CHAPTER 8
THE CURATOR
The smell of tarmac grew stronger as we headed towards Sal’s car. For a moment I let myself imagine it’s just another night, just another conversation. Not that my house just blew up and I got fucked by a whiskey bottle in a hay field.
‘Why do you do it?’ he asks. ‘Kill bad people.’ I can’t answer right away, but then the memories come flooding back.
Before the makeup, before the armour, before I turned my body into something untouchable – I was just a girl in a house that never felt like home. Before all of it, before me, there was him. And his voice.
‘You’ll never become anything, Stella. Don’t waste time crying, it won’t change anything. Your mother is dead, and that’s that. Now, do as I say. I can make you behave, one way or another.’
I remember the sharp smell of beer on his breath, the way his words filled the small rooms of our house like thick smoke. The way the floorboards creaked when his friends came into my room.
I remember learning silence before I learnt language, knowing when to hold my breath, when to forget his friends were touching me. And I remember the worst part, the part that made me doubt myself more than bruises ever did.
I remember the way his friends looked at me.
‘She’s got such an innocent face. Sweet girl.
Lucky to have a father like you,’ they’d say to my dad.
They saw what they paid my father to see; a quiet, polite daughter, never talking back, never making trouble.
A girl who didn’t fight. A girl who didn’t run.
That’s what they called me – docile, broken, and already defeated.
And my father smiled when they said it. It wasn’t pride. It was satisfaction. Ownership.
That smile stayed with me. That smile was the first one I ever took.
The first sin I wore like a trophy. From that day on, black clothes weren’t fashion, they became my funeral procession, which I wore day after day, each outfit stitched with the girl I buried.
My black eyeliner wasn’t just makeup – it was my war paint; my declaration to myself that I would never be that girl again.
And I never was. She died the moment I learnt what survival tasted like.
I blink at Sal who’s waiting on an answer.
He’s watching me carefully, like he knows there’s nothing he can say to make things better.
The silence stretches between us, and he pulls me against him.
‘You know, Stella, I don’t need to know.
’ His grip is firm and grounding. For a second, I don’t breathe.
My pulse stutters, and my body stiffens in his hold.
I expected more questions, curiosity, judgement, maybe.
But instead, he says it like an answer. I stare at him, searching for cracks, for hesitation, but there aren’t any.
He doesn’t need to know because he already sees me.
Not the bloodstain left behind or the ghosts still grinning in the glass cases.
Just me. He’s the only one who ever looked at me and saw everything – and didn’t flinch.
I look at him. Really look. Sal is here to kill me.
That was and more than likely still is the plan.
Yet, from the moment our paths crossed, from the first time I saw the flicker in his eyes, I knew.
Maybe he’s just biding his time, waiting for the right moment to end me.
He’s a bad man. Or at least, he’s meant to be.
I could kill him. I should kill him. But I won’t, because he sees me.
So if his hands were meant to end me, then I’d meet the fall with open arms and a grin – because there are worse things than dying, and the cruelest fate is dying unseen.