But instead, he staggered up, legs faltering beneath him, a puppet with its strings sheared.
He didn’t look at me as he stumbled his way down the hall, left a smear of blood on the white wall where his hand caught the corner, slammed his palm twice against the entryway in an animal pulse of violence.
Then he was gone, hurtling through the door, clattering down the porch steps, and into the dying afternoon.
And I was left to deal with the aftermath of my destruction.
The world was a fizzled fuse, a scorched wire, the air still hot and trembling from the current that had passed through it. I lay crumpled on the floor, skin prickling with aftershocks.
My heart fluttered between arrhythmia and inertia, unsure whether to keep beating or surrender.
I traced the crescent cuts his nails left in my flesh, the bruises blooming along my thighs, and felt nothing. Not relief, not satisfaction, not even the expected horror. Just a bottomless emptiness and shock.
My sister’s corpse barely cold, mother evaporated into her bottle, the world already soiled and ruined and here I was succumbing to my hatred for Caiden in the worst way.
Lillian would never forgive me. If she were watching from whatever secondhand heaven was left for girls like us, she’d spit in my face and call me a traitor. She’d see how easily I let the monster under my bed crawl in and make itself at home.
I wanted to be sick. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, scrape myself raw, leave my own body behind like a snake’s old husk and never look back.
I lay on the ground for a long time, cheek pressed to thesplintered wood, waiting for the house to grow cold and for the ache in my limbs to fade.
It didn’t. Nothing faded.
The aftermath of what I’d done, what I’d allowed him to do, pressed in harder than the act itself.
I was sick with it, drowning in it, swimming through a soup of regret so thick I feared I’d never claw my way out.
Maybe destruction was the only thing I was ever good at, turning hurt into hunger, swallowing the poison just to see if I could survive it.
My mind replayed the events with sickening clarity. A highlight reel of every gasp, every snarl. The more I tried to blank it out, the louder it became, until I wanted to bash my head against the porcelain just to make it stop.
I dry-heaved over the sink, but nothing came up. There was nothing left in me but acid and ghosts.
I was the architect of my own corruption. I watched the world burn and then poured accelerant on the ashes, desperate for a heat that could cauterize the wound where Lillian had been.
I’d let Caiden touch me. Let him use me, even for a second, and it was a humiliation so vast it eclipsed even the grave.
I wish it were simpler. We give in too easily to the things that are poison, chasing the need to feel better, to forget the pain. Even if that thing we give into would inevitably destroy us. Even if, on some level of subconsciousness, we hate the thing we are falling into.
When the fire fades, that’s all we have left, the darkness and the ache.
I had been gutted and hollowed and left to marinate in my own rot, and in the end, there was nothing but this: The stillness after a disaster, the silence that rings in the skull when the sirens are gone and all the screaming has burned itself out.
THE PAST
AMELIA’S BREAKING POINT
There are moments in life when time halts, leaving one feeling more like a shell than a human being. I reached that point of bottomless emptiness when Lillian died, and now I was plummeting deeper than ever.
Sharing a rage-filled kiss with Caiden, a physical embodiment of our hatred. I remembered what came before it, his confession of a dark secret.
My mother was the reason Caiden’s mother had left. A voice in my head whispered insistently that Caiden’s mother didn’t have to walk away. That was her choice. My mother hadn’t forced her to walk through that door and never return.
But if she hadn’t slept with Caiden’s father, so much pain could have been avoided. I was sure it was my mother who came onto him. After my father left, she had entered a delicate state of mind, spiraling into a version of herself that felt like an utter stranger.
It wouldn’t surprise me if she tried to fill the void left by my father with another man.
I tried to confront my mother. Her responses had been nothing but hollow defenses, words that echoed with insincerity.
