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Slams.

Shatters.

Ceramic explodes across the hardwood floor like bones breaking. The sound cuts through the quiet house, sharp and final.

Kerr. Harper.

The names echo louder than the crash. They shouldn’t be on the news. They shouldn’t matter. I chose carefully. Dug through their lives with surgical precision. No wives. No children. No one who would remember what they wore last.

What did I miss?

My breath shortens. The room feels too small. The air presses in, hot, stale, electric like something just before a storm.

It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter.

No one knows. No one saw.

I was just a girl when we met.

A face blurred by time. A body no one wanted to remember.

But they remember.

They always remember.

My hands tremble.

Then that sound.

A low, wet, animal groan from in front of the TV.

I walk, passing him and hit the power button to the television. He doesn’t need to hear anything more about that.

I turn to face him.

My father stares at me.

Focused. Sharp. Present in a way that makes my skin crawl.

His eyes bore through me, unblinking. The corners of his mouth twitch. He’s trying to speak.

“What?” I bark. My voice cracks like a whip.

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to.

The look on his face says it all.

He knows.

Of course he knows.

He sees the rot flowering behind my eyes.

He put it there.

My skin feels wrong, too tight. My limbs don’t belong to me. My heartbeat pounds loud in my ear, out of sync with my breath, which is coming too fast and too shallow. The room tilts slightly, barely, but enough. The floor seems to ripple, like heat off pavement. The walls breathe. Or maybe I do. I’m not sure anymore.

He’s still watching. That half-lidded gaze that once meant come here, girl, now just a twitch of muscle and memory. But it still paralyzes me.