Page 38 of Dark Romeo

My chest filled with pride. That was my mother, so patient, so filled with compassion. She always knew what to say. I wished I had inherited that trait from her.

There was a pause on the tape and the sound of someone breathing hard.

Joan: “Are you a mother?”

Abigail: “I am. I have a beautiful little girl. She’s eleven. And I would do anything for her. Anything. Be strong for your children, Joan. Be strong for them.”

Joan: “Okay…”

It had been a phone conversation she’d taped a few weeks before her death. When I made detective six months ago, I had snuck into the records room and copied every piece of evidence from that file. My father would hate it if he knew I had this tape, that I played it over and over again on nights alone, listening to her voice and pretending she was in the same room as me. “I have a beautiful little girl. She’s eleven. And I would do anything for her.”

The recording ran to its end. I sat in the preceding silence. My apartment seemed cold and empty. Quiet. Too quiet.

I used to love the silence of my apartment, the way the things I left remained where they were exactly how I left them, no one else’s invading touch. Everything right where it belonged. Every bit of space mine.

Tonight, I stared around the apartment as if it was my first time in here. The furniture I liked enough but it was all so generic and far from personalized. There were no pictures on my walls. No artwork. Nothing to reflect my tastes. I’d been waiting, it seemed, expecting that one day I would leave. That my real life would then begin.

That chance had come with Roman. That possibility had stretched out its hand to me. I did not have the guts to take it. Why didn’t I have the guts to leave with him? Why didn’t I say yes?

I felt his warmth and his body pouring into me, filling me up. Our cries echoing throughout the room.

I shook my head, closed the box containing my mother’s case file, before dumping my cold tea down the sink drain. I was being silly. I barely knew the guy. I was reeling from the insane amount of orgasms he’d given me. That was all.

Tomorrow, I’d feel better. Tomorrow things would go back to normal.

I lay in bed, staring at my ceiling, the moonlight painting squares of pale light across it, chewing on my lip. My eyes kept drifting over to my phone, the only link I had left with him.

Nora had long since gone home but her words had stayed behind with me. “When you get to my age you realize that life is short. Sometimes you don’t need to know the ‘point’ of it before you jump in.”

I snatched up my phone from the bedside table and opened a new message, the blank screen waiting for me to say all the things I wanted to say.

Is it strange that I miss you?

Is it crazy that I can’t stop thinking about you?

I wish I had said yes to Paris.

I didn’t write any of these things.

Me: I wish we hadn’t left things the way we did. Let me know you’ve arrived in London safely.

I turned over, my back to the phone on the bedside table, and tried to find peace in the darkness. The image of his eyes haunted me, chasing me into a restless sleep.

ROMAN

____________

I killed a man.

Back in my father’s limo, I stared into nothing as this single thought looped over and over in my brain. The repeat of the gun booming throughout the warehouse room, the gun jerking my hand back, the small black hole that appeared on his forehead, the slim river of blood that dribbled from it. And those stupid cartoon socks.

The gun became so heavy that I let it hang at my side. My father’s hand clasped my shoulder and his voice echoed in my skull. “Well done, son.”

I had killed a man and he had been proud of me.

My hearing had gone fuzzy after that.

Someone had pulled the gun out of my hands. I knew it’d be wiped down, the barrel scratched with a wire plunger designed to change the internal grooves so that the next bullet’s striations were different. No one would ever trace the bullet in that man’s brain to me. That was how my family worked. They were professionals at this, too well-oiled and rehearsed to be taken down by the law. Soon I would be adding to them, bringing my knowledge of the criminal law system so we could bend it further to my father’s will. It had been the only reason my father had agreed to let me move to Europe to commence my legal studies.

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