Page 77 of Ruin
Trying to wash him off.
The smell of sandalwood. The ghost pressure of his hands.
The places where his mouth has been that my nerve endings still remember with treacherous precision.
I catch myself pressing my fingers into the bruise on my left hip.
Faded now, yellowish green at the edges, but I can still feel the shape of his thumb from our last night together.
The tender one. The night I told him I loved him while he moved inside me with a gentleness that made me believe,truly believe, that I was the center of his universe.
My stomach lurches.
I press my forehead against the tile and breathe through the nausea until it passes.
When I step out, I avoid the cracked mirror.
I towel off, pull on jeans and a cashmere sweater, and tuck the collar under the fabric where it sits against my sternum, hidden but present.
A secret pressed to my skin.
The evidence wall watches me from the living room.
All those faces. All those names.
My father's handwriting on legal pads, neat and precise, the penmanship of a man who believed that documentation could save the world.
But it didn't save him.
My phone is face-down on the kitchen counter where I left it last night.
I flip it over and the screen lights up.
Fourteen missed calls.
All from the same number.
And one text, from a different number entirely.
Emilia: SELENE MARIE DEVERAUX. You have cancelled brunch THREE times. I’m not accepting a fourth. Saturday. Mimosas. Seventh Street. If you don’t show up I am filing a missing persons report and I am NOT joking. Love you.
Saturday. That's today.
I read the message twice and something in my chest loosens a fraction.
Not much. Just enough to remind me that there are still things in my life that aren't stained with blood.
Emilia, who has been texting me variations of this message for weeks.
Who doesn't know that the reason I keep canceling is because every time I think about sitting across from her, I have to calculate which lies to tell and which truths to swallow, and the arithmetic is getting harder.
But right now, with the gun on my nightstand and the evidence on my wall and fourteen unanswered calls burning a hole in my phone, Emilia's voice in my head is the only thing that might calm me.
I type back: I'll be there. Eleven?
Her response is instant: Eleven sharp or I'm sending Dad with a search warrant.
The restauranton Seventh is all exposed brick and hanging plants and reclaimed wood tables, the kind of place that serves sixteen-dollar avocado toast and calls orange juice "fresh-pressed citrus."
