I look up.
The ceiling has holes.
Several of them, ragged and specific, the kind of openings that don't come from age or neglect but from something deliberate—applied force, a tool, intent. The rain coming through them is not polite about it. It falls straight down in thin, consistent streams that hit the floor and spread, and the floor is wet, and the books are scattered across it.
My books.
Eleven of them, pulled from the shelf and distributed across the wet laminate in the particular pattern of things that have been thrown rather than dropped—the open pages facing down, the spines bent at angles they weren't designed for, the covers darkening as the water reaches them from the holes above and the flooded surface below.
The rest of the apartment.
The kitchen island has been cleared—not tidied, cleared, the small accumulation of papers and the business card and my phone charger all gone or displaced, the drawers pulled out and their contents redistributed across the counter and the floor. The bookshelf itself is intact but emptied, the thing that held the books still standing while everything it held is ruined. The chair with my jacket is overturned. The jacket is on the floor.
Someone was here.
Someone came into this space and went through it and left, and on the way out they ensured—deliberately, specifically, with the kind of targeted intention that goes beyond opportunism—that the roof would do the rest. That by the time I came home, the work would be finished.
The lock.
I look at the door frame. The lock plate has been forced—not picked, forced, the kind of entry that doesn't care about subtlety because subtlety wasn't the point. The point was the message. The point was standing in this doorway at four in the morning in wet shoes looking at what's left of the smallest, most inadequate safe haven I've been able to build, and understanding that it wasn't safe at all.
I press my lips together.
The sound that wants to come out is something I'm not going to allow. Not yet. Not while I'm still standing in the doorway with a stranger behind me.
"I guess St. Patrick's Day isn't a lucky day for me after all."
The laugh that comes out with it is the wrong kind—the kind that arrives because the alternative is worse, the specific register of a person whose nervous system has run out of appropriate responses and has defaulted to inappropriate ones. I walk in.
The floor is wet under my shoes. The sound of the rain coming through the ceiling is—present, continuous, the particular quality of rain indoors, which is wrong in every way that a sound can be wrong.
I go to the bookshelf.
The books on the floor are all damaged. Some more than others—the ones closest to the ceiling streams have the most water in them, the pages swelling, the covers warping already. I crouch down and pick up the one I know by the spine color, the one I've been reading in pieces for three weeks, the one I kept coming back to between shifts when the hours allowed it.
The cover is wet.
I open it.
The bookmark is still there—the pressed clover that Elowen tucked in when she gave it to me, because that's the kind of person she is, the kind who tucks a pressed clover into a book when she gives it to you—and the ink from the clover is running now, the color bleeding outward into the surrounding page in that particular irreversible way of things made from organic material meeting too much water.
The page beneath the bookmark.
I know this page. I read this page twice the last time I had fifteen minutes at the café counter, because the scene landed differently the second time and I wanted to stay in it. The Omega in the story—the one who packed a bag and left a bad pack and drove herself to a town she'd never been to and talked herself into a life she'd always wanted—is signing the contract for her bar on this page. The pen in her hand. The document in front ofher. The moment before the life she chose instead of the life that happened to her begins in earnest.
The page is wet.
Something falls onto it.
I watch it land—the small dark circle of it spreading into the already-damp paper—and it takes me a full second to understand it's not from the ceiling.
Oh.
Oh, I'm crying.
I don't try to stop it immediately, because the first sob that escapes is already out before the decision to stop it could have intervened, and the second one follows with the momentum of something that has been held in place for a very long time and has run out of reasons to stay there.
"Just my luck," I say, which comes out as a whisper with a tremble in it that I didn't authorize. "Always so fucking lucky, aren't I."
