Page 87 of Ruin
The evidence wall is the first thing I see, illuminated by the streetlight that leaks through the curtains.
My face is up there.
Photographs, documents, red ink connecting the nodes of my life's work like a diagram of a disease.
I don't go out of my way to look at it. I know what's on it better than she does.
The kitchen counter is spotless. The coffee maker is cold.
A mug sits in the dish rack, still damp.
She made coffee and didn't drink it.
Small details that tell a story about a woman going through motions that have lost their meaning.
I move through the dark with the silence I learned from my father, who learned it from his father, who learned it in the old country where silence was the difference between breathing and bleeding.
Past the living room. Past the bathroom, where I can see the cracked mirror in the half-light. To her bedroom.
The door is open.
She's in bed.
Lying on top of the covers in a T-shirt and sleep shorts, one arm thrown over her face, the other resting on her stomach.
The gun is on the nightstand, positioned for a right-handed draw.
She's thought about this. Planned for the possibility that someone might come through that door.
The collar catches the moonlight, diamonds throwing tiny refractions across the ceiling like scattered stars.
She's wearing it to bed.
A week after learning what it really means, and she's sleeping with my collar against her throat.
I sit on the edge of the mattress.
The bed dips beneath my weight and she doesn't stir.
Her breathing is slow and even, her lips slightly parted, and she looks younger in sleep.
Softer.
Closer to the girl I found than the woman I built, and the distance between those two things is the distance between who I was before her and who I am now.
I reach out.
My fingers hover above the line of her jaw, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her skin without making contact.
I trace the shape of her face in the air.
The cheekbone. The curve of her lower lip. The edge of the collar where it meets the hollow of her throat and her pulse beats steady against the diamonds.
One centimeter. That's all the space between my fingertip and her skin.
One centimeter of air that holds everything I can't say and everything she won't forgive.
She moves.
