31. Amiyah
Chapter thirty-one
Amiyah
Four days into winter break and my apartment smells like stale takeout and the inescapable funk of someone who has decided that showering is, at best, an optional courtesy to the general public.
The blinds are drawn. Not with purpose, not with any real intention to regulate light or maintain privacy—they’re just pulled.
Someone did that, and that someone was me, but the memory of doing it exists in the same vague, underwater territory as everything else that’s happened since I dropped Jae at the airport and drove home with the windows down and my knuckles white around the steering wheel.
The TV has been running for ninety-six consecutive hours. I know this because next month's power bill is going to read like a fucking ransom note, and I will pay it without complaint because the alternative is silence, and silence, at this precise moment in my life, would be fatal.
The takeout containers have formed a small, greasy archipelago on the coffee table.
A paper bag from In-N-Out, crumpled and translucent with grease, sits beside a half-empty cup of milk tea from the place on Westwood, the tapioca pearls swollen and sad at the bottom of the straw.
Next to it, an open box of garlic noodles from the noodle shop down the street, the noodles congealed into a single, gelatinous slab.
I’ve been eating directly from the cartons with a plastic fork that bends if you look at it wrong.
I haven’t washed a single dish; an empty dishwasher gapes in the dim light, its stainless steel door gleaming with silent, accusatory disappointment.
The fairy lights threaded through my white canopy bed are dimmed to their lowest setting—a warm, amber glow that turns the bedroom into something that would photograph well for a lifestyle blog and feels, in practice, like being trapped inside a sad birthday candle.
I haven’t turned them off because the switch is on the far wall and that’s approximately eleven feet of walking I haven’t been able to justify.
The espresso machine is the only thing in the kitchen showing any signs of life.
I’ve been using it to heat water for instant ramen.
A dry, unused portafilter sits locked in its cradle, a monument to better days when I cared about things like crema and extraction time.
Now it’s a glorified electric kettle, and we both know it.
I finished the prestige crime drama in forty-eight hours.
Twelve episodes, eight hours of sleep total, one bag of sour gummy worms consumed in a single sitting while the protagonist’s marriage fell apart in high-definition slow motion.
I took notes. Not real notes—mental ones, the kind my brain generates automatically when presented with legal procedure, even fictional legal procedure rendered by actors who’ve clearly never set foot in a courthouse.
The chain of custody errors alone would have gotten the entire case thrown out in a real courtroom.
The prosecutor’s closing argument contained at least three material misstatements of fact.
I found myself yelling at the screen at three in the morning, my voice hoarse and cracked, addressing a fictional district attorney who could not hear me and would not have cared if he could.
The reality competition show was worse. Two full seasons of eighteen contestants building elaborate structures out of household objects while judges with British accents delivered critiques so devastating they should have come with trigger warnings.
I developed theories. Elaborate, unhinged theories about production interference and favoritism and the specific contestant—a graphic designer from Milwaukee with an asymmetrical haircut—who was clearly being set up as the season’s villain despite being objectively, mathematically superior to everyone else in the cast. I composed a seventeen-point manifesto in my head about judging criteria and left it there, trapped in the echo chamber of my own skull, because there was no one to send it to.
And then there’s the documentary.
Competitive dog grooming. Two hours of extremely serious people trimming poodles into geometric shapes while a somber voiceover discusses the historical significance of the continental clip.
I have watched it twice. I will not be acknowledging this fact to anyone, ever, under any circumstances.
The second viewing was not a choice. It was a surrender. The poodles won.
My notebooks sit closed on the dining table in a neat, color-coded stack.
Property Law. Constitutional Theory. Advanced Civil Procedure.
Their spines are uncracked. The pages inside are virgin territory, the margins empty of my precise, neurotic annotations.
I look at them from the sectional and they look back at me, and the mutual understanding between us is that we are currently in a cold war and I am losing.
The encrypted journal—the one living in the false bottom of my nightstand drawer, holding operational notes that cannot exist anywhere digital—remains untouched.
The lock hasn’t been cycled. The pen rests exactly where I left it, capped and aligned parallel to the edge of the drawer.
It’s been four days. The journal should have at least two entries by now—routine maintenance, if nothing else.
The silence of the blank pages is, itself, a kind of data.
The diffusers cycle through vanilla and cherry blossom on a timer I forgot to override.
Every ninety minutes, the living room fills with a burst of synthetic sweetness that lasts approximately seven minutes before fading back into the baseline odor of neglect.
It’s like living inside a Bath & Body Works having a nervous breakdown.
My skincare routine is still happening.
All eleven minutes of it, down to the exact, exhausting sequence.
I know it’s pathetic. I am acutely, painfully aware that pacing in front of a mirror and double-cleansing a face that hasn't seen fresh air in six days is the textbook definition of a psychological tailspin.
But the alternative is sitting still, and sitting still means letting the silence rush in.
At 9:17 PM, I drag myself off the sectional and force my leaden legs toward the bathroom.
I flip on the light and stare straight into the glass, letting the glare turn my reflection into a coroner’s exhibit.
I go through the motions—oil cleanser, foam cleanser, sixty seconds of counting, toning, pressing serum into skin—because the products don't require me to feel anything. They just require obedience.
I stare at my reflection when it’s over.
The skin is dewy, plump, and entirely fraudulent.
The woman looking back at me is meticulously maintained on the outside and hollowed out by a panic she doesn’t have the vocabulary to fix.
I’ve spent my entire life building an armor out of control, and it turns out I have zero idea what to do when someone slips right past it and leaves behind an ache I can't scrub off.
The far corner of the sectional is undisturbed.
The throw pillow rests perfectly placed against the armrest. Fluffed. Centered. Untouched.
Jae would have been sitting there. His long legs stretched out, one ankle crossed over the other, his shoulder pressed into the corner cushion with the unconscious entitlement of someone who treats furniture like it exists solely for his comfort.
He would have had opinions about the prestige crime drama.
He would have been objectively, provably wrong about the graphic designer from Milwaukee.
He would have made some dry observation about the poodle documentary that would have made me laugh despite my best efforts not to, and then I would have hit him with a throw pillow, and he would have caught it one-handed without looking, and then we would have argued about something else entirely, and the apartment would have felt like a place where people lived instead of a set I’m slowly decaying inside of.
I don’t look at the corner directly. I pick up the remote instead.
I scroll through the streaming menu for seventeen minutes without selecting anything, the blue light of the screen washing over my face in rhythmic pulses, and then I land on a nature documentary about deep-sea creatures and press play without reading the description.
The narrator’s voice is British and soothing. The footage is beautiful and meaningless. A jellyfish pulses across the screen, translucent and alien, and I think, That’s what I feel like. A gelatinous blob drifting through the abyssal zone, propelled by currents I neither understand nor control.
I tell myself this is fine. It’s winter break. This is what winter break is for. Decompression. Rest. The recalibration of a nervous system that has been running at prosecutorial intensity since August.
It’s not fine. I know it’s not fine. The part of my brain that handles self-deception is currently on strike, and the part that handles brutal, unflinching honesty has seized control of the microphone and is reading aloud from a very damning internal report.
By day six, I have reorganized the weapons cache behind the closet panel twice.
The secure panel slides open with a soft click—a sound engineered to register below the threshold of human hearing for anyone standing more than three feet away.
The walk-in closet smells like cedar, gun oil, and the chemical trace of the non-porous coating I apply to the metal components every six months.
I pull on nitrile gloves from the drawer beside the panel. The left one tears at the thumb. I discard it, reach for another pair, snapping them on with the sharp crack of latex settling against skin.
The cache is arranged by type and caliber.
Pistols on the top shelf, rifles below, blades along the side wall in magnetic sheaths.
Each piece has been cleaned, inspected, and logged within the last fourteen days.
There is no operational reason for me to be handling them right now.
The last contract was completed nineteen days ago.
The next one has not been assigned. This is maintenance without purpose. Ritual as displacement.
I run a gloved hand over the Beretta 92FS.
Check the slide. Check the magazine well.
Check the firing pin. Re-shelve it. Move to the Glock 19.
Same process. The Walther PPK. The Smith & Wesson .
38 snubnose that belonged to my father before Chino, before the conviction, before the carefully constructed narrative of his life collapsed into thirteen years of concrete and razor wire.
This last appeal is literally his last hope…my last hope.
The throwing knives are next. Three of them, balanced to the gram, the edges honed to a mirror finish. I test the weight of each one in my palm, feeling the heavy, precision-engineered metal designed to travel through air and find its target with minimal resistance.
I put them all back. Exactly where they were.
The organization is already perfect. It was perfect before I started.
It will be perfect after I finish. The only variable is me, standing in a walk-in closet at two in the morning, handling weapons I don’t need to handle, because the alternative is sitting on the sectional and thinking about the empty space where Jae’s shoulder should be.
I open the Chrome bookmarks manager and manually drag Arizona v.
Hicks into the custom folder view, placing it above Arizona v.
Miranda. I move Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents below Boyd v.
United States. I create a new folder for Fourth Amendment exceptions and populate it with twelve cases that have absolutely no business being grouped together.
One hundred and seventy-four total bookmarks, dragged and arranged by hand because the default sort view is useless when your brain is fraying at the edges.
I close the laptop. The screen goes black. I stare at my reflection in the dark glass, entirely alone with the silence.
The secure tablet buzzes on the coffee table.
The sound is distinct—a low, resonant pulse engineered to cut through ambient noise without being audible through walls or floors. I know that sound the way snipers know the crack of their own rifle. My body responds before my brain does. My spine straightens. My hand freezes halfway to the remote.
The tablet rests beside the half-empty milk tea cup, its matte black surface illuminated by a single notification on the lock screen.
The encryption icon pulses gently in the corner—a small, geometric pattern indicating a message has arrived through the channel that doesn’t route through any server a subpoena could touch.
I reach for it. My thumb finds the biometric scanner. The screen unlocks.
Penelope’s message sits in the center of the display, rendered in plain text on a black background. No emoji. No voice memo attachment. No lengthy preamble about her upstairs neighbor’s bass-heavy taste in music or the new energy drink flavor she’s decided is either brilliant or a war crime.
Just a single line: files incoming in the next day or two. Next contract. Good one.
I set the takeout container down on the coffee table. The plastic clicks against the glass with a sharp, echoing snap.
The encrypted text changes the math. No more grease. No more gray-noise television. Just parameters, a timeline, and a target.
The poodle documentary is still playing. The British narrator is describing the judging criteria for the continental clip with the grave intensity of someone discussing nuclear non-proliferation. I reach for the remote and mute it without looking away from the tablet.
The apartment is quiet now. Just the soft tick of the wall clock in the kitchen and the almost inaudible whir of the espresso machine’s heating element cycling on for no reason.
I open the secure messaging app and type a single character: K.
Then I set the tablet down, stand up from the sectional, and walk to the kitchen.
The sink is full of dishes. I turn on the hot water. I squirt dish soap into the basin. I pick up a sponge and I start washing.
The problem has arrived. The parameters are set. I will receive the files, review the dossiers, and execute the plan with the ruthless precision that has kept me alive and out of prison and on the dean’s list simultaneously for the past three years.
I scrub a curry-stained plastic container with surgical force. The hot water turns my hands pink. Steam rises around my face, carrying the sharp, clean scent of lemon detergent.
I am back.