Chapter Forty-Four Violet
Chapter Forty-Four
Violet
Castina blurred as the sun sank, the mist wrapping itself around everything until even the edges of the town looked smudged.
Fog sat low, heavy as a damp shroud. Gulls wheeled once, twice, then vanished into the bruised sky.
I took the boardwalk anyway. I always did after work now, shoes slipping against the wet planks, my hair damp with salt air. Routine. Same path. Same breath. Like if I kept the ritual, the day wouldn’t splinter.
Couples drifted past, living in some other world.
A woman slid her hand into a man’s pocket as if it belonged there.
A boy pushed his bike instead of riding, the wood too slick to risk it.
Everyone looked so painfully normal. It felt obscene, like laughter at a funeral, like joy in a place where it didn’t belong.
I sat on a bench and forced myself to notice the details.
The abandoned child’s sock on the railing beside me, soaked through.
Seaweed scattered on the sand, green and slick like the skin of something dragged from the deep.
Across the way, an old woman tossed bread to gulls that tore it midair, their shrieks too sharp in the fog.
And then I saw him.
Through the shifting white, tall stature, shoulders broad beneath a gray jacket. My spine went rigid, my breath cut short. That gait . . . I knew it, carried it somewhere buried in me, a muscle memory for longing.
The crowd parted and closed around him like waves pulling back from shore. Oil from water. He paused, turning just enough that I caught the blur of his profile, half swallowed by mist.
It was . . . familiar. Too familiar.
“It’s not Grayson.” I didn’t know if I whispered it or only breathed it into the cold air, but the name left me all the same. “You’re seeing things again.”
I should have let it go there, but part of me still needed to be sure. I cut through a knot of tourists braving the weather, intent on keeping the figure in my sights. Someone cursed when I shoved past, but I didn’t care. I needed to know I wasn’t crazy—that it wasn’t him.
The man stopped outside the seaside café. Just before stepping in, he turned, and his face became visible.
He was too young. Too soft around the edges.
His face lacked the map of pain that was etched into Grayson’s features.
Even as the disappointment hit me like vertigo, I reminded myself that I’d known it wasn’t him, that I didn’t need to follow every tall man in a coat.
I clutched the railing, fingers digging into cold metal until it ached.
The sting of it meant I was still here, still in the present. That my sessions with Dr. Afonso were working, at least a little bit.
I stepped back until the fog swallowed him whole. Then I turned and started walking. By the time I reached the boardwalk, the tide had surged higher, waves muscling over the rocks with a steady, merciless violence. I stared at the gray churn until my eyes burned from salt and wind.
I walked the rest of the boardwalk home. The thrift shop beneath my apartment was already dark, save for the single lamp left burning near the register. The handwritten sign on the glass, with loops and flourishes, read Closed. Open tomorrow at 8 a.m.
Upstairs, the hallway carried its usual damp-and-lemon-cleaner scent. My door stuck the way it always did when the air swelled with humidity. I shoved it open, flicked on the kitchen light, lined my shoes by the door, and draped my jacket over the chair. The motions were automatic, ritualistic.
I put water on the stove and poured a mug of tea I already knew I wouldn’t drink. Then I lit the candle and turned off the overhead light. The single flame owned the room, shadows fastening themselves to every corner.
I sank onto the couch and stared into the uneven dark. The apartment seemed bigger than it was, or maybe it was just my mind, stretching into a boundless void.
That was when I heard it. It was just a faint shift, like fabric brushing against fabric. I froze, listening hard, holding my breath until the silence thickened again. Nothing. No footsteps, no voices. Only the candle flickered, casting light and shadows against the walls.
I told myself it was the building settling, pipes ticking, and the ordinary complaints of an old building making itself known.
But the longer I sat there, the more certain I became that it hadn’t been the apartment at all.
It had come from me. From somewhere inside my own head, fraying at the edges.
God, was I losing touch with reality?
I told myself to read, to focus on anything else. The textbooks on the kitchen table still lay open to yesterday’s pages. I wanted fiction, something to pull me out of my head, but I forced myself back to what was supposed to matter.
I didn’t bother with the lights, just carried the candle over and set it in the middle of the table.
Its flame cast long, twitching shadows as I flipped through a book, stopping on a page I’d underlined last week.
Pen in hand, I wrote in my notebook. The rasp of ink on paper steadied me, almost soothing.
When I finally set the pen down, I stared at the sentences until the lines bled into doubles. The candle swayed. The refrigerator hummed a steady white noise.
And then everything cut out. The hum. The small sounds of the building. Even the dance of the candle’s flame seemed to hush. The room held its breath. My skin went cold, and a kind of instinctive chill screamed run before my mind caught up.
“Get a grip,” I muttered, but my voice sounded too thin, too human in the thick silence. I shot to my feet too fast. My knees knocked the underside of the table, books shuddered, and the flame jumped.
Then came footsteps. Slow, steady, deliberate, and right outside, climbing the stairs toward my door. Nothing about them was extraordinary, but they carried a weight I knew too well.
Before I even thought, I was at the door. My hand hovered over the locks, trembling. Don’t. But I turned the dead bolt anyway. The click of metal sliding free echoed through the apartment. Loud, obscene, and final.
I opened the door and stared into the vast darkness that stretched as if it had no end. I didn’t breathe as I stood there and counted to ten. Then I shut it again, forcing myself back into the ritual of routine. Life was easier that way.
I switched on the television but kept it muted, watching strangers perform the motions of lives I no longer recognized as my own.
I curled onto the couch with the blanket pulled to my mouth, the screen’s colors strobing faintly across the room.
Between commercials, I kept catching the afterimage of a man in a gray jacket, turning toward me, turning away.
Sleep didn’t come. I listened to the sea in the distance, the relentless back-and-forth of the waves battering the shore.
I tried to anchor myself to the sound. At some point I must have slipped under, because I dreamed of the barn.
Of kneeling in the dirt, smoke clawing my throat, the roof burning before it fell.
When I woke, my cheeks were wet and my fists clenched so tightly my nails had carved crescents into my palms.
I wondered if the line between memory and madness had already blurred too far to ever find my way back, or if it was time for me to say fuck the noise once and for all?