35. Ophelia
“Ethan.” My voice catches in my throat.
Ethan is standing in the bedroom. He’s in the dark slacks and shirt he’d worn to the funeral, but his suit jacket is gone. His tie is loose around his neck and his hair is wet with melted snow. He stops when he sees me, almost like he’s surprised at least for a moment.
“There you are,” he says casually, blinking, stepping into the bedroom like he’s just come home.
“Ethan. What are you doing here?” I clutch the towel to myself.
“I needed to show you something.” His gaze drifts to my chest, to the towel I’m holding on to, like he just noticed I’m not dressed.
“How did you get up here? How did you know where?—”
“You need to see this.” He comes into the room.
“Let me get dressed. I’ll be right there, wait outside.”
“No.” He looks around, tosses the first thing he sees at me. It’s a sweater and a pair of jeans I’d left draped over the back of a chair. “Put these on. We need to go.”
“Wait outside.”
“I fucking said no!”
I jump when he takes out what he had tucked into the waistband of his slacks, which have grown looser around his waist. It’s a gun.
“Get dressed.”
My throat goes dry, and I remember that strange pop I’d heard. “Okay,” I say, picking up the sweater with one hand and trying to pull it on.
“Fuck’s sake, you’d think I’d never seen you naked!” he snaps, crossing the room in three quick strides and tugging the towel from me.
I scream, then drop onto the bed because I’m out of space. When he pushes the sweater down over my head, I feel the cool steel of the gun against my cheek. I look up at him and slide my arms through, then pick up the jeans. He steps backward.
I pull the jeans on with trembling hands.
“Hamish. Where’s Hamish?” I ask.
“Where’s your phone?”
“In the bathroom.”
“Get it.”
I nod, walk toward the bathroom to get the phone, thinking maybe I can get inside and lock him out, but he follows me too closely, that gun in his hand, steel against my side when he touches me. He sees the phone when we’re in the bathroom and reaches around me to grab it.
“Where’s Hamish?” I ask again when we go back to the bedroom.
He gestures toward the door, and I walk slowly, keeping distance between us even though he’s not pointing the gun at me. He’s keeping it at his side.
“Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. Go. Down the stairs.”
I do, holding onto the banister and keeping my back to the wall, one eye on him. I see Hamish before I get all the way down the stairs and stop.
“Oh, my God.” I cover my mouth with both hands because Hamish is lying on the floor between the hall and the living room and from here I can see the pool of blood circling him. See how still he is, this giant of a man. I look back at Ethan, at his gun. That pop I heard was a gunshot.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I told you, he doesn’t matter.” He takes me by the arm and moves me toward the door. I’m still barefoot but he doesn’t seem to notice or if he does, he doesn’t care. When he pulls me to the hallway, I step into that cooling blood, slipping a little before Ethan rights me.
“He’s dead. Oh God. He’s dead.”
“He wasn’t going to let me see you, and you need to see what I found. You need to know the truth.”
I look back into the house when he drags me through the front door. He’s parked down the street. I recognize his car and we walk toward it. Ethan tugs me close as we pass a couple, and they must notice how we look. Neither of us is wearing a jacket. I’m barefoot. Do they see Ethan’s gun? He keeps it at my back, out of sight.
“Smile. You don’t want me to hurt anyone else because of you, do you?”
I am not sure I manage a smile, but they pass, and I hear them mutter something about me being barefoot but by then Ethan is pushing me into the passenger seat of the car. He crouches down once I’m in, tucking the gun back into his slacks. He pulls the tie free from his neck.
“Hold out your hands.”
“Ethan, what are we doing?”
“We’re going back where it started,” he says. “Give me your fucking hands.”
I hold them out to him, and he wraps the tie around them multiple times, then makes a knot. It’s tight, too tight.
“Don’t fucking move or I’ll fucking shoot you. Understand?”
I nod. I believe him.
“Good.”
He stands up, closes the door, and walks around to the driver’s side. He gets in, setting the gun in his lap.
I look at it. Can I grab it?
He reaches into the glove compartment, and I press my back into the seat. He pulls out some sheets of paper.
“See this, I looked into it. Hope you don’t mind I took them, but you need to know, Phee.”
I drag my gaze from the gun to the papers he’s holding. Those charred sheets I’d pulled from the fire. Did he take them with him that day he came to the house? They were just on the table beside the door.
But I can’t think about that now. He’s distracted. This is my chance.
I lunge for the gun, getting hold of it while he’s distracted. My phone clatters to the floor but he’s so fast and so strong, so much stronger than I remember. He grabs my face with one hand and grips the barrel of the gun with the other, pointing it away from himself.
“You always were a fucking pain in the ass, you know that? You’re going to make me hurt you again.” He spits the words, shaking his head. He’s holding my jaw so tight, I can’t even open my mouth to plead with him or scream and it all happens so fast anyway.
Ethan spits ugly words at me before he thrusts my head backward into the window hard, stunning me.
“This was never about you,” he says as I blink, dazed, before he does it again. “It’s always been about him. About him taking every fucking thing from me. Well, that changes. Tonight. Tonight, I’m going to take from him. Tonight, I’m going to fucking put that bastard in the ground next to his bastard father.”
He slams my head one final time, and this one does it. This one doesn’t just send stars spinning in blackness. There are no stars. It’s just blackness.