Chapter 47
47
BLAKE, 1999
18 years old
It was as though I had been abruptly pulled back into the past, to a time when I was a kid, isolating myself in order to avoid everything and everyone around me. I had spent years perfecting this—this numbing, this retreat into silence and solitude. I had built my walls high enough to keep out the world, high enough that even I couldn’t see past them. And now, with Arthur gone, those walls shot up so fast that it was as if they had never been lowered at all.
It was easier this way.
No expectations, no vulnerability.
It was safer this way.
No one could hurt me if no one could reach me.
I did what I knew best; I drowned in numbers, in equations and unsolved theorems, in statistics and algorithms.
I filled my mind with so much data, so many problems to solve, that there was no room left for anything else.
Math never abandoned me.
Numbers never bled out in my arms.
There were only answers. Right or wrong. Truth or false. There was no grief in formulas. No gnawing guilt in an equation. Just problems with solutions, and I could solve them over and over again until my brain was too exhausted to think about what I’d done. But the guilt still had a way of seeping through the cracks, anyway.
I saw him every time I closed my eyes—his face, his hands.
I could still feel the pressure of his fingers digging into my sleeve as if he still had something left to say.
Knock. Knock.
I clenched my jaw.
She knocked every damn day. Every morning. Every night. Every time she left a plate of food outside my door to rot.
Knock. Knock.
I ignored her and the soft, rhythmic tapping against the wall that used to be ours.
Knock. Knock.
She never stopped.
She kept knocking, and I stared at the ceiling.
She kept knocking, and I sat in the dark—feeling nothing, feeling everything—waiting for her to give up.
But she never did.
Knock. Knock.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, sucking in a shaky breath.I wanted to tell her that I had buried myself next to our father, and there was nothing left of me.
Go away, B. Just stop.
She should have gone to her mother for comfort.
She should have realized I couldn’t be what she needed.
The worst part wasn’t even the knocking.
The worst part was when I woke up in the middle of the night, my chest so tight I couldn’t breathe.
When the walls of my room seemed to close in on me, the air thick and suffocating. When my body betrayed me—shaking, gasping, folding in on itself like I was ten years old again, huddled in a corner, pleading for the pain to stop.
I would slide off the bed, pressing my back against the wall, my knees to my chest, my fingers tangling in my hair.
I was so fucking weak. I had survived worse than this. So why did this feel like the one thing I couldn’t come back from? I squeezed my eyes shut, my breath coming in shallow, ragged pulls.
I was supposed to die when I was six.
But I had fought it. I had clawed my way back to life.
And for what?
To take another life?
To ruin the only man who ever gave a damn about me?
My throat tightened as my thoughts spiraled, as the past and present blurred together into something I couldn’t escape.
What were you trying to say, Dad ?
His lips had moved. I swore they had. He had tried to tell me something, and I would never know what it was. Never. How selfish was it to want closure when I was the one who took his life?
But I had always been selfish. I was selfish at six when I felt my soul slipping away, but I fought it because I was in my real mother’s arms, and she was warm and comforting.
Then I was selfish with Arthur, begging him not to hurt me, to never leave me, to stay. I guilt-tripped him, and he took me in. Look how that ended—with me staring down at him, watching the life drain from his eyes.
And then there was Beverly. If I’d ignored her affection, none of this would have happened. If I’d never fallen in love with her, none of this would have happened.
None of it.
Knock. Knock.
Why wouldn’t she stop ?
I glared at the wall, every muscle in my body tight with frustration. Because I knew that if I knocked back, if I just gave her that small, familiar thing, she would come running.
She would crawl into my bed, press her forehead to my shoulder, and wrap her arms around me like she used to.
Beverly shouldn’t touch me.
She shouldn’t love me.
Not when I had just taken her father from her.
He had been right.
We would have never worked.
We weren’t meant for forever.
I had been an idiot for ever believing otherwise.
For thinking I could love her the way she deserved.
I didn’t deserve her at all. Not her love. Not her forgiveness. Not a single damn thing in this world. Because when you take someone’s life, you don’t get the privilege of peace.
I couldn’t be here anymore.
This house was a living, breathing graveyard.
Everything inside it was a reminder of him.
The scent of his aftershave still lingered in the hallway.
His coffee mug was still sitting in the sink. His boots were still by the door, as if he would come home at any moment, step inside, shake off the day, and look at me like I was his son.
But he wasn’t coming home.
Knock. Knock.
Knock. Knock.
Knock. Knock.