Page 119 of What You left in Me

“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.

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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 labeledjob 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 knowswhere 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.