When I get home,I drop my bag by the door and go straight to the bathroom. I don’t stop and I don’t take any detours. I turn on the tap and wash my hands. Once. Twice. A third time.
The water is hot enough to sting. It keeps me here in the moment. Keeps me grounded and reminds me I’m alive. Theritual gives me order. Control. The certainty that nothing from the outside world gets to taint me.
There’s nothing like hygiene. Although I wish I could give the ugliness of the world a good rinse.
I dry my hands carefully, hang the towel back where it belongs, and finally look at myself in the mirror. I don’t know what I see. I look the same, and yet I’m so different. My eyes are tired. The color in my face is drained. Time has not been kind to me, I think.
I walk back into the living room and sink into the armchair by the window, my body folding in on itself like it’s finally run out of instructions. The sun cuts through the room at a crooked angle, throwing a shard of half-light across the floor. It doesn’t warm so much as expose.
I draw in a slow breath. Hold it. Let it go.
This is my home. My sanctuary.
The moment I moved to the city, I took an apartment off campus. I always knew the university grounds weren’t for me—too many people, too much noise, too many shared walls and borrowed lives. I didn’t want to share my space. Didn’t want to negotiate my silences or explain my habits. I’ve gotten used to being alone.
I like it that way.
Home.Outside the window, the city hums—traffic snarling, voices rising and falling, life moving forward the way it’s supposed to. Mine moves too, technically. Classes. Articles. Days stacking neatly on top of each other.
But underneath it all, I’m standing still.
I will never have the life I want until I put my demons in the ground and make sure they stay there.
There’s still so much to do.
I open my bag and take out the envelope. I’ve looked at it athousand times or more. It’s worn at the edges, soft from handling. I smooth it flat on the table.
Three names stare back at me.
William Scott-Evans.
Marcus Delaney.
Unknown.
I read them slowly, deliberately. Let them settle into me. The first two carry weight—history, faces, records I can trace. The third is different. A gap. A deliberate absence where someone should be.
I know there was another man there that day. I can feel it in the inconsistencies, the silences stitched into the record, the way the story collapses if you look at it too closely. Someone else shaped what happened. Someone who didn’t stand in the light long enough to be named. Someone they protected. But who?
I’ve chased him through documents, transcripts, sealed filings. I’ve followed every thread I can reach, only to have it disappear in my hands. He’s not hiding—he’s been removed.
The first two are monsters I can see. The third is the one who made them possible.
I fold the envelope and slide it back into my bag, my movements slow and deliberate. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes.
I see them as they were. I see them as they are. And then I see them as they’ll be—exposed, dismantled, remembered for exactly what they did.
I’m going to dismantle their lives piece by piece. Their careers. Their families. Their legacies. I’ll make sure their names corrode long before their bodies do.
And when there’s nothing left—when they’re empty and terrified and begging for a mercy I’ll never offer them-then I’ll deliver the final blow.
This won’t be quick, because it was never meant to be.
7
JUSTIN
My father once told me you can’t kill an idea—only the people who carry it.
