Abandoning Regretful Ex After Released

The prison gates closed behind me with a sound like a book slamming shut.

I waited.

One minute. Five. Twenty.

The road stayed empty. No black car. No driver in white gloves. Not even a cab idling at the curb.

I tightened my grip on the cardboard box that held everything I owned now: a toothbrush worn down to the plastic, a comb missing teeth, and the gray sweater they gave me on my first day. My fingers had gone numb around the edges.

A bus came eventually. The driver didn't look up when I dropped my coins in the slot.

"Where to?"

"Smith Estate. Hillcrest Drive."

He let out a short laugh, the kind that wasn't really a laugh. "Long way for the local, miss."

I sat in the back. My reflection in the window looked like a stranger �� cheekbones too sharp, eyes too still. Three years ago I'd have called that face ugly. Now I just called it mine.

The mansion came into view through the iron gates. White stone. Black shutters. The hedges were trimmed exactly the way my mother used to like them.

I walked up the drive with my box pressed against my ribs.

The front door wasn't locked.

Inside, the foyer smelled like lemon polish and old roses. The same chandelier I used to count the crystals on as a kid threw a soft yellow over the marble. For a second I thought I might cry. Then I heard it.

A woman's voice, upstairs. Low. Breathy. Familiar.

Then a man's, answering her.

Sam.

I stood very still in the middle of the foyer with my cardboard box of toothbrushes. The sound was muffled by walls and a closed door, but I knew the rhythm of that bed frame the way you know the sound of your own name.

My fianc��. My sister. The east wing bedroom. My bedroom.

Something cold slid down the back of my throat. My hands started to shake first, then my knees. The cardboard box dipped. The toothbrush slipped out and clicked against the marble, a small bright sound in a very large silence.

I didn't pick it up.

I couldn't feel the floor under me. I could feel the buzz of the chandelier in my back teeth. I could feel the wallpaper on the far wall like it was pressed against my eyes. The air had a weight I hadn't felt in three years, the weight of money and old wood and her perfume �� Barbara's perfume, the gardenia one, drifting down the stairs.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the sounds upstairs to stop. Long enough for my legs to start aching.

A throat cleared behind me.

"Miss Kate."

The housekeeper. Mrs. Lorne. She was wearing the same black dress she'd worn the day I left in handcuffs. Her hands were folded in front of her like she was holding a small dead bird.

"You're back," she said.

"I'm back."

"Shall I tell Mr. Sam?"

I looked at the toothbrush on the floor.

"He already knows I'm in the house," I said. "But yes. Tell him."

She gave a small nod and went up the stairs. Her shoes didn't make noise on the carpet. I noticed that. I noticed everything now �� the click of a clock in the next room, a moth tapping the inside of a lamp, the way the banister had a chip in it on the third post that hadn't been there three years ago.

Ten minutes.

That's how long it took for them to come down.

Sam first, in a white shirt with the cuffs rolled to his elbows. His hair was damp. He was pushing the wheelchair, and Barbara was in it, wrapped in a pale blue cashmere blanket like she was something fragile that had been delivered in a box.

She looked thinner than I remembered. Prettier, somehow. Her hair was pinned back with a pearl clip. The same pearl clip she'd been wearing the night she fell.

I had not seen that clip in three years.

My stomach turned over once, slowly.

"Kate." Barbara's voice broke a little on my name, the way an actress breaks her voice on cue. "Oh, Kate."

I didn't say anything.

Sam wheeled her closer. He stopped two feet from me. His eyes did a quick pass over my face �� cheekbones, mouth, the bruise that hadn't fully gone yellow yet on my jaw �� and his mouth pressed into a line I couldn't read.

"Barbara has something she wants to say." His voice was flat. The voice of a man reading a contract.

Barbara reached out. Her fingers grazed my wrist. I felt the touch land like a wasp.

"I forgive you, Kate." She tilted her head. Her eyes filled, right on schedule. "I've had three years to think about it. Whatever happened that night �� I'm not going to carry it anymore. You're my sister."

Three sentences. Three lies, by my count. *I've had three years to think about it* �� said by the woman whose ballet shoes I could see lined up on the foyer console behind her, satin pink, freshly dusted, the way Mrs. Lorne dusted things that were still being used.

I nodded.

Just once.

"That's it?" Sam's voice tightened. "Your sister gives up her career, sits in that chair for the rest of her life, and you nod?"

I opened my mouth.

The words weren't there.

He took a step toward me. Just one step. His hand came up �� not to hit me, I knew that even then, just to take my chin, to make me look at him �� and my body went somewhere my mind didn't follow.

I was on the floor.

I had my arms around my head and my knees against my chest and my forehead against the cold marble and I was saying it before I knew I was saying it.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I'm sorry ��"

The words came out in the same flat rhythm I'd learned in cell block C. Say it fast. Say it small. Say it before the boot lands.

"Kate." Sam's voice, far away. "Kate, what �� get up."

"I'm sorry. I was wrong. I'm sorry ��"

"Stop it."

I couldn't stop it.

My cheek was on the marble and through the gap in my arms I could see Barbara's slipper. Pale satin. Her foot was inside it.

Her toes moved.

A small flex. A curl. The way a dancer's foot does when it's testing the arch.

I saw it for half a second before the blanket settled and hid the slipper again.

My mouth kept saying I'm sorry. My brain went somewhere else.

Three years ago. The east staircase. Barbara at the top in her gardenia perfume, screaming at me about Sam, about the engagement, about Mom's ring on my finger. Her hand grabbing my shoulder. My hand coming up to push her hand away. Her heel sliding back on the polished step she had insisted, all week, that the housekeeper polish again.

She had let go of me before she fell.

She had let go on purpose.

I remembered the look on her face on the way down. Not fear. Calculation. Like she was counting stairs.

"Kate." Sam was crouched in front of me now. He wasn't touching me. He'd figured out that much, at least. "Kate, look at me."

I looked at him through the cage of my fingers. His face was the face I used to wake up next to. Dark eyes. A small scar above his left eyebrow from a horse, when he was nine. He used to laugh when I traced it.

He wasn't laughing now. He was looking at me like I was a stranger who had broken into his house.

"What did they do to you in there?" he said quietly.

The toothbrush was still on the marble two feet from my hand.

Behind him, in the wheelchair, Barbara watched me with shining wet eyes. Her hand rested on the blanket exactly over the place where, a second ago, I had seen her toes move.

Her thumb pressed down once against the cashmere, smoothing it flat.