No one tells you that grief can be an ending.
They dress it up instead—talk about time and healing and resilience like they’re instructions printed neatly on the side of a box. Like grief is something you pass through, something with a clear exit. But grief doesn’t move you forward. It buries you alive, grain by grain, until you forget the shape of your own breath and mistake suffocation for living.
For some people, death would be easier than being left behind.
I was twelve the night everything ended. Missy was sixteen. Older. Braver. Already everything I wanted to be. She walked like the world made sense to her, like nothing could knock her off balance. She laughed loud. She took up space. She didn’t know that the ugliness of the world could rearrange your entire being.
Her death didn’t shatter our family all at once. It started quietly. With silence. The kind that creeps into corners and spreads like mold. The kind that doesn’t scream or rage—it justsettles.
We were a loving, working-class family once. With chippedplates and second-hand furniture. A mother who could turn fifty dollars into a week’s worth of dinners if she planned carefully enough. We didn’t have much, but we had each other. And that was supposed to be enough.
Until it wasn’t.
After Missy, my parents stopped eating at the same table. My father blamed my mother for letting us walk home. My mother blamed my father for not picking us up. And I blamed myself. I still do.
We became ghosts in our own house, drifting past one another without ever really touching. My mother cried until her voice gave out, and when tears stopped working, she drank. Whatever dulled the edges enough that she didn’t have to hear the sound of her own grief echoing back at her.
I spent the next year keeping her alive.
Pouring bottles down the sink. Lifting her off the bathroom floor. Cooking eggs she never ate. Doing homework at the foot of her bed so the house wouldn’t feel so empty. Soshewouldn’t feel so empty. Until she drowned herself at the bottom of a bottle.
The paramedics said she slipped into unconsciousness before her heart stopped. They said it was peaceful. Nothing about our lives had been peaceful.
My father tried to hold on after that. Tried to be strong. But grief doesn’t negotiate. It crushes what’s left of you slowly, methodically. He left a few weeks later without leaving a note. Without a goodbye. He never once looked back.
After that, I went to live with an aunt.
I learned how to live small. Quiet. Invisible. Because the world had already taken everything loud and beautiful from me, and I wasn’t willing to offer it anything else.
I poured what I had left into school. Into law. Into justice. Into the lie that if I studied hard enough, I could make thingsright. That the world might give something back if I proved I deserved it.
I’ve spent years chasing justice in my mind.
But secretly?
I’ve always wanted vengeance. The kind Missy deserved.
Every time I think about her pain, my chest locks up until breathing feels optional. Panic takes me without warning, dragging me under like a rip current. I hear her screams even though I never heard them. My body remembers what my mind refuses to touch.
I don’t trust easily. People. Promises. Systems. In one way or another, they all failed her. Failed me. Failed our family. The world abandoned Missy and called it even.
I did everything right. Or close enough that it felt like I did. I smiled until my jaw hurt. I kept my heart open when instinct told me to shut it tight. I trusted systems built by people who never had to crawl through them.
And still—fate found me.
It found the softest part of me and bit down until something vital snapped.
And that’s why I’m here tonight—sitting in a rental car with the engine off, hands loose in my lap, watching the street through the windshield and waiting for my next move.
Marcus Delaney, it turns out, is predictable.
That’s the thing about men like him. They mistake routine for protection. They move through the world convinced that repetition equals safety—that if nothing has gone wrong yet, nothing ever will. He’ll show up. He always does. He’ll slow, glance around once—maybe twice—just enough to satisfy himself that the world is behaving as expected. And then he’ll proceed, certain the universe exists to place women in his path for him to use and discard without consequence.
I didn’t find him at the Slay Pen. That turned out to be adead end, a glossy distraction designed to swallow attention without offering answers. But I did find him somewhere else—at the address Florencio gave me, the one he’s been using when he’s in the city.
I’ve been watching him for several nights now. Learning the rhythm of his days. The habits he repeats without thought. The patterns he assumes are invisible. I wait, observe, adjust—quietly planning my next move while he continues on, unaware that his certainty is already unraveling.
I check the time.
