Page 70 of What You left in Me

He started with the official line,heart attack, and I told him my mother didn’t have a cardiac history, that her last EKGs were cleaner than a sermon and her resting heart rate could make a marathoner flinch. “So try again,” I said. He did what liars do: he changed subjects and pretended it was an answer.

I pressed. I asked names, places, who paid who to stand where and say what. He gave me air wrapped in syllables. I gave him the wall.

It wasn’t elegant, the kind of violence with choreography or a point. My fist met his ribs, his shoulder met the concrete, his breath broke into pieces and skittered across the floor like dropped coins. He laughed once, wet and nervous, then tried to turn it into swagger. “You don’t want this truth,” he said. “You won’t like where it points.”

“I don’t care if it points at me,” I told him. “Say the name.”

He spat red in the circle of light and said nothing worth keeping. I put him upright and asked again. He sagged, then stiffened, like a man choosing between pride and survival and picking the one that would hurt me more.

I hit him again, open hand this time, the sound thunderous and stupid in the low room. He grinned with a split lip and said a first name that didn’t matter, then a street that never met the map, then a time that contradicted the report I’d memorized until the paper tore. I could feel the lie the way you feel a splinter when you press your thumb against it—small, exact, insisting.

He lunged for the steps like a rabbit trying a new hole. Reflex is faster than thought; I shoved him back, just to stop him, just to reset the board. His heel skated on dust, his movements went unnatural, and the back of his skull found the edge of the lowest stair.

The sound was small. Not cinematic. Not even dramatic. Just a dull, private thud you feel more than hear, like a door closing two rooms away. His eyes lost focus in a way I recognized and hated. He blinked at me, once, twice, as if he could make the moment pick a different ending. Then his body chose the floor.

I knelt. I said his name, one of the names he’d offered, anyway, and it didn’t come back. I pressed two fingers to his neck and felt the pulse stutter, then argue, then fade like a bad radio station losing the hill. “Don’t,” I said to him, to the concrete, to the universe that delights in timing, “not yet.” It wasn’t a prayer. I don’t do those. It was a demand I wasn’t allowed to make.

He didn’t give me a name. He didn’t give me anything. He took the one thing he had left—the truth—and carried it out of reach.

I sat there for a long minute with my hands open and empty, breathing through the metal taste in my mouth, the buzz of the bulb, the way the basement made every choice feel like it would echo forever. I wasn’t a killer. That sentence arrived by itself, unhelpful and earnest, like a volunteer with the wrong flyer. It didn’t change the floor. It didn’t change the air. It didn’t change the fact that a man who might have known why my mother’s heart “stopped” when it had no good reason to had just left me with more silence.

We hid it well. That’s the part no one wants to hear. Not because it’s clever. There was nothing clever about it. But it worked. No diagrams, no blueprints, no alibi rehearsals. Just a decision with exact corners, the kind you don’t put down once you pick it up. The world didn’t check on him. Not like anyone was going to miss him. Men who sell lies for a living don’t have attendance taken.

When it was done and when the room remembered how to be a room and not a verdict, I washed my hands until the skin tightened and went upstairs and stared at my reflection until the shape of my face felt like a rumor. I slept two hours and woke up with the same sentence in my mouth:I didn’t mean to kill him.It rattled around like a bright orange life jacket—keeps your head up, tells the world you’re drowning. I put it away and went back to hunting, because that’s what I had left: the work, the ache, the promise that I would still find the name, even if I had to pull apart the city brick by brick to get it.

Then I filed the memory where it lived, behind a glass labeledDO NOT TOUCH, and touched it anyway every time the night got quiet enough to hear it breathe.

Wrong number.Cowardice.

Delete.

Get in line.Cute. Useless.

Delete.

Who is this.Bait they want me to bite.

Delete.

I look up. Cameras in smoked bubbles above me blink red. Security cart hums on the level below. Wind drags at my collar. I forward the number to the one person who makes other people’s secrets beg.

Me→Eric:Trace this. Now. Priority one.

Me→Eric:FORWARDED: “I know what you did.”

His reply lands so fast it feels like he was already watching.

Eric:On it.

Eric:Separate thread: movement on your mom’s case. Name is Waren. Last seen at your hospital… last night, and again this morning. Neuro floor.

Waren. New label. Old problem. The sound of the name tastes like rust. My mother’s death is the only file I keep open even when I’m sleeping. Heart attack, they said. Like hell. No history. No warning. Just a neat box to bury her in and a shrug. I’ve been prying that box open with my nails for years.

She had been getting sick for no reason. Doctors had no idea why she was feeling the way she was feeling. She startedgetting exhausted quicker and stopped doing all the things that brought her joy. Until one day, on a run with me, she dropped.

Me:Where exactly?

Eric:Near the family lounge. Pulling stills now. Thirty seconds.