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10

DELILAH

G lass crunches under the booted feet of the officers. It doesn’t stop me from overhearing their conversation after Asher left me in the living room.

“Is there anything missing, Mr. Newman?” the officer asks.

“Not that I know of. None of the security alerts were triggered, but my wife…” He pauses, and I turn to see him run his fingers through his hair before he continues. “My wife has issues. Her knees are scraped and there’s blood on the glass at the bottom of the stairs, so she could have fallen.”

I don’t have issues. I have one, singular—the freak who chased me. He said he believed me, but now he’s acting like I’m crazy to the people who are supposed to help.

The officer looks up from his shitty little notepad and I stand, refusing to let them assume I’m some delusional idiot that doesn’t know what reality is. My steps slap off the floor and anger tightens every muscle in my body until I’m standing in front of them both.

“I didn’t fall inside the house,” I say with conviction.

The detective gives me a tight-lipped smile that shows he doesn’t believe me. It’s been the same bullshit since I showed them all the points the freak had touched, and what had been changed while I was unconscious. The table I knocked over was back in the correct place and Asher didn’t move anything.

Before either of them can call me crazy without actually saying the word, I point out the obvious thing they’re both missing.

“What if he’s living in the building next door?” The officer looks to Asher, and I add, “You said it’s not linked to the house but there’s a walkway upstairs. He could have come through it.”

I stand there smug as the officer rounds up his dumb colleagues to check the building. Asher follows them as he takes out a set of keys. I need to see the freak be apprehended so I join their search party. The first thing that makes me pause is the driveway.

The flat surface should be disturbed with deep grooves in it from my struggle. Asher’s car is parked at the side in the opposite direction of where I was tackled. The police cars are behind it, so the grooves should still be there. I wasn’t unconscious for days, it was only twelve hours, so why are the grooves missing?

The officers shout through the door as they open it and pull me back from examining each piece of gravel. The smell hits me before I’m even close to the threshold. Stale air and dust. Little particles glimmer in the light from the midday sun and Asher holds my hand, stopping me from entering.

Every surface is covered in a thick layer of dust that the officers disturb on their journey through the building. The windows are boarded from the inside and thin strips of light stream through. I know it was used as a studio by the previous owners, but the mask sitting on the workbench looks out of place.

A gas mask.

The black straps are gray from how long it has sat there unused, and the lens is covered in grey too. Spray paint bottles are lined up at the back of the workbench against the wall. The caps are broken or missing entirely. But I can’t stop staring at the mask. My eyes narrow and I look through the space, trying to find the memory my mind is associating with it.

Nothing.

There’s no memory, yet I can’t rid myself of the feeling that the mask is significant.

Asher pulls me closer to his side and kisses the top of my head. Stroking down my arm, he attempts to comfort me in a bullshit soothing tone because he thinks I’m crazy.

“It’s okay, Lilo, there’s no one there.”

“Did I fucking say there was?” I snap back and push him away from me.

I don’t look at him as I storm back to the house. I’m not crazy or seeing things. The house was a suggestion, not a fact.

But there’s nothing out of place like it should be. The glass is at the bottom of the stairs, when I dropped it in the kitchen. There’s no gravel inside the house, when it was scraping against the floor.

Am I crazy?

Delusional?

Or is everyone else around me refusing to see what I do?

The stones crunch under the feet of the officers as they leave the other building and I turn in the hallway. The front door blocks them from seeing me, but it doesn’t stop Asher’s conversation from coming through.

“The security system is a closed network. No one would have been able to get into it without it alerting me and I have the physical passkey to access it,” he says while the officer nods along, when it’s basically gibberish.

“And where were you?”

“I had to visit a client in New York. My flight landed around two hours before I made the call to you guys.”

He takes a deep breath and looks over his shoulder towards me. I’m about to go outside to say he’s telling the truth when he starts speaking again.

“My wife has”—he slowly shakes his head and amends his words—“is going through a lot, mentally I mean. She sometimes experiences reality differently to what’s actually happening around her.”

The officer doesn’t add anything or ask any further questions as Asher undermines everything I’ve said.

“She’s medicated for her psychosis, but she just had an episode so she’s not fully in recovery yet. I shouldn’t have left her alone.” He says the last part lower and scratches his jaw with the back of his fingers. “Sorry to waste your time.”

“How often does this sort of thing happen, son?” the officer asks.

I’m getting an insight to someone I don’t know and stand there waiting for the answer. I thought he believed me. But he sighs and shrugs.

“It’s on and off depending on how she reacts to her medication. At our last house, she thought the neighbors’ coat stand in their hallway was a figure watching her. Even after she broke into their house with a knife ready to confront the object, she kept screaming that they were watching her. They were kind enough to not press charges, but the local station had an injunction on her due to how often she would call them to report the neighbors.”

What the fuck is he saying?

A little voice tells me to trust him while my blood heats. I wouldn’t break into someone’s house because of a coat stand. Or with a knife. I’ve never broken into anywhere. He’s making me sound crazy, untrustworthy. But I stay there and listen to him recount things I vaguely remember.

“Some episodes aren’t as violent. They get worse when no one believes her. For instance, when she was eighteen, she convinced herself that she’d murdered someone and kept going to the police begging them to lock her away. The accident had already been investigated, but they reopened the case.” He runs his fingers through his hair and grips his nape. “It was a very hard time for us all when they exhumed his body, and it resulted in her parents sending her to an institution.”

Some of it makes sense. I remember arguing with my parents before they forced me to go to that hell. But it’s in pieces. Half sentences and different days mixing together that I don’t know what really happened. It’s like having twelve different jigsaws, all millions of pieces, and someone has mixed them together. It doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try, I’ll never be able to marry each edge up to create the right image. Fragments will remain hidden, and I turn to hide.

I only pick up the parting words of the officer as I try to make sense of my own mind.

“It looks like you have your hands full. We’ll keep an eye on any reports from this address. But you might want to discuss your wife’s medication because there’s no sign of a break-in, and your security cameras don’t show anyone on the property, apart from you leaving and coming back earlier this morning.”

Their conversation continues and I sit on the sofa cross-legged. Pulling the blanket folded over the armrest with me, I stare into space, trying to work out what’s going on. Tires roll over the driveway and they all leave but I don’t even blink. If it’s not real then my knees wouldn’t be scraped up, I wouldn’t be able to feel the tension in my muscles from running. I’d just be normal.

What the fuck is normal anyway?

I know what’s happening. I know how hard my heart was racing, the fear, the feeling of the freak wrapped around me when he tackled me to the ground. That is real. It has to be.

The front door closes, and I wrap the blanket around me. My eyes close as I remember how the masked man held my arms to my sides. I tighten the blanket to mimic it. As much as it was terrifying, knowing it’s real helps to ease everyone else’s opinion. A sick part of me wishes he would have hurt me so that I could show an injury as proof that I’m not crazy. If I was bleeding out on the floor with a knife in my back then no one could say I’m imagining things.

Maybe I am insane. That thought isn’t something a “normal” person would wish on themselves. No one would want to be harmed. But how else can I prove that I’m right? That this is real. My cut knees aren’t enough. No one will recognize my mental torment until they have physical evidence of it because the world is fucking stupid.

I’m gently lifted from my seat and placed between Asher’s thighs. He doesn’t force me to open my eyes, but he does stop my thoughts as he kisses my cheek.

“It’s okay, you just had a bad day.”

“It was real,” I mumble as I fall against his chest. “He was there, please believe me.”

He chooses his words carefully as he wraps both arms around me. “I believe you.” His heartbeat is steady against my back as he ruins the agreement. “I believe that it was real to you and everything you’re experiencing is real.”

Real to me. What the fuck does that even mean? Something can’t be both fact and false at the same time. But I don’t want to argue with him, so I remain silent.

“We’ll go back to the hospital and get them to adjust your meds,” he says, blowing my intentions to shit.

I have to fight with the stupid blanket to get off him and my voice raises from the frustration of my life. “Fuck you, I don’t need to go to the hospital, I’m not crazy.”

Being locked away again isn’t an option. Not after everything that happened the first time and being left for months tied to a bed. I won’t—can’t—do that again. Being tied up isn’t something that’s acceptable for animals, and I’m no longer at the whims of my parents’ wealth and influence.

There’s nowhere for me to go, so I run up the stairs, ignoring Asher calling me back to him.

“Delilah, baby, I didn’t mean it like that.”

I’m going to force the freak to come back again. Maybe then, he’ll believe me. Yeah, he’ll have to when he can see the weirdo himself and I’ll be vindicated.

Locking myself in the studio he created for me, I pace, trying to plot a way to get the freak to come back. If Asher needs something to know what isn’t normal, it’s my current thoughts. But it’s his fault for lying and saying he believes me when he clearly fucking doesn’t.

A loud thud hits the door and I stand in front of the piano as he shouts, “Delilah, open the door.”

“I would, but I don’t know if the door is real. I might just be imagining it,” I fire back.

Humor fills his voice as he jostles the handle. “Yeah, why don’t you try and see if it is.”

He continues calling my name as I back away from the door and look for another route to escape. The floor-to-ceiling windows opposite the piano don’t have any openings and there are no other windows in this stupid room. The walls on either side of the piano are lined with books. I take the hidden steps behind the bookcase up to the mezzanine floor as he continues banging on the door. It’s not in a repetition of two, which settles me.

The only thing in front of me is an unstretched canvas. Like everything else around it, it’s untouched but the items are placed exactly like I would have them before I’d get lost in painting something. I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and stretch my legs out in front of me. The metal railing allows me to see out to the rest of the room but I’m as hidden as I’m going to be in this glass house. I watch the trees in the distance through the windows, but there’s no peace when I want the freak to come back and show himself in front of other people. He has to be real. He has to be .

Another thud hits the door and I block it out as I watch the blue sky. Bending my legs, I bring my knees up and hug them, still waiting for anything to pop out of the tree line. If I was following someone, breaking into their home and chasing them, I’d watch the outcome. Otherwise, it would be a pointless, wasted effort. But nothing moves other than small birds taking flight from their nests.

Wood splinters and I keep ignoring it as rushed steps move through the room. They thunder up the staircase and Asher reaches for me as he falls to his knees.

Pulling me into his chest, he kisses any part of me he can reach while wrapping his arms around me so tightly that it’s difficult to draw in a breath.

“Fuck, don’t scare me again,” he says breathlessly.

He cups my face with both hands and looks between each of my eyes as though he’s trying to convince himself I’m in front of him as he asks, “You’re okay?”

I nod weakly.

There’s so much care on his features and I don’t want doubts over my sanity to overshadow the time I thought I’d lost with him. I’ve spent years thinking he was dead and in the two days he wasn’t here, that grief creeped back in.

“I missed you,” I whisper up at him.

A slow smile lifts his lips as he whispers back, “I missed you too.”

I have three very different words on the tip of my tongue. Words that I haven’t uttered to a living soul since I was eighteen years old and stood in the rain hiding my tears. They’re too heavy under his gaze and I push them back down before they can leave.

Like this, with Asher directly in front of me blocking sight of everything else, I’m normal. I don’t have to question anything or worry about reality. This is enough and I never want to leave. When he’s with me I don’t think about who I thought he was, there’s only who he is now as he holds me together.

I need more though. For something to convince those lingering thoughts in the moments he isn’t there that this is it. This is real and it’s my life.