause. Every place I let the truth leak in just enough to hurt.
I lock the screen and drop the phone next to me on the floor.
My pulse is steady now. Slow. Measured.
The first hit of hearing her voice had me feral. Laughing and swearing and pacing like some caged animal finally given blood.
Now?
Now I’m cold.
Cold is better.
Cold makes me careful.
On the wall opposite me, in between all the photos, there’s one thing that isn’t her: a floor plan. Neat lines, printed labels. I stole it from the architect’s site before they took down the listing; one of Noah’s investment properties, customised to his specifications.
