Chapter 36 – Ariane – Shattered Things #2
I stare at my hands. They don’t look like a good girl’s hands. They look like someone else’s—someone who will walk down the hall tonight because she can’t help it. “Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes I’m something else.”
He closes his eyes. “We all are.”
I leave before I do something embarrassing like put my head in his lap and cry until we float away.
In the hall, the day has lengthened into that bright nowhere time where you can’t nap because you’re an adult, but sleep is the only thing you want because your brain is an unhelpful roommate.
I make it three steps toward my room and then hear footsteps at the far end of the corridor.
The kind that sound like they know where they’re going and why.
I duck into the linen closet so fast I almost become a towel. Welcome to maturity.
From my ridiculous vantage point, I watch Finn pass.
I’m not ready to face him yet. He’s in a dark shirt, sleeves pushed up, throat bare.
He looks like a war you want to sign up for.
His face is set in that really-not-smiling line that says he’s already buried something today.
He doesn’t look toward my door. He disappears toward the back stairs and the office.
I stay in the closet until the scent of cedar makes me light-headed and then I tiptoe to my room like a thief.
I tell myself I’m avoiding him because I have dignity.
The anklet at my ankle laughs, Sure, babe.
I spend the rest of the morning pretending to do tasks. I make lists and then throw them away because they look like crime notes. I try to read and stare at the same paragraph for twenty minutes. I open my laptop and answer two emails with the prose style of a raccoon.
Every time the floor creaks, I freeze. Every time a door closes I picture Mom walking back in, chin high, and a new story already loaded. I try to imagine what I’ll say if she does. My brain offers: hi and why and please don’t. None of them feel sufficient.
By noon, I have consumed one piece of toast, three cups of tea, and an entire bag of pretzels I didn’t know we owned.
I could call Penny and ask her to take me somewhere banal, like Target, and we could touch throw pillows until things felt normal.
But she’s not here. So instead, I pace my room and get acquainted with how many steps there are from the dresser to the window.
(Sixteen. Seventeen if your heart is heavy.)
Memory keeps choosing its own programming.
I keep replaying last Night. The slap. Finn’s fingers biting around Eleanor’s wrist, ugly and beautiful all at once.
His voice. The calm way he put the phone on the table like a dealer laying down a straight flush.
The way Mom’s face changed when she realized he’d cornered her, fear and fury, all in one terrifying second.
And then the worst: Richard’s shoulders collapsing. The sound he made when he stood, the sound I will hear in my bones until they turn to dust. I wanted to run to him. I wanted to run to Finn. I did neither. I stood and burned, because that is apparently my new skill set.
Around one, there’s a soft knock on my door. I have the ridiculous thought that it’s the universe and she’s here to apologize. “Who is it?” I ask, because I’m a coward who would like to pre-screen agony.
“Julia,” comes through the wood. “And soup. Don’t make me use my key.”
I open the door. She holds a tray like a shield. The smell is tomato and basil and childhood. “Eat,” she says again, because she knows I need bossing or I will abscond into melancholic poetry.
I sit on the bed and obey like a trained seal. “Has anyone heard from her?” I ask.
“No.” She sets a napkin in my lap, formal service for an informal collapse. “Those who leave at dawn do not call.”
I twist the spoon in the bowl. It makes a little whirlpool.
“I keep thinking maybe I don’t know my mother.
But I do. I know the exact scale of her expectations.
I know the angle of her head when she’s about to say something that feels like a gift and lands like a slap.
I know how she’s going to hold her glass at a party. I just didn’t know… this part.”
Julia sits. “We do not know the parts people bury for us,” she says. “That is the point of burying.”
“I want to un-know it,” I say. “Can we return it? Is there a receipt?”
“Baby,” she says, “there are many things in this house with receipts. Not this.”
I laugh-sob, attractive as a feral cat. “Finn had the receipts,” I say, and the name is gasoline. “He had them all lined up like dominos, and then he pushed.” I press the spoon into the soup until it disappears and then let it go. It floats back, defiant. “He didn’t even warn me.”
“He does not come with warnings, in my experience,” she says.
“Has he always been this way? Even when he was kid… when his mother was alive?
Julia gives a sad smile. She started to work here when Finn was a baby. “Yes.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“No.” She pats my knee again. “But it’s the truth.”
After she leaves, I put the tray outside the door like a little white flag. The afternoon staggers. I try to nap and dream about keys that don’t fit any doors, about pearls rolling across the floor like eyes. I wake with my heart sprinting and check the anklet as if it has moved on its own.
I catch myself in the mirror around four and hardly recognize what looks back.
My hair is a tangled mess; my eyes are red and swollen; my cheek wears Mom’s handprint like makeup I forgot to blend.
I touch it and shame flashes hot and savage, not because she hit me, but because part of me is still that child who wanted to be good enough not to deserve it.
I grab my concealer and dab, dab, dab, like I can fix the past with pigment.
By early evening, the light shifts sweetly over the lake.
It’s the kind of hour you save for picnics and proposals.
The house pretends at normal. Someone clinks glasses in the kitchen; the gardener drags a hose across the lawn; a bird does its best at opera on the fence.
None of it touches the knot under my breastbone.
I don’t see Finn all day because I have arranged my movements like a woman hiding from an eclipse.
If he came to my door, I don’t know what would happen.
If he walked into this room right now, I’d tell him to leave.
I’d also brace my hands on his shoulders and plead for him to stay, to stay forever.
I hate that both are true. I hate that the wanting wins in every timeline I run.
He did not warn me that I would burn this way.
###
By the time the clock marks six, I’ve done what every anxious woman does when she can’t change anything: I’ve cleaned my top dresser drawer, color-coded my notebooks, and started a spreadsheet labeled job applications maybe lol. The world does not pause just because mine keeps biting its own tail.
I move to the window. The dock throws a long finger across the water.
The boathouse keeps its secrets. From here I can see the gravel stretch that leads to the driveway.
It is empty. I picture a car appearing there, the powder-blue one Mom loves, and feel sick.
I picture Finn’s black car and feel something worse.
A motion catches my eye below. The study door opens.
Richard steps out onto the patio, cardigan tight, hands in pockets.
He stands like a man who has aged ten years since breakfast, which is impressive because he had a good lead.
He doesn’t look toward my window. He looks at the oak and then back at the house and then at the sky, and I swear I can hear him asking an old, tired God what the plan was supposed to be.
I press my palm to the glass and whisper a prayer I don’t believe in: Let him be okay. Let me be enough to help him be okay.
I don’t know how long I stand there but it’s long enough for the light to turn honey and then amber, long enough for my tea to go cold and my mind to wear grooves into itself. Long enough to know that nothing is going back to the way it was, no matter how much I behave.
When I finally move, it’s because my body decides to. I leave the room and stand in the hall with no plan. The ankle monitor hums, a ghost of a hum, but I feel it. It says: he knows where you are. I should hate it. I stroke the metal with my thumb like a talisman and step forward.
I pass the study door, which is open now. The chair is empty. A single book lies face down on the rug, as if the reader fell asleep mid-sentence and stumbled away, leaving it there, forgotten.
I keep walking, because I can’t absorb any more meaning.
At the landing, I hear Finn’s voice. Not loud. Not even angry. Just… there. Talking to someone called Eric on the phone about something that is not me, using numbers like blades, making decisions in that quiet way that controls the whole room. I freeze out of sight.
By nightfall, I am exhausted from doing nothing.
I wash my face and see the bruise coming up faint and mean under the skin.
I set my moisturizer down harder than is reasonable.
I crawl into bed like I have run a marathon fueled by anxiety and toast. The house settles.
That’s what we call it, anyway, when the wood remembers itself.
I stare at the ceiling and try to catalog what I know:
— My mother is gone.
— Richard is breaking in a room with my last name on the door.
— Finn told the truth like a guillotine.
— I am furious.
— I want him anyway.
If there’s no going back, then forward is the only way.
What does forward look like? Me and Finn, in the open?
Me, choosing the man who lit the match because he’s also the only one who knows how to hold me when it’s dark?
Him, being with the woman whose mother killed his?
The anklet cool against my skin says you already chose.
I pull my knee up and press the metal into my palm until the circle bites. The sting steadies me.