Page 87 of Emmett

I head straight for my grandfather’s office; a space which I was only allowed to visit with him present, never alone. I was never to touch anything, never to read his private papers. I wasn’t old enough, prepared enough, trustworthy enough.

Dropping into the chair behind his deep rosewood desk, I run my hands over the smooth leather, bringing them to my face as a quiet sob escapes me.

I’m all alone now. My grandparents are interred together in their shared mausoleum, some poetic display of their love for each other, and I’m left here with no one. I have no family, I have no friends, I have no one that I can call on.

“You stupid old man,” I say under my breath. Someone knocks on the office door and I sniff, scrubbing a hand against my eyes to dry them. “What?”

Orla carefully steps into the room, her ginger hair slicked back into the same bun that I’ve seen it in every day since the moment I moved into this house. Her uniform remains as unchanged as her hair, which has been dyed to hide the greying pieces that beg to show through.

I’ll miss her when I leave here, I think, but I can’t stay. Not without them here.

The people who held me together when my world came crashing down around me are gone. Every dinner will be alone. Every breakfast. Every birthday and every gala. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about that. Orla may be able to fix many things, but she cannot fix this.

“Flowers were delivered for you, Mr. Montgomery. From a Colt Fowler?” She looks at the card in her hand. “He writes that he’s very sorry for the loss of your grandfather.”

I reach inside of myself in search of one of the many masks that Henry had helped me to carve out over the past nine years. Only one seems to fit me anymore, and it’s the only one that I carved out all on my own, during my first week in prison. It’s the mask that’s kept me safest, and it’s molded itself to my shape. We belong together, this mask and me.

I pull it over my face in a cold display, shutting off any emotion and keeping my housekeeper from seeing the pain that I tuck deep down beneath it.

“Get rid of them.”

“Mr. Montgomery—”

“People die all of the time, Orla,” I tell her as I stand from my seat. “It isn’t a big deal.”

•

PresentDay

I can’t sleep.

‘I just wanted to hear your voice, I guess.’

I reach to my nightstand for my cell phone, pulling up Emmett’s voicemail to play it one more time. I listen to the unease in his voice, to the hesitation behind every word that he speaks, and dread settles into my gut like a two-ton weight. He’s left me plenty of messages since that night in my living room, and he’s gone through plenty of emotion throughout the course of them; anger, pettiness, hurt and defeat. This one is different; this one makes my skin crawl.

Without meaning to, I tap his contact page and call him, sitting up to leave my bed. The line trills and trills and trills for painfully long moments while I move to my closet to slip on some clothes.

“Hey, you’ve got Emmett Fowler. I’m not able to take your call, but leave your number and I’ll get back to you.” As soon as he stops speaking, he laughs and starts to say something – presumably to someone else in the room with him – just before the message cuts off. It’s a beautiful laugh.

The last time that I heard that laugh, he’d come over after dark, like always, and we’d sat at my piano for two hours while I tried to teach him to playChopsticks. When he’d finally given up after the both of us laughed so hard that we were turning red in the face, I played him Beethoven’sFür Eliseand Schubert’s rendition ofAve Maria. His hand rested at the nape of my neck and the smell of his cologne enveloped me in a rich blanket that had come to feel much too much like home to me.

I hang up as the message tone sounds and I dial again, repeating the process as I move to the SUV waiting for me in my garage, and as I climb in, I order the car to call ‘pretty boy.’ When I hear his answering machine play out for what has to be the ninth time, my foot presses more weight against the gas pedal.

“If you don’t answer the phone right now and tell me that you’re okay,” I warn him, “I’m going to show up at your house, and then you’llreallybe angry with me.”

I call again. Another voicemail.

“Answer the fucking phone, Emmett.”

I push far beyond the speed limit, weaving through traffic with my own words to him echoing in my mind.

Parasite.

Desperate to be loved.

Tragic.

I’m terrified that I poisoned him.