Chapter 7
Evan
Acool breeze drifted across Central Park while the sun began its descent toward the Manhattan skyline. The metal bench’s chill seeped through my suit pants, evening shadows stretching long as I blinked hard, trying to shake the fog from my thoughts.
Laughter echoed from the playground, dogs barked, and traffic hummed from Fifth Avenue. The air carried the scents of hot asphalt, cut grass, and street cart food. Nothing had changed. It was almost too perfect.
A headache throbbed behind my eyes. Must have dozed off. The past few weeks had drained me as I wrapped up the final contracts that would secure my promotion.
No.
I’d already gotten promoted. So, why couldn’t I remember doing the interviews?
I held a hot dog from a park vendor, my usual treat when I visited.
It had been a luxury I’d craved as a kid, too expensive for an orphan, even when I cleaned the children’s home for Anita in exchange for pocket money.
Now I could buy every cart in the park if I wanted.
Funny how success tasted exactly like a five-dollar hot dog with plain ketchup.
I took a bite, my eyes following the group of kids playing—about seven of them, aged six to ten, wearing shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers that had seen better days.
A little girl with pigtails and missing front teeth waged an epic battle with the monkey bars, falling off after the third bar, brushing wood chips off her knees, then returning with the determination of a tiny warrior. Her shoelaces dragged behind her, forgotten.
Brian, a ten-year-old with a gap-toothed grin, had appointed himself playground referee for two boys arguing over slide privileges. “You both go together!” he declared, convinced he’d found the perfect solution.
A drop of ketchup landed on my white shirt, and I muttered a curse, grabbing a napkin to scrub at the stain.
It only smeared, leaving a dark red blotch that bloomed across the fabric.
Nausea coiled in my gut, the image of red pooling on a shore forcing itself into my thoughts. The playground’s laughter vanished.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“How are you feeling, mijo?” Anita asked.
I turned toward her, surprised I’d forgotten she was there. The woman who’d raised me in the orphanage after Mom died sat beside me on the bench, rough hands folded in her lap. Her gray hair was gathered in a loose bun. She wore the same daisy floral dress she’d had for years, faded but clean.
Wednesday was our day. It always had been. I visited her and the kids every week and brought them to the park.
“I’m fine,” I replied out of habit, the same response I’d been giving her for over twenty years.
Anita gave me that stare, the one that said she could see past all my bullshit. “You got everything you wanted, didn’t you?”
I nodded as Brian stepped in to mediate another dispute between the kids. He moved among them with a patience I didn’t possess at that age. “Yeah. Everything.”
“Then why do you seem like a man at his own funeral?”
True. It was like a funeral, I just… couldn’t name the body. Grief for the ghost of a feeling, mourning for the satisfaction that was supposed to be waiting at the top, the one I’d promised my mother I’d find.
I finished my food in silence, not trusting my words.
Anita had never married or had children of her own.
Instead, she devoted her entire life to the orphanage kids, pouring all her love into broken children who needed someone to believe in them.
At seventy-two, she had no family left except us—the kids she’d raised—and I’d never seen her bitter about it.
She wore her sacrifice like a badge of honor, finding joy in every small victory, every child who made it out okay.
Everyone in the neighborhood loved her, from the bodega owner who saved her the best produce to the cops who checked on her during their rounds. To me, she was more than beloved; she was the only person I’d ever trusted with my truth.
“You’re punishing yourself, keeping everyone at arm’s length. When are you going to stop?”
“Stop what?”
“Stop blaming yourself for surviving when she didn’t.”
The constant weight of denial rose in my throat, constricting my chest. “I don’t…”
“You do.” A sad smile touched her lips. “You think you don’t deserve happiness because you’re alive and she’s not. You think you have to carry that guilt forever.”
The kids’ laughter rang out around us. “I should.”
She leaned closer. “And what if you got a second chance? What if you could start over, be different? What would you do?”
The questions caught me off guard. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do. I think you’d choose to let people in. Choose to care about something more than keeping promises to ghosts.”
I faced her fully. “I’m not a good person, Anita. I’ve taken things from people. Destroyed smaller companies and signed contracts that put families out of work. Everything was taken from me, so I took from others. That’s who I am.”
“That’s who you became,” she corrected. “There’s a difference. The boy I raised, the one who used to help me with the other kids, the one who cried when he found a hurt bird in our yard—that’s who you are underneath all that armor.”
“That boy died long ago.”
“No, mijo. He’s in there. Scared and hurt and tired of being alone.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m proud of the man you became, you know. With all your mistakes, all your walls—I’m proud of you.”
The declaration left me breathless, shame clawing at my ribcage. “You shouldn’t be.”
“But I am. And your mother would be too,” she affirmed.
Crumpling the napkin in my fist, I tried to pin my mind on anything but the ever-present void behind my ribs.
Anita checked the sky, where the afternoon sun was shifting. “Time to go, kids!”
I rose from the bench, and tightness gripped my sternum, making my heart race. The kids’ laughter faded, distant, muffled.
“Mr. Evan?” Brian’s shout came distorted, as if through water. “You alright?”
I pressed my hand to my chest, my heart pounding and temples throbbing. The park began to blur at the edges, colors bleeding together like watercolors in rain.
“I’m—”
“Don’t resist it, Evan,” Anita spoke softly, and her words seemed to come from everywhere at once.
The resistance I had was crumbling, all the fight draining out of me as I realized how tired I was of carrying everything alone. Maybe Anita was right, I didn’t have to be alone anymore.
The invisible force tugged harder, and I let it.
White light and pain burst behind my eyes. Anita’s form became translucent, the park disappearing until nothing remained but pain—worse than any migraine, more agonizing than—
Suddenly, the world snapped back into view.
Sensation flooded back all at once—wood smoke and herbs perfumed the air, rough blankets scratched against my skin.
Above me, a vast, golden hologram appeared, with a shimmering, three-dimensional intricacy unlike anything I had ever seen.
The golden light began to pour into me. I fought against it, my muscles tense and resisting.
I tried to scream, but my throat produced nothing—every part of me rejected this foreign force, struggling with all my might.
Through the chaos, a familiar richness reached for me. Sandalwood. It was Gregory’s scent, an anchoring presence that pushed aside the pain and found me right where I was. Despite the violence, despite the pain he’d caused, that presence brought an unexpected sense of safety.
A quiet calm settled over me, mixed with the harsh realization that I was fading away.
For the first time since this nightmare started, I took one deep breath. It might be my last. And maybe, after everything, that was okay.
My consciousness returned in fragments as I blinked against a soft glow.
The gentle babbling of water reached me first, followed by the chirping of birds weaving into the morning air.
Sunlight streamed through a window, bringing pleasant warmth against my skin.
I lay curled on my side with a blanket draped over my shoulders.
God, I was rested, the kind that wiped away years of exhaustion. No heaviness stuck to my bones, no three-hours-of-sleep-and-six-cups-of-coffee kind of functional. Tension had vanished from every muscle, and the mental fog had lifted entirely.
I clutched the edge of the blanket and lifted it to my nose, breathing in the aroma of sun-dried cotton. The scent dragged me back to the rooftop in Queens, where Mom hung laundry on makeshift lines between rusted pipes, her hair shining in the afternoon sun while she hummed off-key.
She’d always insisted on air-drying our clothes, even in winter. “Sunshine makes everything better, baby,” she’d say, and I’d roll my eyes because we barely had money for detergent, let alone a dryer.
I stretched until my vertebrae popped one by one, then pushed myself into a sitting position. The blanket pooled around my waist as long, flame-colored strands spilled across my shoulders. I blinked hard, hoping the hallucination would fade. The hair remained.
I ran my fingers over the linen of an oversized tunic, well-made and soft from age and washing. The scent of aged wood and smoke lingering on the linen drew my eyes upward, where enormous wooden beams and joints fit together perfectly, forming the log cabin around me.
Blackened from what seemed like years of use, a stone fireplace occupied one wall, facing a single settee and a hand-carved table. In the corner, a beige curtain probably hid the bathroom. The place wasn’t trying to be charming like some fancy lodge; it was simply honest, and clearly a home.
A figure moved in the kitchen, drawing my attention. When I glanced over, a young woman stood frozen, clutching a cast-iron pan to her chest, wide silver eyes meeting mine.