Chapter 13 – Finn – Cracks in the Glass
The automatic doors spit me into the parking lot like the hospital is done with me. Fair. I’m fucking done with it, too. The sodium lights throw everything into sick yellow cones, cars, oil rainbows, a Styrofoam cup waltzing in the breeze like trash has choreography.
My head’s a storm with broken glass in it: Ariane’s mouth on mine, Dad’s chest moving because a machine tells it to, Eleanor barking orders at people who save lives for a living, and Julian… being fucking useless.
I get in the car and sit there with the key in my hand, not turning it, staring at the empty passenger seat like it owes me an explanation. The smell of hospital clings to my jacket: antiseptic, coffee gone bitter in the pot, fear.
I roll my shoulders until I hear the joint pop and say, “Fuck,” into the steering wheel because there’s not a better word and there hasn’t been in hours.
Engine on. Lights on. I pull out slow, check the mirrors like an old habit could fix anything, and point the car toward the road that cuts along the lake.
Willowridge at sunset pretends it’s a place worth keeping.
Trees huddle close. Houses sit back like secrets.
The water keeps pace on my left, a black sheet with one ripped seam of moon.
The doctor’s voice keeps replaying: Cerebral hemorrhage… Not a candidate for surgery… We’ll monitor… We’ll wait…
I wanted to put my fist through a wall and punch a cure out of the fucking walls of this place.
Instead, I stood there like a good boy and let Eleanor argue in pearls while Ariane tried to stay upright and Julian stroked the scene like a fucking campaign ad.
I didn’t say a word because every word I had was a weapon, and the person I wanted to aim them at wasn’t wearing scrubs.
I hit the first curve and the memories start like they always do when the road gets empty enough to hear them.
Mom, in the kitchen after sunrise. Hair shoved into a crooked clip, swaying to some old song on the radio and singing off-key on purpose just to pull a smile out of me.
She’d hand me a wooden spoon like it was a microphone, pretending she didn’t notice the flour on her cheek or the smoke creeping from the pan she’d forgotten.
“Cooking’s just chemistry with better music,” she’d say, though she burned half the things she made.
She’d tap the edge of the counter like it was a stage curtain and bow with exaggerated grace that made her look years younger.
Later, too soon later, I stood in that same kitchen alone, the radio still playing, every drawer too loud when I opened it.
I knew then where this was heading, even when everyone else kept pretending it wasn’t.
The road unwinds and I hit the gas just enough to make my heartrate spike. The purr of the engine is the only thing that shuts my brain up. It lasts a mile. Maybe two.
Ariane bleeds in through the edges. Emerging from the lake: a siren in a provocative excuse of a bathing suit clinging to skin I had no right to touch.
A vision in green velvet under those party lights.
In this fucking car, last night—her legs spread around me, the warm valley between her thighs grinding against me while her hands and mouth roamed all over me.
Her enormous fucking ring catching the dash light like the world flashing a siren I could’ve ignored.
The taste of she’s-going-to-stop and the shock of she-didn’t.
Only, then she did stop. Stopped herself. Stopped me.
Good men would call that restraint.
I’m inclined to call it a stay of execution.
I pass the turnout where we used to park in high school and lie to each other about futures that didn’t happen. The guardrail is still dented where I spun Mom’s Subaru and convinced her it was a shopping cart at the grocery store lot. She laughed. She knew even though she pretended not to.
I think of how the brain hemorrhage is a snake coiled under everything. I keep seeing the monitor behind Dad’s bed, the numbers climbing and falling like they mean something I can change if I stare hard enough.
I keep hearing Eleanor insisting that money and force can glue a man back together.
I keep seeing Ariane’s face when the doctor said the words that pulled the ground from beneath her feet. Her mouth opened, but no sound escaped her lips. She looked at me like I might hold her up from across a room I’d been studiously ignoring all day.
I take the turn onto the long road that threads through the north woods toward the estate and roll the window down farther. The night’s cool enough to bite. The silence here is cricket static.
In it, I can hear my mother’s laughter echoing in pine and then not echoing at all.
I see me at twenty-five with a bag in the trunk, putting a hundred miles between myself and this town.
“Fuck,” I say again, because some words do their job until they don’t, and then they do it anyway.
My phone buzzes in the cupholder and lights my hand up ghost-blue. I don’t fucking care. I don’t care about any of it.
“I am not leaving,” I tell the steering wheel. “I’m not leaving him. I’m not leaving her. They can scream, write checks, call donors, draft statements. I am not fucking leaving.”
It’s a vow, which sits with contention in my chest.
###
After an eternity, I head back to the house instead of the hospital.
I don’t make it past the foyer before the night decides to pick a fight with my willpower.
The house is half-asleep, chandeliers cooled to a smug glimmer, and the roses on the stairs giving up the last of their perfume like a bribe.
Security headlights crawl along the service road and peel away. Presumably, they’re all still at the hospital. The family car wasn’t in the driveway.
I tell myself I’ll pour a drink, look at the lake until the view begins to blur, and try not to think about a brain bleed I can’t cauterize with will. So, I hit the bar, thumbing through the cut crystal, and the pour my poison of choice in the glass with a familiar splash.
I don’t drink it, however; I don’t get the chance before I hear them.
A laugh, brittle and taut, echoes through the house. It sounds like someone tried to tape a laugh together out of nerves and habit and it cracked anyway. Then a second sound is much deeper-set.
My hand stops mid-air. The hair along my arms prickles like the night put teeth on me. I don’t decide to move; my body makes the decision and tells me about it after. Before I know it, I’ve set my glass down and am walking towards the sound.
The runner on the back stairs stifles the sound of my footfalls. Nothing muffles the voices that spill down the corridor. Hers, thin with exhaustion, threaded with apology. And his, smooth, practiced, and the exact register that makes donors open checkbooks and interns forget their names.
“Julian, I’m…” Her breath hitches like she’s been running upstairs, like she didn’t want the house to hear.
“It’s okay.” He’s already soothing, already arranging the scene in his favor. “You’re shaking. Take a breath, sweetheart.”
It’s pretty fucking obvious where this is headed.
Still, I keep moving towards it, because I’m a man. Also: I’m a fucking idiot.
I can tell myself it’s protective fury, and not the hunger that’s been pacing my ribs since the car, but it doesn’t matter either way.
The corridor narrows as I pass the framed prints Eleanor hung to make history look curated.
Ariane’s bedroom door is slightly ajar. It’s just enough that I can see inside through the cracks. I don’t have to look. Yet I can’t fucking stop looking.
The lamp on her dresser casts a dim glow, throwing the room in honey and shadow.
The shoes she’d been wearing earlier today lay strewn, abandoned by the threshold—one on its side like it tried to leave and failed.
Her sweater, tossed on the chair near the window.
A book lies open on the nightstand like it passed out mid-sentence… And then there’s the bed.
Julian’s only half out of his shirt. But he’s propped over her, careful, elbows braced like a gentleman in an old painting. Ariane beneath him, hair loose and wild against the pillowcase, in a silken robe she must’ve changed into rucked up around her thighs.
“Julian—” she whines, quiet and torn, a name that isn’t mine. “I…I don’t…”
“Shh,” he murmurs, and there it is, the politician’s lullaby. “Let me take care of you, sweetheart. You’ve been so strong all day…”
He kisses her. There is no passion to it.
And she lets him. Her hands come up slow, as if they’re waking, and slide to his shoulders.
Her eyes are closed. Maybe she thinks if she keeps them closed, the night will reset itself.
She’s trying to outrun the hospital monitor that branded itself on the back of her eyelids. Trying not to think at all.
Something in me swivels from anger into something worse. Rage coils, sure, but not absolute jealousy; that’d be almost decent. This is a darker thing, possession and hunger.
I stand there and watch ten seconds of a life that isn’t mine like a sinner at the back of a church, and it undoes me.
I cannot stand the sight of her giving herself to anyone else.
Because I know how she sounds when she stops performing.
Because I know what her mouth tastes like when she forgets there’s a world.
“Julian,” she tries again, softer, almost pleading, and he mishears it as consent.
“I’ve got you,” he says, fingers sliding to the knot of her robe, slow, reverent, stage-ready. “You don’t have to think.”
She flinches. It’s small. Another man might miss it, but I don’t.
I could knock. I could storm in and knock him out. Make an excuse, kill the moment, laugh and say Sorry, wrong room, and watch how fast he edits the story to make me a footnote. I do none of it. I just stand there, frozen, and watch.