Chapter 59 Jillian
JILLIAN
“If you wanna break these walls down, you’re gonna get bruised”
— “Castle” by Halsey
Whatever crew Kir sent to deal with the body in my apartment did a thorough job. The hallway wall where the man died has been repainted to perfection. The floorboards are spotless. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I imagined the whole thing.
Too bad I know better. Much, much better.
I’m shoving clothes into a duffel bag on my bed without bothering to see what exactly I’m grabbing. I’ll go to my cousin’s place in Jersey to hide out from the storm that’s about to engulf this city whole. It’s better that way for all involved.
Just when I finish stuffing the bag as full as it will go and wrenching the zipper closed, I hear the front door of my unit open. I didn’t lock it. I don’t know why. Maybe I forgot. Maybe I didn’t.
I don’t turn around, though. What’s the point? I already know who’s here.
Cinnamon and sandalwood fill the room before Kir says a word.
My hands stop moving, but still, I stare down at the closed zipper.
It would’ve been better if I’d done this with everything, I think.
If I’d kept it all closed—my doors and windows, my mouth, my legs, my past, the locked room where I shoved everything that’s ever hurt me—then we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.
But we are.
Oh, God, how we are.
He’s in the doorway. I can feel him behind me the same way I felt him that very first night, when the lights went out and a gloved hand covered my mouth. My body knows his proximity before my brain confirms it.
“Look at me,” he orders.
Reluctantly, with the acid taste of dread in my mouth, I turn around.
He’s different. That’s the first thing I register. The Kir I know runs hot, explosive, volcanic. This isn’t that man. This man is cold as an unmarked grave. He looks more like his father than I ever noticed before. Their eyes are the same. Two distant, silver moons. Untouchable. Inhospitable.
He reaches past me, careful not to make any physical contact whatsoever, and sets two items on top of my duffel bag.
The first is his phone, screen up, a text thread visible, bearing Richard Thornton’s name at the top.
The last message: Article runs tomorrow, front page. Legal cleared it. Nothing I can do.
The second is an aqua-colored envelope. The name on the return address cements the blood in my veins. Briarwood Family Services. The flap has been torn open.
“Read it,” he says as he steps back to resume his position in the doorway of my bedroom.
With trembling fingers, I pull out the letter from the envelope. I read quickly. My eyes flit left, right, left, right, and the dread taste in my mouth doubles and triples.
“This was in the mail I took from your apartment the first night,” he says emotionlessly. “You remember. The night I told you I was there to kill you.”
I can’t move. I can’t look away from this letter and what it means. My daughter wants to know me.
“So.” He folds his arms across his chest. “Which one do you want to explain first? The article or the letter?”
This room is too small for a conversation this big. The walls, the ceiling, the bed with my stupid overstuffed duffel bag—all of it is pressing in on me, shrinking, compacting around the two objects sitting on that zipper.
His phone and that letter.
My career and my daughter.
The two grenades I’ve been juggling for weeks… and Kir just pulled both pins at once.
I don’t even have the strength to open my mouth, much less start talking and explain a damn bit of anything. But the only thing worse than my meager explanations would be to stay silent. Unfortunately, that’s all I can do.
“That’s about what I thought you’d say,” he snarls cruelly.
He unfolds his arms and takes one step into the room. Just one. He stops at the foot of the bed, hands at his sides, and I can see the veins standing out stark on the backs of them.
“That’s fine. I can do the reporting for once. Headline one: You had a child. You carried a baby, you delivered her, and then you handed her off to strangers. You gave your daughter away. An innocent soul who needed a mother, and you abandoned her.”
I press the letter against my stomach with both hands.
My lips part but there’s nothing behind them.
Abandoned—has there ever been a more vicious word in the English language?
For all my degrees and all the books stacked up on my nightstand, I can’t think of one.
Especially not the way he says it. It’s a hateful word. Ugly and barbed.
“I said you’d be a good mother.” He rubs at his jaw and laughs mockingly. “I don’t think it’s possible to be more fucking wrong.”
My eyes fall to the ground. If I could laugh, I’d laugh at what I see there.
Because there’s a gray sock on the floor.
It must have fallen from the duffel when I was cramming everything in.
How sick and wrong. The last time my world caved in, there was a gray sock on the floor just like this.
Different sock, different room, and a very different man standing over me, but my eyes found it the same way.
They latched onto the smallest, stupidest thing in the room because everything else was too enormous to look at.
I keep my gaze on it now. Safe little sock. Can’t hurt me. Can’t call me a bad mother. Can’t break my heart.
“You know what happened to me,” Kir continues.
“You know what my father did to my mother. You sat at that table and you listened to me tell you about a boy who woke up one morning and his mother was just gone. And the whole time, I was telling you that story, you were carrying the exact same one inside you and you said nothing.”
The comparison is so unfair and yet so accurate that it splits me open. I want to scream that it’s not the same. I was nineteen and terrified. I did it for her, not to her.
But I can’t even say for sure if that matters anymore. If anything does.
“You disgust me,” he spits.
With that, he turns and leaves. I look down at the sock again as the door slams closed and Kir’s footsteps fade away.
This apartment has now seen both the birth and the death of the strangest, most terrible, most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.
Sex and joy, sorrow and heartbreak… All of it happened within these four walls.
Now, it’s just me alone again. Me and the sock, I suppose. Each without our matching pair.
I sink onto the floor and cry.