The Hallway Tilted. Everything Tilted - Libby
Six
My hands shook as I moved down the hallway.
Blankets. Just get the blankets. Keep moving. Keep your shit together.
With each step, the house tightened around me, the air thickening, pressing against my skin the closer I got to the linen closet. An old ache crept in.
Not now. Please, not now.
I yanked the closet door open harder than I meant to, grabbing at the stack inside and nearly pulling everything down on top of me. Fabric spilled over my arms, soft and clean and completely wrong against the pressure building in my chest.
That room.
Of all the rooms in this house, it had to be that one.
My breath hitched. I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing my back against the wall beside the closet, holding myself still.
The memory came anyway.
The study door closing. The soft click of the latch catching.
His voice—low and unhurried, with something pulling at me to stand closer to the door, even then, even before I’d let myself understand why.
Him with his odd quality of calm, the kind that never meant safety.
Lily’s face afterward. Small. Quiet. Something behind her eyes went dark; one moment there and extinguished the next.
My stomach turned so hard my knees buckled. I caught myself against the wall, palms flat against the wood paneling, fingers pressing in until my nails bent.
“I protected her,” I whispered, the words barely carrying. “I protected her.”
But guilt had never been a thing that words could reach. It simply sat lodged in the middle of my chest, living for the past ten years, patient and immovable.
The blankets slipped from my arms and hit the floor.
The hallway tilted. Everything tilted.
I couldn’t find now. Couldn’t locate myself inside it. My body had already gone back to then—his hands, his voice, the sound of my daughter trying not to cry through a closed door while I stood on the other side of it and told myself I was misreading things, that it wasn’t what it looked like.
“Stop,” I choked out. “Stop.”
Each breath caught halfway and stalled, my lungs refusing to fill completely, my pulse roaring so loud it drowned out everything except the pressure building inside my own skull. The world went thin at the edges.
For one second, I thought my legs would give out—that someone would find me down on the floor and I would have to explain.
Then Lily’s voice drifted from down the hall. Quiet and uncertain, asking no one in particular something I couldn’t quite make out.
Her voice.
Just her voice and it cut through everything and dragged me back by the collar.
Back in the now, and I confronted the undeniable truth: I needed to be upright, functional, and present. The past would not claim me tonight.
I forced air into my lungs, feeling it catch and burn.
Another breath, shallow and painful, yet it was mine.
A fine tremor ran through my hands. “I’m okay,” I whispered to the empty hallway, the lie catching in my throat.
I knelt, the blankets a clumsy weight in my unsteady arms, then pushed myself to stand.
I arranged my face into a mask of composure, hoping the dim light would hide my body’s rebellion.
Abusive husband. Self-defense. Tragic but justified.
That was the narrative the world had, the one I had meticulously crafted, smoothed, and handed over, watching them accept it. Some days, I was still grateful for it. Some days, I needed their version more than anything. It was easier. It was survivable.
They didn’t know about Lily. They didn’t understand the true meaning of “incrementally” when you lived inside it.
They didn’t know what it was like to tell myself, “not yet, not enough, one more time, besure”—and to keep telling myself that, to keep not being sure.
And to understand now, ten years later, that my indecision had been a destructive act.
I had rebuilt my entire life to ensure she never had cause to ask, to ensure she never knew how long I’d stood on the other side of that door.
I told myself it was mercy. Some days, I believed that.
Other days, I understood that mercy and self-preservation could appear identical from the inside, and that I had never been fully certain which I was practicing—only that I had needed it to be mercy so desperately that the question had eventually ceased to feel like one.
I swallowed hard. Straightened my back.
One step, then another, toward the study.
By the time I reached the study door, composure had returned. That was enough; it had to be.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside, blankets stacked in my arms, my face revealing nothing I hadn’t intentionally placed there.
“Got some,” I said, my voice shaking only slightly.
I distributed the blankets. Responded to Fiona’s quiet thank you with something that approximated a smile.
And I did not look at my daughter. Not directly. Not long enough for her to look back.
Holding myself together had been the only thing I had left for ten years.
I watched Finn slip out of the study, his movements silent but purposeful, already oriented toward whatever came next before the rest of us had finished processing where we were.
I waited a beat, listening to Fiona and Lily shifting blankets behind me, and followed him.
By the time I reached the kitchen, Finn had already opened two cabinets. He shut the door behind me the second I stepped in, and my hand rose instinctively, fingers stopping just short of the counter’s edge, bracing for nothing. I made myself lower it.
He gave me a brief, assessing glance—the kind that takes inventory rather than interest—then turned his attention back to the cabinets, the counters, the sink.
I was categorized, filed, already dismissed.
The relief that brought surprised me.
After John, being looked at and moved past—an item among many—carried an unexpected lightness. Finn looked at me the way he looked at the cabinets, which meant I didn’t have to fear what his gaze implied.
Invisible, and therefore safe.
Yet, something complicated the edges of that relief. Not desire—nothing so straightforward. More like a faint signal from a part of me that had gone quiet, a reminder of a version of myself who had known what it was to want and be wanted without the threat embedded within it.
I didn’t suppress the thought; I simply set it aside. This was not a door I had any business opening—not tonight, with everything pressing in, and not after ten years of evidence that I no longer trusted my own judgment.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
Finn didn’t hesitate. “Inventory,” he said, pulling open a cabinet and scanning its contents. “We need to know exactly what we’re working with. And I haven’t eaten since last night.”
“There are canned goods in the lower cabinet,” I said, stepping closer. “Pasta, soups, some boxed stuff. I don’t know how much. Here, I made this last night,” I handed him a half loaf of banana bread.
“Thanks, and good.” He crouched, pulling items out and lining them up on the counter in neat rows. He was controlled and methodical, building order from available materials the way someone does when order is the only tool left.
“Next, we fill everything we can with water,” he said, still crouched, reading labels as he absently ate the bread.
“The sink still works.”
“For now.” He looked up at me, his expression neither soft nor cruel. “When the grid goes down—and it will—we lose pressure. Whatever’s in the pipes at that point is all we get.”
Something about that settled in my chest and stayed there.
“How much should we—”
“Everything.” He stood. “Bathtubs, pots, every container in the house. If it holds water, we’ll use it.”
I nodded. He turned the faucet on. Water rushed steadily into the first pot.
For now.
I started pulling things down from cabinets—pitchers, old Tupperware from the back of a shelf, mixing bowls I hadn’t used in years, a stockpot Lily had given me two Christmases ago.
I set another container under the faucet, my hands moving steadily.
The house creaked.
Then, beyond the boards, a scream—close enough that my body understood it before my mind did. It cut off abruptly.
My hands froze. Water ran over the rim of the bowl and onto my fingers, but I didn’t move.
Finn didn’t stop. Didn’t look up. “Keep filling.”
I forced my hands to obey. Water hit plastic, a strange noise in the quiet—too domestic, too small.
“How long do you think—”
He didn’t look at me. “Don’t know.”
His blunt honesty was an undeniable, terrifying truth.
I watched him for a moment—steady, reorganized around a reality that had collapsed in hours.
I looked down at the water rising slowly in the bowl.
From the hallway, Lily’s laughter at something Fiona said drifted through the dark house, reaching me in the kitchen like a sudden, unexpected comfort.
She was still in there. Still capable of that.
Outside, the city continued to unravel. Inside, we kept filling containers with water.
I set the full bowl aside and reached for the next.
We laid everything out on the counter: cans, boxes, a few half-used bags of rice and pasta, their tops rolled and clipped shut by someone who expected to return.
It looked like more than it was.
Finn straightened and rolled his shoulders, then turned to face me. I met his eyes for half a second before I understood my mistake and looked away.
The pull registered before I could stop it.
Quiet and unwelcome—and then, underneath that, something not entirely unwelcome, which was worse.
Whatever part of me had apparently survived everything intact chose this particular moment to make itself known, without apology, without shame, and without any apparent awareness of its own poor timing.
I recognized it for what it was: elemental attraction.
The fact that some part of me could do this—still respond this way to a man’s presence—didn’t feel like survival. It felt like a flaw I hadn’t finished paying for.
I looked back at the counter. The cans. The half-empty bags of rice. Anything that wasn’t his face.
Finn spoke first. “We’ve got enough for a week, maybe two.” He said it as he said most things—direct, handing me the information like any other fact. “After that, we’re in trouble fast.”
Ten years of school pickups, utility bills, and ordinary weeks—and now my world had shrunk to days. Maybe less.
“How close is the nearest store?” he asked.
My stomach tightened. “Eight blocks. But won’t it already be—”
“Looted.” He looked away, pressing his tongue against his cheek. “Yeah, possibly.”
He dragged a hand down his face, his mind elsewhere, running calculations I couldn’t access.
Eight blocks.
We both understood what that meant.
Finn took a deep breath, and something in his eyes resolved. “We sleep while we can,” he said. “I’ll take first watch. Then you and Fiona rotate.”
I stared at him. Sleep was a word I understood, but I couldn’t grasp how it would actually come. My legs hadn’t stopped shaking for ten minutes, a fine, continuous tremor that ignored every command I gave them.
“Me?” I whispered, the word barely a breath.
“You know this house,” he said, as if that was the only data point that mattered. “The sounds it makes. I need you both functional by morning.”
There was no hesitation. He didn’t ask if I could manage it; he hadn’t seen me fall apart in the hall, but his failure to even consider the possibility was its own cold assessment. He’d decided I was a tool for the job, and he was moving on.
“Okay,” I said.
He gave a short nod. “Keep it quiet. If anything sounds wrong, anything sounds like it’s getting in, you wake me immediately.”
“Got it.”
The silence between us held for another beat—long enough that I became aware of the boarded windows at my back and the sounds drifting in from outside, the city continuing its undoing—a distant siren that died abruptly, a shout that wasn’t a scream.
Then Finn reached over and killed the kitchen light.
Darkness came down all at once, complete and immediate, and I heard rather than saw him move toward the door.
“Come on,” he said, his voice low. “Let’s get some sleep.”