Kai
Iplay her voicemail until my phone gets hot in my hand.
Then I play it again.
I’m sat on the floor of the shitty little house I’ve turned into a shrine, back against the peeling wall, legs stretched out in front of me, the glow from the screen cutting through the dark like a wound.
The room smells like dust, old paper, cigarette smoke I don’t remember lighting, and her voice bleeding out of the speaker on repeat.
You came back.
Her first words. Broken. Slurred. Soaked in wine and regret.
Every time she says it, something inside my chest claws at the bars I welded around it in prison.
“I never fucking left,” I mutter under my breath, thumb hovering over the screen, ready to hit play again the second it ends.
The mattress shoved in the corner is unmade, sheets twisted like a body fought there.
The walls around me are lined—floor to ceiling—with her.
Photos. Newspaper clippings. Screen-printed screenshots.
Still frames from security footage I shouldn’t have been able to get.
A candid from the charity ball, pinned crooked above my head; she’s smiling for a camera, eyes dead, Noah’s hand on the small of her back like he owns her spine.
He doesn’t even know what he’s touching.
None of them do.
The floor around me is chaos—envelopes, letters, ink-bleeding pages covered in her handwriting and mine, stacks of white cardboard boxes with evidence labels still half-stuck on them. A bottle sits uncapped by my ankle. I haven’t drunk any of it.
I don’t need alcohol.
I’ve got Scarlett.
God, Kai… I remember you touching me.
My head tips back against the wall with a dull thud.
I close my eyes.
I see her—drug-warm, soft, eyes half-lidded; the way her lips parted, the way she whispered my name like it was the only thing she had left. The way she shivered when I bit that mouth.
My jaw tightens until it hurts.
“I shouldn’t fucking want you,” I told her.
Lie.
I always wanted her.
The voicemail crackles on, her words spilling in that raw, unguarded way that makes me want to rip the world apart and make it listen.
I remember your voice. I remember your smell. I remember your hands on my face like you never left.
I laugh under my breath, harsh and low.
“You lied in court better than that, little sister,” I say to the ceiling, to the shrine, to the ghost of the girl who used to sit at the end of my bed with paint on her fingers and ask me what freedom tasted like.
She tasted like it.
That’s the fucking problem.
The message plays through to the middle, to the part I can’t stop rewinding even though every time it hits, it digs into places prison didn’t manage to rot.
I’ve spent four years pretending I forgot you when all I did was fucking drown in you.
My hand curls into a fist on my thigh.
The scars across my knuckles go white.
She doesn’t even realise what she’s giving me. How every word she spills into my voicemail is another thread I can wrap around her throat. How confession is just another kind of collar.
I loved you so much it felt like dying.
“That makes two of us,” I murmur, voice flat, eyes still closed.
My thumb drags across the screen.
I don’t need to watch the little bar crawl along the bottom. I already know every pause. Every breath. Every crack in her voice. I could recite it back to her word for fucking word, hold her jaw open and feed her own guilt down her throat until she chokes.
The recording jumps, her voice softer, shredded at the edges.
No. No, that’s a lie. I still love you.
There.
That’s the line.
That’s the one that took me from wanting to haunt her life to deciding I’m going to fucking dismantle it.
I open my eyes.
The room looks smaller now. Closer. The edges of everything sharper in the low light from the phone.
“I still love you,” I repeat, letting the words drag over my tongue like I’m tasting them. “You have no idea what you’ve just done, Scar.”
The voicemail goes on. Her explaining herself to the empty room like I’m not pressed against the walls of her mind already. Like I haven’t been living in that head for four fucking years while she tried to bury me.
I lied in that courtroom because I thought it would save you.
My lip curls.
I push off the wall, restless, pacing the small strip of floor that isn’t drowned in paper. The boards creak under my boots. The radiator ticks. A car goes past outside and fades into nothing.
She thought she was saving me.
She stood there in that too-big blazer, hands shaking around the Bible, voice cracking, eyes begging me to understand while she put a bullet through everything we were.
I watched her sell me out with tears on her lashes.
I watched the judge look at her like she was some tragic little angel who’d survived the monster in the defendant’s chair.
I watched the cell door close on the life we were supposed to have.
She thought she was saving me.
“You nearly destroyed me,” I say to the wall covered in her face, heat crawling up my spine. “But you didn’t. You just…” I huff a humourless breath. “You made me patient.”
Prison didn’t kill what I felt.
It concentrated it.
Took everything else away. Friends. Freedom. Sky. Touch. Noise that wasn’t someone screaming or steel clanging shut.
All I had was time.
Time and her name.
Time and the letters she sent back unopened, the envelopes crumpled by some disinterested guard and tossed into my cell like trash. I smoothed out every one. Wrote the date she rejected me in the corner. Stacked them neatly under my mattress like a spine.
I reach down now, grabbing one from the nearest pile. Her handwriting is on the front—neat, slightly slanted, the way she used to write my name in the margins of her school books so our mother wouldn’t see.
Kai Everly
HMP Greyside
Prisoner 49762
RETURN TO SENDER.
Big black stamp across the centre.
Beneath it, in smaller letters, the first one that really fucked me up:
Recipient refused correspondence.
A lie.
She never refused me.
They did it for her.
She begged them to keep me away.
I tear the envelope in half with a calmness that feels almost surgical. The rip is clean, practiced. I’ve done this a hundred times. I don’t need the outside anymore.
What matters is inside.
Not the letter—my words are burned into my brain, I don’t need to read them.
What matters is that she knows now. That I kept them. That I read every one in the slant of fluorescent light that passed for day in that place and imagined how her face would look saying the words she forced me to hear from someone else.
I drop the paper.
It joins the mess on the floor.
The voicemail keeps playing.
I miss you. God, I miss you.
I grab my phone again, dragging the bar back, listening to that part over and over until the line between confession and punishment blurs.
I want to see you. I want you to come back. Just don’t hate me anymore.
“That’s the funny thing, Summer,” I say quietly, using the name that still makes something soft ache beneath all the broken bits. I look up at the photo above the window—her on some charity flyer, wearing a dress that costs more than this entire building, eyes hollowed out under the gloss.
“I don’t hate you,” I tell her paper face. “I never did.”
I hate Noah.
I hate the system.
I hate every person who sat in that courtroom and looked at me like I was dirt while they polished their shoes on my back.
I hate the version of her that bought the lie that she could survive without me.
But her? The girl who bit her lip until it bled trying not to cry because she thought tears would make them harder on me?
I could never hate that girl.
I sit back down, phone balanced on my knee, and finally let the voicemail run to the end without touching it.
Her breathing goes ragged.
Her voice drops to that small, shattered place I’ve only heard twice before—once when we watched the paramedics wheel our mother out, and once when she stood outside the police station and told me she couldn’t lie for me anymore.
Now she’s lying for me again.
For a different version of me.
For the story she told herself to sleep at night.
Just don’t hate me anymore.
The beep cuts her off.
Then silence.
My silence, recorded earlier, slides in over hers. The message I sent back. The one she’s already replayed enough times to carve into her bones, if the look on her face last night was anything to go by.
“I told myself I wasn’t going to pick up…”
I don’t listen to it again.
I don’t need to. I remember every syllable. Every calculated pause. Every place I let the truth leak in just enough to hurt.
I lock the screen and drop the phone next to me on the floor.
My pulse is steady now. Slow. Measured.
The first hit of hearing her voice had me feral. Laughing and swearing and pacing like some caged animal finally given blood.
Now?
Now I’m cold.
Cold is better.
Cold makes me careful.
On the wall opposite me, in between all the photos, there’s one thing that isn’t her: a floor plan. Neat lines, printed labels. I stole it from the architect’s site before they took down the listing; one of Noah’s investment properties, customised to his specifications.
Ground floor.
First floor.
Security system.
The back door.
The side gate.
The exact path from the woods to her bedroom.
I stand, stretching out the tightness in my shoulders, and cross to it, scanning the routes I’ve already tested in the dark.
The path I took last night. The blind spots in the cameras.
The window angle that gives me the perfect view of her vanity, of the mirror where she paints her face to look like she belongs in his house.
“Did you have a nice sleep, Scar?” I murmur, tracing the little rectangle that marks the master bedroom. “Wake up feeling like death? Head pounding? Throat sore?”
My lips quirk.
“Good.”
Noah wants her compliant.
He uses chemicals.
I use consequences.