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And now they’re playing out the script.

The official discovery. The welfare check. The deputy’s calm voice on the phone acting like I’m just another contact to notify.

But if that’s true, if this is a performance, then why tell me anything at all?

Unless it’s a warning.

Unless Davis is trying to see how I react under pressure. To unsettle me. To make me slip.

The living room gapes before me, dim and stale. My father slumps in his chair, the lamplight cutting hollows into his face, the same way it always did when he preached about sin.

This is his fault. All of it.

My chest tightens. My hands start to shake. “If you’d been a father…” The words wobble, then sharpen, slicing through the still air. “If you’d been anything human, none of this would be happening.”

He doesn’t move. Just breathes, slow and shallow. Useless.

“You created this,” I hiss, pacing in front of him now. “Fed it. Let it fester. You looked away while it grew inside me, until I couldn’t tell where you ended, and I began. And now it’s burning through me. Through this house. Through this town.”

He exhales again, soft and thin, like a deflating balloon. His eyes stay empty. Unseeing. Unchanged.

Something in me snaps.

“Do you even understand that, Father?” The title catches in my throat, more venom than reverence. “Do you understand what you made? What you turned me into?” I laugh, a brittle, broken sound. “You always said I was born to serve the Lord. Well, maybe I am. Maybe this is His work. Maybe every scream, every body, is just another prayer He answered.”

The laugh catches on a sob. I dig my nails into my palms, trying to keep myself from shaking apart. “You don’t get to die until you say the words,” I whisper, stepping closer. “You don’t get to rest until you admit it. All of it.”

My throat burns. The tears come anyway, hot and bitter. “Say it,” I choke. “Just fucking say it.”

His lips twitch, a small, involuntary spasm. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s everything.

“Don’t you smirk at me.” My voice breaks. “Don’t you dare.”

I stumble back, hand pressed to my mouth, the world tilting sideways. The house is deaf with silence, the kind that knows too much.

On the counter, the tea I made him sits untouched, steam curling up in thin, ghostly strands. The smell turns my stomach.

There’s no undoing any of this.

I didn’t just open the door.

I tore it off its hinges, and now I’m standing in the smoke.

CHAPTER

FORTY-NINE

The silence in the house presses in. Heavy. Full of things unsaid. The kind of silence that settles in your bones. This is exactly how it was after my mother died. There were no words exchanged between me and my father unless he forced me to. I didn’t just lose my mother that night, I lost my father, and eventually my innocence. Who knows, maybe I lost my mind too. How else could one person brutally kill another human being without an ounce of guilt?

I pull open my bedroom door with a low, slow groan. Stepping out into the hall, I stop just outside the threshold of my room and listen. It’s quiet, as it should be, seeing that it’s in the middle of the night. I tiptoe down the hall, hoping that the floorboards beneath my feet don’t squeak, alerting my father that I’m up. Not that he can do anything about it.

I stop in front of the door. Their door.

I haven’t set foot in this room since the day my mother died. It feels like crossing a fault line, like whatever lies on the other side might split me open.

As a little girl, this room was my sanctuary. My mother’s laugh lived here. The warmth of Saturday mornings, curled between their bedsheets, while she pressed his shirts with lavender-scented starch. I’d watch her hum and iron, the sunlight pooling on the floor, and I’d believe, truly believe, that nothing bad could ever touch us.

Back then, I didn’t understand how silence could be weaponized. How behind that gentle perfume and soft-spoken smile, she was shrinking. I didn’t know their bed held secrets. That the man I thought was strong was a monster hiding behind scripture. That while my mother kept us afloat with tenderness, he was poisoning the air we breathed.