Page 140 of Ruin
I stand there for a long time. The wind moves through the trees and somewhere on the next row over, a sprinkler clicks and hisses in a lazy rhythm. The world is quiet the way it only gets in places where the dead outnumber the living.
"I know about him," I say. My voice sounds strange out loud, too small for the open air. "I know who did it. I know why. I know every detail, because the man who pulled the trigger told me himself, sitting in his living room, drinking whiskey like confessing to murder was just another item on his evening agenda."
The headstones don't answer. I didn't expect them to.
"And I'm with him. I'm with the man who killed you, and I love him, and if you could see me right now you'd..." I stop. Swallow. The coffee is cooling on the stone, untouched, and the cream in mom's is separating the way it always did when she forgot to stir it. "You'd be horrified. Dad, you'd try to prosecute him. Mom, you'd try to save me. And neither of you would understand, because what I've become doesn't fit inside the world you raised me in."
A jogger passes on the path behind me. Headphones in, oblivious. The normal world, three feet away, not noticing the woman talking to the dead.
"But I'm alive," I say. Quieter now. "I'm strong. I'm using everything you taught me, even if I'm using it for things you never imagined. And the man you'd hate...he's the reason I'm standing here instead of lying next to you. That's not a justification. It's just the truth, and you both taught me that the truth matters even when it's ugly."
I press my fingers to Dad's headstone. The granite is cool and rough under my fingertips. Then Mom's. I trace the letters of hername the way I used to trace the letters in her handwriting on the notes she'd leave in my lunchbox.
Catherine.
I have her jawline, her coloring, her stubbornness. I have her habit of arguing with people who are bigger than me and her inability to walk away from a fight I believe in.
She'd understand, I think. Not forgive, but understand. Because my mother was a defense attorney who spent her career arguing that people are more complicated than their worst acts, and if that was true for her clients, maybe it's true for the man I love. Maybe it's true for me.
I leave the coffees on the headstones. Don't take them. Don't drink mine. Let them cool and separate and eventually spill in the wind, the way everything does when you stop holding it.
I walk back to the car without looking back.
The letter arrives on a Tuesday.
No return address. My name on the front in handwriting I'd recognize from across a room, across a city, across any distance.
Emilia's handwriting.
The same loopy cursive she used on birthday cards and study notes and the label of a friendship bracelet she made me when we were seventeen that said BEST BITCH in purple and green thread.
The envelope is thin. One sheet of paper inside, folded once.
I open it standing in the hallway of the penthouse with the afternoon light coming through the windows and Cassius in his office ten feet away, and I read it.
I'm not ready. But I'm not gone. Don't forget the difference.
Eleven words, and the paper shakes in my hand because my fingers are trembling. The hallway blurs because my eyes are filling. I press the letter against my chest and walk very quickly to the bathroom and close the door and lock it.
Then I cry.
Not the controlled, silent tears from the factory or the safe house or the night I found out the truth. This is the ugly kind. The kind that bends you over the sink and wrenches sounds out of your chest that don't have names and leaves you gripping the marble counter because your legs won't hold you up.
I cry for Emilia, who I love and who loves me and who I will never sit across from at brunch again. I cry for the friendship bracelet and the guest room and the mimosas and the girl who braided my hair when I couldn't stop shaking and never once asked me to be anything other than what I was.
I cry for the fact that what I was isn't what I am, and the person who loved me most can't survive the distance between those two things.
It lasts four minutes. I time it by the clock on the bathroom wall, because even in the middle of falling apart, some part of me is counting, measuring, controlling what I can.
Four minutes of wreckage. Then I wash my face with cold water, fix my hair, check my eyes in the mirror—red but manageable—and walk back into the hallway.
The letter goes in the nightstand drawer. Beside the collar key. Two objects that represent two choices, sitting side by side in the dark.
Cassius is in the doorway of his office when I pass.
He sees my face. I know he sees it because his expression shifts the way it does when he's reading something he doesn't like but won't interfere with.
He doesn't ask. Doesn't reach for me. Just watches me walk past with the particular restraint of a man who is learning, slowly and imperfectly, that some things he can't fix by taking control of them.
