Page 52 of What You left in Me

Mom’s mouth tightens. “Already?”

“Board meeting,” I say, which is true enough. “He said he’ll miss me.”

“And?”

“And I said I’ll miss him.”

I don’t add: I said it like a person reading a recipe aloud just to hear the right words.

She watches me for three beats. “You’re getting that look again.”

“What look?”

“The look that says you are very stuck in your own head. You’re acting like the Cancerian woman you are.”

“Wow,” I say. “You’ve really cracked open my psyche, Mom. Next, you’ll tell me my attachment style and my enneagram wing.”

She doesn’t smile. “Be careful, Ariane.”

“I always am, Mom,” I lie. “What could possibly happen in a hospital? The worst thing you can do here is underestimate the cafeteria jello.”

She keeps watching until I busy myself with the blanket again. I tell myself I’m reading her, not avoiding her. She’s pale under the lipstick. She is scared, and the only way she knows how to be scared is to be mean. I can be gentle. I can meet her where she is. I can do that much right.

I’ve only been fussing over her for a few minutes when I hear her choke on a breath. Alarmed, I look at her, and look behind myself to where her gaze is affixed.

A man stands at the far end of the hall, just outside the automatic doors where the sunlight slices the floor into hard rectangles. He doesn’t belong here. You can tell by the way he leans, like he owns the doorway and maybe the street beyond it. He is all angles that were never corrected: jaw too chiseled, cheekbones like a threat. His hair is the greasy kind of dark that argues with combs, his jacket could once have been leather but now looks like bad decisions, and there’s grime at his collar like a signature. His mouth is pulled into a smirk that hasn’t done anything kind in years.

I know him, but I don’t know him. My stomach drops to my shoes, and I struggle chase it with reason.

Nevertheless, the memory arrives, not a photograph so much as a smear of color and heat: the back porch of our old house, late, a cigarette burning like a red eye in the dark. A man laughing low and ugly. The clink of pill bottles. My father’s voice, frayed and bright. I was supposed to be asleep. I was fourteen and stupid and scared and I told myself I didn’t understand what I understood.

Next to me, Mom goes absolutely still.

It’s the worst tell in the world because she is never still. She is a woman of perpetual adjustment, bracelet straightened, lipstick checked, hem smoothed. The stillness radiates off her like a silent alarm.

I look straight ahead at the soap opera funeral and feel my pulse in my throat.

The man steps in from the doorway and the light slides off him like it knows better. Up close, he’s older than the memory but not by much, lines carved by nights that never ended and deals that shouldn’t have. Tattoos crawl out from his cuffs, cheap lines and prison art. His eyes are pale, washed-out blue that should look cold but somehow looks wet. He smells like tobacco, machine oil, and a kind of sweetness that makes bile slick my tongue. He looks at me the way men look at pretty things they want to break, then past me to Eleanor, and the smirk deepens.

I don’t know his name. I never knew his name. But I know what he did. He’s the one who put little plastic bags on our porch like party favors. He’s the one whose number lived under different names in my father’s phone. He’s the one who helped sell my father the poison that finally did what rehab and shame couldn’t undo.

My fingers go cold. I set my phone down before I drop it.

Mom’s hand grips the sheet. She doesn’t look at me, but I feel the fear radiating off of her. We are two points on a line that stretches across years, a string drawn through a needle’s eye. We both remember. We never say it. We have spent a decade not saying it.

What is he doing here?

He takes his time crossing the space between us, as if the hallway belongs to him and we are only here by temporary permit. A nurse pushes a cart past him, and he sidesteps without apology, checking his reflection in a dark window, smoothing the jacket that won’t be smoothed. A sad bouquet wilts on a side table. Somewhere, a monitor sings a single warning note and then silences itself.

I feel my face settle into an ugly expression. I can’t help it.

He looks at me and then at my mother and then back at me, as if he’s choosing where to start. His mouth makes a soundlessTsk, tsk, like a private joke he’s letting us watch.

I glance at my mother. Her eyes are dark and luminous and terrified. We have not spoken of this in years. We have never once said his name out loud. We don’t say it now.

He keeps coming, the smirk fixed, patient as a storm rolling in on a day everyone swore would stay clear.

And then he is close enough that I can see the nick in his left eyebrow where a scar splits the hair, close enough to count the pitted marks along his cheek, close enough that if I stood up, I would be inside his shadow.