He never did, though.
The bedroom was worse than I remembered. The twin mattress where I spent years curled up defensively was still there. Same ratty navy blanket, same peeling sticker on the headboard.
I knelt next to the bed and pressed my forehead to the frame, the metal cold against my skin.
I heard the echo of my father’s voice ricocheting off the walls:“Don’t slam the goddamn door, Caiden, you think you own this house?”
Most of the furniture was gone, just a skeleton of a home, but the stains on the wallpaper remained. The blood-brown streak above the thermostat, where he’d thrown a bottle at my head and missed.
I made my way to the kitchen. The fridge was unplugged and gaping. Someone had raided the pantry, but not before the mice got to it. The empty space vibrated with memory.
I sat at the table, or what used to be a table. My father’s seat was to my left, where he could see everything, a general on the battlefield of his own tiny kingdom.
Sometimes, on the rare nights he’d had a halfway decent day at the mill, he would let me stay up and eat with him. Those were the nights I lived for, the nights I convinced myself he was just a regular dad and not the monster under the bed.
I poured myself a drink from the flask I kept in my jacket.
It was easy to hate him for what he did to me. It was harder to hate him for what he did to himself. The way he’d slouch, even when he was standing, as if gravity hit him harder than other people. The way his hands shook after a long binge was so bad he couldn’t even hold a glass unless he braced it with both fists.
The slow collapse of a man who, for all his anger, never learned how to fight for anything but pain.
He was the definition of ruin and terror.
Half of my life was lived in fear, and I would never forgive him for that.
My thoughts went to Amelia, her intoxicating sweetness, how I ruined it because of how my father ruined mine.
It wasn’t fair, that’s what I told myself all those years ago. Why did she get to keep her sweetness while mine rotted in the dark?
If I could turn back time, I would do it differently. I would be sure that she never lost it.
It took a while, but the anger began to surface, a slow, tepid boil. It started as a twist in my guts, the familiar ache of helplessness, then climbed higher, infecting my chest, pressing on my throat.
The ghosts here weren’t just memories; they were living things. You could feel them leeching into you, rewriting your bones.
I stared at the greasy ring where his elbow used to rest, and the urge to smash the table was so real my hands shook.
I’d been twelve the first time I got drunk. My father poured out two glasses and told me to“drink up, be a man.”
He’d watched me gag and cough with a smile so thin it could slice you.“It gets easier,” he said, “if you’re not a pussy.”
And maybe he was right, because by fifteen I could outdrink him, and by sixteen the only language we shared was the kind that came in a bottle.
I didn’t remember when I started to cry. I just heard the sound, guttural and high, and realized it was coming from my own mouth. The noise disgusted me, but I couldn’t clamp it down, not here, not in this empty mausoleum with its hunger for confession.
I sobbed like a goddamn child, fists pressed to my eyes, and for a second?—
Iwantedhim back.
I wanted the old bastard alive again, because at least when he was around, the world made more sense. The rules were simple. Don’t flinch. Don’t talk back. Don’t expect mercy.
When he was alive, it was easier to hate her, to feel like I was doing the right thing. I didn’t have to deal with this fucking guilt, shame, and regret.
When he was alive, it was simple.
Spend my days hating Amelia Langston, shoving my affection so far deep that I thought it disappeared completely.
Now, it was all fucked up.
