Page 82 of What You left in Me
“You’re not going to ask me anything,” he says, in that same smug voice. “You’re going to pay. You’ll call when you want to. You’ll call when you’re ready.”
He thinks he’s setting terms and that he has leverage. He hasn’t met the kind of hunger that keeps me awake.
I shake my head again, because I can’t let the man think he’s the one holding any of this. “I’ll call you when I want answers,” I say. “When I want them, they will come. You give me what I want when I ask. Not before. Not on your timetable.”
He sizes me up like a man seeing if the next animal is worth his time. Then, with a practiced motion, he punches his number into my phone. He hands the device back and gives me a smirk like he’s played his part perfectly.
“Call me when you’re ready to bleed,” he says. Then, because men like him always like a flourish, he adds with a leer, “But remember…truth has a hunger. It gets what it wants.”
What the fuck does that even mean?The man needs to stick to drinks and weed, not poetry.
He melts back into the darkness like soot, leaving the night smelling worse for his presence. I stand there for a longtime, chest tight, everything in me wired for a fight I haven’t started yet.
The anger runs deep and slow now, with a hot flare of immediate violence, guilt, and regret. I’m feeling so many emotions, I couldn’t even bottle them up if I wanted to. I think of my mother… of her small, patient faith in a world that refused to be decent to her. I think of Ariane and the way she’ll look when she learns the woman she calls mother, and who is supposed to have counseled her about safety and virtue, stands at the center of a conspiracy that cost someone everything.What the hell am I gonna tell Dad?I won’t let my mind go there.
Eleanor’s fucking pretentious in ways I always found annoying. But I never thought she was capable of turning her vanity into murder. That realization is a new kind of betrayal, one that tears at the brittle scaffolding of family myths I relied on. The house I live in, the rituals, the reasons I learned to measure my feelings in degrees of acceptable rage—they all start to look like a theatrical set.
I light another cigarette and draw until my lungs remember calm, which refuses to come. The smoke is little comfort. My chest is a furnace; suspicion carved in bone.She killed her.That’s the truth. Maybe not with her own hands, but with whispered instructions and enough money to make a man like Waren work until his conscience’s voice is rented out. She paid. She wanted a life with my father and thought erasing a wife was a method of making a life. That is monstrous and intimate at once.
Tomorrow, I will stand by Dad’s bedside as the doctors check vitals and hand me lists of dosages and times. I’ll be the dutiful son, and I’ll field questions and I’ll keep a face like the house needs. But after that, after the morphine fog lifts and the surgeons go home and the nurses go off shift, I will start pullingthreads. Waren’s number is in my pocket, the first thin wire I can tug. He will sell me what he knows because that is his nature. He will also sell it to someone else if the price is right, so timing matters.
I need to be precise in my approach. I will want names, dates, accounts, the men who moved money. I want receipts, not exaggerated stories. Stories make good theatre but receipts? They hold people accountable. I am not sentimental about exposure. My aim is not revenge for its own sake; it is correction. If someone built her life on arranging other people’s ends, I will do what men like me do: use leverage to make systems right, or at least to ensure the record reflects reality.
For a minute, standing alone in the courtyard, I imagine Ariane’s face when the ledger is open. Will she look at her mother and see a woman capable of murder? Will she see a desperate lover who used the arsenal of privilege to get what she wanted? Or will she see a story her mother told to protect her—one that unravels in ugly, unlovely ways? My chest hurts at the thought. It’s not gentleness that makes me worry; it’s the understanding that Ariane, who has already been broken by the deceit of men, cannot afford another evisceration of trust.
I pocket my phone. Waren’s number is added there like a promise and a threat both. I step back into the hospital, the light swallowing me.
Inside, the world keeps its polite noises: monitors, whispered thanks, the hollow clink of cutlery from a vending machine. Richard sleeps and the surgeons say he’s stable. That will do for now.
For now, I am left with the taste of smoke and the knowledge of what I must do. I didn’t like Eleanor, sure. But never in a way that prepared me for this. I never imagined thatthe woman who has shaped my father’s midlife to be the one to write such a dirty script.
I walk down the hall to Dad’s room with slow and loaded steps of a man who knows how to plan a siege.
Chapter 26 – Ariane – A Week of Silence
It’s been a week since Richard’s surgery, and the house still smells like boiled chicken and lavender disinfectant. We’ve cycled through three casseroles, two fruit baskets, and one floral arrangement that looks like it could devour a small cat. The wicker hamper saysGet Well Soonin cursive, which feels both encouraging and vaguely threatening, like the flowers might enforce recovery with thorns if necessary.
Richard is home now. He’s pale, stitched, and fiercely pretending he isn’t fragile. But, he’s home, away from the machines and white coats. The first thing he asked for, after a plastic cup of tepid water, was a pencil and paper to sketch out a new gallery layout. The second thing he asked for was whether the koi pond filter still hums at night because it “ruins the composition of silence.” That’s Richard: editing the world when his body refuses to cooperate. I’m surprisingly grateful for it though. The editing and the way he keeps calling the nurse “Lieutenant” like she’s ordering troops. Grateful that he’s here to annoy everyone back to normal.
But the week is hollow. It’s as if someone scooped the center out of it and left me circling the edges, pretending I can’t see the gap. Finn left after that night in the hospital lawn. Not a word. Not a note. Not even one cryptic and razor-edged texts.
One second, he was a storm pressed against me, and the next he was gone, like the weather changed and took something with it I didn’t realize I was clinging to. It would be easier to hate him if I couldn’t still feel his hands. My body keeps betraying me with memory, and my better self keeps trying to slap my wrist like a nun with a ruler. I should hate him for it. I should hate myself more for letting it happen. Again.
The house is abnormally quiet in the mornings, the lake lying flat and judgmental under a skim of mist. I make coffee and watch the dock because, apparently, I’m a Victorian widow waiting for a ship. The kitchen clock tuts at me, knowing exactly how pathetic that is. I tell it to mind its own business, and it keeps ticking anyway.
Mom has been different. That’s the polite word for what she’s acting like.
Different.
She moves through rooms like a figure in a painting: perfectly dressed, untouchable, and shrouded in darkness. No snarky commentary or frostbitten advice about my hair or my career choices. She floats in, adjusts Richard’s blanket with exacting tenderness, and floats out again with her phone clutched like a rosary. When I ask if she slept, she says yes without looking at me. When I offer to make her tea, she says no, thank you, without noticing whether there’s a kettle on the stove. Even though I shouldn’t be thinking about it, I can’t help notice that the change started the moment Waren returned to our lives. She hasn’t given me any details about him. Honestly, I haven’t even pressed that hard. Considering everything going on at the house with Richard, now doesn’t seem to be the right time to ask questions about the man who brough ruin to our house. Partially at least.
“You should focus on Richard, not me,” she says on day three, in the tone you use for lost children and people who want to discuss the weather.
“Iamfocusing on him, Mom,” I tell her, exasperated. “I’m focusing so hard I can see his pores. He’s going to file a restraining order against my eyes.”
“That will be something to arrange after he’s fully mobile,” she replies, and then smiles as if she remembers what humor looks like, but not how it works.
I hover in the doorway of Richard’s room that afternoon, pretending to straighten magazines. The nurse, Janice, who could lift a car with one hand and puree soup with the other, gives me a look that is three parts fondness and one partdrink some water or I’m telling your mother. Richard snores softly, mouth open, one hand curled on top of the blanket like he fell asleep mid-gesture.