I want her here. Not abstractly—specifically, physically, with the desperation of a man who has been in a stone room with no warmth for fuck knows how long.
I want her hands. The way she'd put her palm flat against my chest like she was checking whether my heart was running, like the answer mattered to her.
I want to pull her into my lap in the dark and feel her breathe and not have to perform anything, not have to be anything, just sit there with her weight against my chest and the smell of her hair and the silence she made when she was comfortable, different from all her other silences.
I want to feel like the person she said ‘I love you’ to. So I eat the rice…because she'd want me to. That's the only reason my hand moves, the only logic that cuts through the haze. Not Valeria's voice, not the transaction, just the imagined version of Sophia watching me choose, and what her face would do.
“Good boy,” I hear Valeria say somewhere in the distance, and the sound of a needle meeting concrete deafens every thought, kills every memory, and Sophia’s face fades. Her warmth.
I drag myself across the floor and I do what I do, and the warmth comes, and above me the ceiling crack runs itscourse, and I think about blonde hair in Paris light until the thought goes soft and floats.
I don't know how much time passes before the slot opens again.
"Reth."
The voice is wrong. Not Valeria. Male. Rough with something I should be able to identify and keep?—
Samuel.
I’m leaning with my back against the wall, needle still in my arm when his face in the slot resolves slowly. I know this face. I know the controlled set of it, the particular economy of his expressions, the glass he keeps everything behind. I have known this face for years. I can count on one wrecked hand the number of times I’ve seen something genuine move across it.
It’s not behind glass now.
It’s destroyed.
Tears running openly, not being managed, not being wiped away. His jaw is doing the thing jaws do when someone is trying to hold together something that has already broken.
"How…how could you?" His voice shakes. "She was your sister."
Something stirs in me. Underwater and slow.
A tear drops off his chin. "She loved you."
Yet she looked in the other direction when I was hurting.
"You were her big brother." He stops. His hand comes up over his mouth for a moment. Comes down. "My mom told me everything."
Mary told me everything too. How she pretended I was whole when she knew I was nothing but pieces.
The warmth in my veins goes cold. Or tries to. There's something, an edge somewhere, fighting to stay sharp.
"She told Rowan, too," he continues.
“Wha…” I swallow, the numbness slowly settling in. “What…what did she tell you?”
"She said you came in out of your mind and Mary tried to reach you and you—" His voice breaks apart. He reassembles it. "My mom showed me what you did to her security guards, how you murdered them. You sick son of a bitch,” he bites out. “And to think I believed you. I fucking believed you, thinking my mother was capable of all the shit you said she did.”
“She did?—”
“Why did you do it, huh? Did she figure it out, all your lies?”
“Mary…”
“My son doesn't have a mother because of you!"
Lucas. The name lands somewhere below the haze. In the deep place. A small boy with Mary's eyes, a small boy who?—
"Samuel." I push onto one arm. The room tilts. "Listen to me. Listen. Valeria is lying. She killed her. I…I was there, I watched her. I saw her hands on the?—"
