The bedroom door closes behind me as I stand in the center of the room and look at what's become of my life. His things. My things. The way they've started to cohabitate over the past weeks. My sketchbook on the nightstand next to his reading glasses, my boots by the closet next to his shoes, a hair tie on the bathroom counter that migrated there without permission or ceremony.
It used to mean something. All of this proximity, this shared space we built together. Now it feels empty.
I don't cry, I can't let it out just yet. The grief has no container yet. It's still raw material. A series of images that haven't assembled into anything I can hold. Matt's shoulders jerking. The blade. The light on the wall.
So I stand in the center of the room, and I do not cry, but I think.
The day happens. That's the most accurate way to describe it. It occurs, and I occur inside it, and the two of us move through each other like water through spread fingers.
I read in the sitting room because that's where I'd normally be at this hour with a book in my lap. I can't make out the words, but I turn the pages anyway. My eyes track the lines and my hand turns the paper at appropriate intervals, and if anyone walked in, they'd see a woman reading.
Not a woman thinking.
When lunchtime comes, I say I've got a headache. It's almost true. There's a pressure behind my eyes that might be pain or might be the weight of keeping my face still for hours. Hard to tell. Doesn't matter. The excuse holds, and nobody pushes.
In the afternoon, I walk to the garden and stop in the doorway.
From here I can see the bench, the wall, the lemon trees, the mortar crack where the lizard went. All of it exactly as it was thismorning, exactly as it was yesterday when Matt sat on the grass cross-legged with a grin that rearranged his whole face.
I turn around, unable to step outside. I don't look back as I walk down the corridor. The garden does not feel like an escape anymore. It feels like another prison.
At dinner, I sit next to Elio as he makes arrangements for the remaining girls to go home. They're ready, he tells me, his intense eyes studying my face. I just nod, and move my food around the plate. Once the rest of the women from the compound leave, it'll be just Elio and I left in here. Back to how it started. Back to a gilded cage I don't want to be in.
It's funny how a lie can ruin a carefully built foundation, like a crack beneath a load-bearing wall. Give it time and the entire building will collapse.
Underneath the table, my hand rests against my thigh, where the napkin daisy sits in my pocket. I press down once, just enough to feel the paper through the fabric, before I take my hand away.
I go to bed first, telling him I'm tired straight after dinner. Once again he asks me if I'm okay.
With a small smile, I place my hand on his cheek and say, "Of course. I'll see you in bed."
The performance of a lifetime. I should get an Oscar. Because I'm far from okay, I'm about to share a bed with a man who murdered my best friend, and I have no clue what to do. How to escape the situation I'm in.
I curl up on my side of the bed and close my eyes, listening. Around midnight the door opens. I keep my breaths even and my body still as I listen to Elio go through his routine.
The closet door, the soft sound of fabric, an electric toothbrush in the bathroom. Finally, the lights go down and the mattress shifts.
He is twelve inches away. The distance between the back of my neck and the chest that held me while I cried in a hallway full of spent casings. The distance between my spine and the hands that shook when they pulled me closer, that cradled my head, that?—
That held a blade this morning.
He stays still. He must know I'm awake. Or he doesn't. It doesn't matter. What matters is that two people are lying in a bed pretending to be somewhere they're not, and the dark between them is full of a dead man neither of them is going to name.
His hand lands on my shoulder.
Light. Nothing demanding in it. Just the weight of his palm, the span of his fingers, warm through the thin fabric of my shirt. T
I stay still.
I don't move toward it. Don't move away. Don't lean in, don't flinch. I lie there and let his hand rest on my shoulder and give it nothing back. An absence so total it has texture.
"Violet."
I don't answer.
The hand stays. Five seconds. Ten. Then the fingers lift, one at a time, and the warmth withdraws, and the mattress shifts as he pulls his arm back to his side of the twelve inches.
The dark settles.
