Chapter 35
When he finally spoke to me again, my brain barely caught up with it.
I’d been sitting on the floor for so long my legs felt dead beneath me, my body stiff enough to hurt when I shifted.
At some point the light in the room had changed, the shadows stretching across the walls in a way that told me hours had passed, but I couldn’t remember a single second of it.
There was a dark mark in the wood in front of me.
My eyes kept dragging back to it over and over again, following the same line until it started feeling like the only thing keeping my head from splitting apart completely.
I wasn’t even thinking about it anymore.
I just needed something to keep me there.
“Rowan.” He said my name, but it felt far away, muffled by everything else going on inside my head. It wasn’t enough to pull me back. My body stayed exactly where it was, heavy and useless against the floor. “Can you hear me?”
I blinked once, like my eyes had to remember how to do it.
“... Yeah.” The word came out weak, unfamiliar in my mouth.
Then everything went still again, except this time I could feel him there behind me.
I didn’t need to look to know how he was standing.
Keeping his distance like he had for the past few days, like he thought getting too close might make the whole thing worse.
He hadn’t pushed, not after my pathetic breakdown.
He’d moved around me instead. Given me space in a way that didn’t feel kind, more like he was waiting.
Watching from a step back instead of right in front of me.
“You said he talked to you,” he said after a bit, calm and even.
“Your father.” That reached me somehow. My eyes finally pulled away from the mark on the floor, blurry at first before they slowly started catching on other things around the room.
The edge of a chair. One of the legs had a long scratch carved into the side of it. I swallowed hard.
“Yeah.” A few seconds dragged by before he continued.
“... Did he say anything about your mother?”
That one went straight past all the noise in my head and landed somewhere deeper, somewhere I hadn’t touched in a long time.
I felt it before I even understood why. A hard pull under my ribs– like something buried was being forced back to the surface.
I shifted where I sat, barely moving, just enough to ease some of the pressure building in my body.
My palm pressed harder into the floorboards before I even realized it, fingers spreading against the wood like I needed something solid to hold onto.
“He…” I started, but the rest caught somewhere in my throat. The words felt tangled up in my head, and I had to force them together before they would come out.
“He didn’t talk about her the way I thought he would,” I said after a moment, slower now, like I was checking each word before letting it go.
“Not like… not like she was something he wanted to erase.” I pressed my teeth together, my eyes still fixed on the floor. “He said she was… sick.” The word sat wrong in my throat, so I exhaled through my nose.
“Not the kind you can fix,” I added. “The kind that changes how you see things. How you… react to them.”
My fingers pressed harder into the floor.
“He told me she was scared of me before I was even born.” That part had stayed with me since he said it.
“He said she thought something was wrong. That I wasn’t…” I swallowed, the rest catching for a second before I forced it through.
“Not right. That I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
My throat felt dry and I couldn’t look away from the floor.
“She tried to,” I cut myself off, my jaw locking for a second. I dragged a breath into my lungs and tried to keep hold of it before everything in me started slipping again. “To kill me. Get rid of me.”
That was all my father had said about that part. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that was just the only part my brain had decided to hold onto.
“He didn’t talk about her like she was evil,” I continued, but the further I got into it, the deader my voice started to sound.
“He talked about her like… she didn’t know what was real anymore.”
Something pulled through my shoulders before I forced them still again.
“He said she looked at him sometimes and didn’t recognize him. And other times she looked at him like he was the only thing keeping everything from falling apart.”
Something in my face pulled tight, because I remembered exactly the way he’d said it. Like he’d already gone over it too many times in his own head and there was nothing left to prove. I swallowed again, tried to, but my throat stayed dry anyway.
“He told me about the night she left.” The words came out slower and heavier. “He said she waited. Until everything was quiet, until he was asleep.”
My finger dragged against the floor, back and forth, keeping me anchored while I said it.
“She took me and just… left.”
I could picture it. Not clearly, more like something I had built from what he told me. Pieces stuck together in a way that made sense even if I hadn’t been old enough to remember any of it.
“He didn’t hear the door,” I said. “Didn’t hear anything.” A breath slipped out of me, uneven. “He woke up and we were just… gone.”
The space between the words lingered, and I let it stay that way.
“He looked for us.” That word came out harsher than I expected. I frowned, the sentence felt wrong the moment it left my mouth.
“Not for a week. He kept looking. He said he went everywhere he could think of. Places she used to go, people she used to talk to. He kept thinking she’d calm down and come back.”
My hand pressed too hard into the floor and my fingertips turned white.
“He didn’t understand it yet.”
For some reason, my brain kept catching on that part and refusing to let it go. “He thought it was just… fear. That it would pass.”
I exhaled through my nose.
“But it didn’t and a few years later I was found abandoned in an apartment.” Something inside me dropped so hard it hurt. “She just left me there.”
Those words hit differently than the rest. There was nothing around them this time, nothing trying to explain them away or make them easier to swallow. I just left them there between us exactly as they were.
“They said I’d been there for… a while,” I added after a second– though the number didn’t matter. It never really did. My mouth twitched, filling my mouth with a bittersweet taste.
“They took me after that. Authorities.” I exhaled slowly.
“Then I ended up where I ended up.” There was no reason to say it out loud. We both already knew.
I adjusted my position on the floor, pain and pins and needles crawling through my legs hard enough that they should’ve dragged my attention away from everything else, but they barely even touched me.
“He didn’t know where I was.” It came out detached in a way I couldn’t control.
“He said he kept looking even after that. Even when people told him to stop.”
My gaze dropped fully to the floor again, unfocused.
“He said he didn’t stop until he couldn’t find anything left to follow.”
I pulled a breath in through my nose and held it there for a moment before finally letting it out.
“He didn’t leave me,” I said it again, my voice rougher this time, like the words had already been dragged through me once before.
There was nothing left to prove anymore.
I just needed to hear them out loud again, even if I couldn’t fully understand why.
The room went still behind me again. I kept my eyes forward.
Something in me refused to turn around and see whatever expression he had on his face now.
Everything started drifting for a second, the room around me going dull and distant, and then
“... Fuck.” Almost under his breath, but I heard it. I didn’t lift my head, didn’t look at him.
“But she was right, Zwierek.” The words stumbled on the way out, catching in the middle like some part of me regretted saying them the second they left my mouth.
Then they just hung there between us with no way to pull them back.
“No.” His voice stayed low, but something in the way he said it still hit hard enough to stay under my skin.
“She wasn’t.” I felt my teeth press together at how fast the answer came. Not the words themselves. The speed of it. Like he’d already heard that sentence in his head long before I ever said it out loud.
“They did this to you,” he went on, and this time his voice carried something heavier beneath it. The kind of anger people try to keep under control when they know letting it out fully would change the entire room.
“Everything before. All of it. That’s what shaped you.
” My fingers curled tight against the floor.
My eyes fixated on the same spot. “If she hadn’t,” he stopped himself, exhaled once, then continued.
“If you hadn’t been dragged through that from the start, you wouldn’t be here. None of this would have happened.”
I let the words sit. Not because I agreed, because I didn’t. There was something in it that sounded right if you didn’t look too closely. Something that could almost make sense if you wanted it to. If you needed it to. But… no.
My throat moved when I swallowed. Something in me pushed back anyway, stubborn, sitting deep enough that he couldn’t reach it just by talking. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t just before, it wasn’t just… fate or whatever the fuck he wanted to call it. He was in it too, he just didn’t say that part.
Little Ghost, you hear that, don’t you?
The way he says it. The way he almost makes it sound real. Like there actually is a clear line, a place to put the blame so it doesn’t stain everything else. You’d almost believe him if you wanted to, I could if I wanted to, but I didn’t.
I let out a breath, slow and uneven.