Chapter 14 - I Return to Our Empty House
Months later, I returned to the Alexandria house with Rebecca.
Not to live there.
To collect my things.
The kitchen had been cleaned.
The granite corner looked ordinary.
That offended me somehow.
Places should look different after terrible things happen in them.
They rarely do.
I found the cracked phone in an evidence return bag.
The screen was destroyed.
The contact marked Dad remained visible when I charged it.
I remembered Carter laughing.
Your pathetic country bumpkin.
For years, I thought the secret was Dad’s title.
It wasn’t.
The real secret was that Carter had mistaken humility for weakness.
He did that with Dad.
He did it with me.
I had worked twelve-hour shifts.
Carried his child.
Cooked while bleeding.
Stayed quiet because I was calculating how to survive.
Carter thought silence meant surrender.
He was wrong.
May you like
I took my mother’s old quilt from the bedroom.
Then I left the house for the last time.
