It was nailed shut and padlocked and boarded up so tight for a reason.
And I’m so sorry I opened it.
“After she died,” he says. Very quiet.
“He started — coming into my room.”
• • •
The air goes out of the room.
I feel it leave.
“He said I owed him. My mom wasn’t there anymore to protect me from his attention.” His voice is completely flat now.
The specific flatness of someone reciting something they survived by making it into just a sequence of events. Like it happened to someone else.
“That she killed herself because of me. That everything that went wrong was because of me. Because I wasn’t there. I was here. And so I —”
He stops.
He doesn’t finish the sentence.
He doesn’t have to.
I understand what he’s telling me.
I understand all of it.
Every midnight tap on the window.
Every time he went still when my parents hugged him.
Every time he hated going home.
Every time he showed up at my window at one in the morning, two in the morning, and I never asked why and he never said.
The driveway at midnight.
Twelve years old.
Sitting on the concrete in the dark.
What I thought was just sadness.
It wasn’t just sadness.
It was abuse.
“Cassian —”
“I’m not —” He shakes his head. “I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because you asked for something true. And you deserve to know.”
“I know.”
“And because —” He finally looks at me. His eyes red. Holding it together by something very thin, very frail. “You had this life. This perfect, full, loud, beautiful life. Your parents and this house and the way they loved each other and the way they loved you and just — you were so full of good things, Ro. You were full of everything I didn’t have and I couldn’t —”
His voice breaks.
