The line goes dead.
Kari looks at me.
"Compromised," she says.
"Yeah."
"Is that bad?"
"It means I care about the outcome more than the process."
She holds my gaze. "Is that what you're calling it?"
The corner of my mouth moves. Not a smile. The ghost of one.
"It's the version I can say out loud."
The house settles around us. Late. Tea cold. Evidence bags sealed on the counter. Basement window boarded, cellar door deadbolted, cameras running their silent loops over a perimeter that finally includes every entry point.
Kari sits on the bed, back against the headboard. I'm in the chair by the window — the cane-backed one with springs that protest every shift of weight.
"You don't have to sit over there," she says.
"I know."
"But you're going to."
"For a minute."
She watches me the way she watches walls before she decides how to fix them. Reading the structure underneath.
"Ask me," I say.
"Ask you what?"
"Whatever you've been holding back. About the scar. About why I sleep in a chair when there's a bed. About why I'm like this."
Kari pulls her knees up. "I wasn't going to ask."
"I know. That's why I'm telling you." I breathe in. "My father was charming." The words come out one at a time. "The kind of charming that makes a room brighter when he walks in. Everyone loved him."
Kari doesn't speak. Listening with her whole body.
"At home it was different. You'd have about four seconds to figure out which version you were getting. The charming one — he'd pick me up, swing me around, tell my mother she was beautiful. Those nights you could almost convince yourself the other version wasn't real."
My thumb traces the scar on my left forearm. Wrist past elbow.
"The other version was quiet. Cold. Never hit where it showed. Never raised his voice loud enough for the neighbors. Methodical — the patient, calculated destruction of someone who thinks they're solving a problem."
Kari's jaw tightens. Swallowing rage on behalf of a child she never met.
"My mother stayed too long. Left too late. She collected gas station magnets from places she never visited — Idaho, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon. Stuck them on the refrigerator like evidence of a life she might have lived."
The chair creaks. Elbows on knees.
"Enlisted at eighteen. Two tours. Then Vance. Control became the thing I built instead of trust. If I controlled the variables, nobody could surprise me."
"And then you missed the basement window," Kari says. Not an accusation. A translation.
