Chapter 5 Three Girls I Never Got to Name

I grab the edge of the desk with both hands because my legs have decided they are no longer reliable and I hold on and I breathe and I let it come.

I remember everything.

Callum's voice in the hallway. Nadia's eyes moving through me like I was made of glass. His mother asking for him in recovery rooms and looking through me like I wasn't there. The seven bottles of medication lined up on the counter that I memorised because nobody asked me to. Thirty-two missed calls from my mother. Every presentation, every late night, every argument I did not have because keeping the peace mattered more than keeping myself.

Three girls I never got to name.

The scuff on the toe of my left shoe.

Clear it.

And Lily.

Her weight on my hip, her face buried with trust in the crook of my neck. The way she smelled, warm and clean and completely trusting in the way that only very small children trust, with their whole body, without conditions or reservations or any understanding yet that the world does not always deserve that kind of trust.

I left her.

Not by choice. But I fell and the dark took me and I left my two year old daughter in a world with a father who called her mother ‘it’ and told someone to handle the situation quietly and I was not there, I am not there, she is on that path and I am here and—

My legs let go completely.

I catch myself on the edge of the desk. Both hands gripping the wood, head down, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth the way you breathe when you are trying to stay inside your own body and your body is making it very difficult.

I straighten up slowly.

I look at myself in the mirror again.

Same face. Same wide open eyes. But something is moving in them now, underneath the shock and the grief and the shaking that has not fully stopped, something that has been underwater for ten years and is now with great deliberateness, beginning to surface.

I know what Callum Weston is.

A calculative monster.

I know every smile and every reasonable cruelty and every calculated kindness. I know which parts of the empire he is building have hollow foundations because I built those foundations. I know where the cracks are. I know where the whole thing comes apart if someone applies pressure in exactly the right place.

I know exactly which places those are.

I press my unmarked palm flat against the mirror.

"Not this time," I say quietly.

It is the first thing I have said out loud since I woke up.

I’ll make it into a promise.

---

Downstairs, something sizzles in a pan.

Then my mother's voice, warm and unhurried, carrying up through the floor the way sound carries in old houses, through wood and plaster and twenty years of ordinary mornings.

"Sera. Breakfast."

I close my eyes.

I let myself stand here for one more moment in this room that smells like the girl I was before, before I go down those stairs and begin the work of becoming the woman I should have been all along.

Then I open my eyes.

I look at the girl in the mirror one last time.

She looks back at me with something in her face that was not there a minute ago. She is me.

I go downstairs.

My father is already at the table with his newspaper.

He does not look up when I come in, which is normal, which is so specifically and ordinarily normal that I have to hold the doorframe for a second before I can make myself walk through it.

"Morning," he says, to the newspaper.

"Morning, Dad."

My mother is at the stove with her back to me, spatula in hand, hair pinned up loosely the way she wears it before the day has properly started. She is humming something without a name, low and absent, completely herself, and I stand in the doorway of my childhood kitchen and I look at her and I feel the full weight of thirty-two missed calls sitting in my chest like stones I have been carrying so long I forgot they were there.

She turns around.

"You're up early." She looks at my face, the way she always looks at my face, like she is checking something she does not want to make a production of checking. "Did you sleep?"

"Yes," I say.

"You look like you dreamed badly."

I sit down at the table.

My father lowers his newspaper two inches and examines me over the top of it with the quiet attention of a man who notices things and rarely says so directly. "You alright, Sera-bear?"

"I'm fine, Dad."

"Mm." He raises the newspaper back up. Which means he does not believe me but he is going to let me have it for now.

My mother puts a plate in front of me. Eggs, scrambled, never runny, with the pinch of something she has never told me the name of that makes them taste like Saturday mornings and the complete absence of anything to worry about. She sits across from me with her tea and she wraps both hands around the mug the way she always does and she looks at me with those steady careful eyes.

"Eat," she says.

I eat.

For a moment the table is quiet in the way it is quiet when nobody needs to fill the silence, the comfortable quiet of people who have been eating breakfast together long enough to know that not every moment requires words.

Then my father turns a page.

"They've resurfaced the road on Clement Street," he says, to no one in particular.

"About time," my mother says. "I nearly lost a heel in that pothole in March."

"You were warned about those shoes."

"You were warned about a great many things and I notice you're still doing all of them."

"I have no idea what you're referring to."

"The end loaf, Ross."

My father lowers the newspaper with the expression of a man who has been ambushed. "I took the whole loaf."

"You took the end loaf and left the good half for yourself and told me the bakery only had one loaf left."

"That is a very specific accusation."

"I have eyes."

"You have theories."

"I have a husband who has been taking the end loaf and blaming the bakery for eleven years and I have run out of patience for the performance." She points her teaspoon at him. "Own it, Ross."

My father looks at me over the top of his newspaper with the expression of a man seeking backup.

I press my lips together.

"I'm not getting involved," I say.

"Smart girl," my mother says.

"Traitor," my father says.

I laugh.

It comes out real and sudden and completely unexpected, the kind of laugh that bypasses whatever careful composure I had assembled coming down those stairs, and my mother looks at me over her mug with something in her eyes that is so warm and so specific and so entirely hers that my chest does something I am not prepared for.

She is right here.

She is right here and she is real and she is looking at me and she does not know, she has no idea, that in another version of this morning she called me thirty-two times and I did not answer and I chose him over her voice every single Sunday for eight months and she called again the following week anyway because she is this woman, this woman with her tea and her teaspoon and her ambush about the end loaf, and she does not stop.

I run out of my chair before I notice myself move.