I wait. Count his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The exhales lengthen. The inhales space out. When I'm sure, when the count has held steady for a hundred breaths, I reach into the pocket of the shorts I wore to bed.
The napkin daisy is soft. Warm from my body. The creases have deepened where I've been gripping it all day.
I hold it against my sternum.
I don't sleep.
21
VIOLET
You'd think it would get easier after three days. The performing. That you'd find a rhythm, the way you find a rhythm with anything repetitive. Factory work. Physical therapy. Lying to your mother about where you are or whether you've eaten today. Three days should be enough to settle into the mechanics of it, to stop having to think about where to put your face and what to do with your hands and how long to hold eye contact before it tips from normal into something is wrong with me.
You'd be wrong.
Every meal is an engineering project. Fork to plate to mouth. Chew. Swallow. Reach for water at natural intervals. Don't reach too often. Don't sit too still. Respond when spoken to. Not too quickly, not too slowly, not with too many words, or too few. Smile when someone hands you something you didn't ask for.
The absence of a smile is louder than the smile ever was. Funny how that works.
So I smile.
Elio sits across from me.
He eats. He reads. He doesn't stare, doesn't linger, doesn't angle for conversation I'm not offering. He has recalibrated hisentire presence in the space to require nothing from me, and it is so careful, so considered, that it's almost worse than if he pushed.
Because pushing I could work with. Pushing gives me something to push back against. A wall to brace my weight on. But this... this patient nothing... is quicksand. There's no resistance. Just a slow, steady pull, and the harder you fight it, the faster you sink, so you just stand very still and pretend you're on solid ground.
Night is the worst.
His side. My side. His breathing slows. Mine doesn't.
Three days of lying next to a man whose hands I've held, whose body I've climbed, whose heartbeat I counted, who ended the life of my best friend.
He slept fine that night. I checked.
I still haven't cried, haven't felt safe to. Instead I move through the hallways like a ghost, reading into every encounter, trying to figure out what else am I being lied to about.
His carefulness is a language, and I used to be fluent in it, used to read every gesture and calibrate and lean into the warmth behind it. Now the words arrive, and I recognize them, but they mean nothing. Like hearing Italian when you've forgotten the vocabulary. The sounds are right but the meaning doesn't land.
That's the thing nobody tells you about withdrawal. It's not the leaving. It's the translation dying.
On the fourth day since Matt was killed, my feet take me to Elena's door.
I don't plan it. One minute I'm walking, the next the corridor ends and there's her door, with my hand already on the handle.
The metal is cool.
I push it open and step inside.
The air in here is different. Not the controlled climate of the rest of the estate. That curated, temperature-regulated perfection that makes every room feel like it belongs in a museum. This is just air. Still and cool and slightly stale, the way rooms get when no one opens a window, when no one breathes in them anymore.
The bed is made. Nothing is out of place. Everything is pristine, clean, any traces of the woman who occupied this room gone.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The coverlet is smooth under my palms. Cool. I press down, feel the mattress give, and the creak of the bed frame is soft and small, a sound meant for one person in a quiet room.
Nobody comes looking for me here.
The silence is different here then the one in Elio's bedroom. That silence is charged. This one is just... quiet. Empty. The kind of quiet that asks nothing of you.
