Page 136 of Beautiful Obsessions
I know you, Archie.Better than anyone.I know what lives under your skin.I know how quickly grief curdles in men like us when there’s no one left to aim it at but ourselves.I know your first instinct will be to burn.To tear through whatever stands in front of you and call the wreckage justice because justice is easier to stomach when it’s bleeding.
If you must become something dangerous, then become dangerous in a way he never understood.Not cruel for cruelty’s sake.Not hollow.Not starved for worship.Be the sort of man who knows exactly where the line is and steps over it only when it matters.Be the kind of monster who tears cages apart, not the kind who builds them and makes excuses to fill them.
I know what he is.I know what he did to my mother, and what he did to yours.I know it got under your skin early, and that is why you looked at suffering and could never quite walk past it.
Do not lose that.I mean it.
The world will try to beat it out of you.They will tell you that compassion has no place in power.
Let them say whatever makes them sleep better, because their evil knows no better.
You are not him.And for the love of God, Archie, do not let grief convince you that becoming him is the only way to survive what he’s done to us.
If there is any part of me left in this world after I’m gone, it is in the things I tried to keep alive in you.
Your loyalty.Your fury.Your refusal to look away.Your need to drag wounded things out of the dark even when they bite you for it.
Those things will hurt you.Keep them anyway.
One day, if the world allows it, you will love someone who sees all the worst parts of you and does not run.
When that happens, do not punish her for arriving late to a war she did not start.
Do not bleed all over the one place that feels like peace and push it away.Do not make her carry ghosts that belong to us.
You do not honor me by staying broken, or by dying angry.You honor me by living long enough to become something our father could never understand.Something he could never control.
Something he would have feared if he’d been wise enough to see it coming.
And if there is any justice in this world, you will outlive him.
If there is any mercy, you will love greatly enough that the house does not get the final word on either of us.
And if there is anything of me left in you after all this, let it be the part that knew monsters should never be allowed to walk this earth unchallenged.
—R
I would never admit aloud that I had composed those words a hundred different ways in my head over the years.
But I would know—deep in my bones—that if Rasputin had been given the chance, the letter would have sounded something like that.
Not soft.But loving in the only way either of us had ever known how.
Brutal.
40
Tone - 2 months later
The phone shattered the quiet, sharp enough to cut through the stillness that had settled over the house like a second skin.
I stilled where I stood in the kitchen, my hand hovering over the edge of the marble bench, listening to it ring again.The sound carried through the open space, echoing faintly against high ceilings and sunlit walls, out of place in a morning that had been otherwise… peaceful.
Archie’s phone.
He’d left it on the dining table.
I moved toward it slowly, bare feet silent against the cool stone floors, my fingers curling around the vibrating device just as the screen lit up again.
