Page 34 of After Hours

“I hit him hard,” Zachary told her, harder than necessary, because he had to get it out. “Probably broke his arm. But he also stumbled back and hit his head on the corner of the building. Too hard. It was concrete. He was dead within minutes.”

He waited, trying not to tense, but Romily didn’t take her hand away from his body. She was still watching him like she was waiting for the next part of the story. She hadn’t recoiled.

A moment passed and if anything, she moved closer again.

Zachary felt a kind of tectonic shift inside him, like old fault lines disappearing. He’d told this story too many times to count. He’d never stalled or stuttered.

He’d also never cared what the person listening to this story thought of it. Or of him.

“I went to prison on a manslaughter charge,” he told her, and it wasn’t as hard to say. “I got five years, got out three. When I got out, I got to see my mom again. She’ll never be the same after that night. She walks with a cane. Her speech is distorted.” He glanced over toward the passenger seat. “Shewantsto love me because I’m her son, but when it comes down to it, she doesn’t forgive me. She can’t. Because at the end of the day I killed the man she loved. We both have to live with that.”

“The man she loved was a monster,” Romily whispered.

“To my mother, I’m the monster,” Zachary replied, and he felt steadier by the moment. “And I accept that. There are some consequences that you can’t come back from. I don’t regret killing Pete. I wish I did because I figure that would make me a better human being. When I think about him, I only ever wish I could have gotten rid of him sooner. I don’t regret that either. The only thing I do regret is that I made my mother unhappy.”

“I think,” Romily said quietly, and after a moment of quiet with only the sounds his car made between them, “that your mother is afraid to thank you for what you did, or even acknowledge it, because it then she’d also have to acknowledge what happened to her.”

Zachary felt that as if she reached into his chest, wrapped pretty fingers around his heart, and yanked it out.

For a long moment he couldn’t speak. He followed the winding road around and around, until he pulled into the driveway he’d been aiming for. The driveway he could find in his sleep. Once he parked, however, he had to take a minute.

“I want you to meet her,” he told her. Maybe he meant that he needed her to, but that was feeling a lot like the same thing right now. “She’s part of me no matter how she feels about any of this.”

“Of course I want to meet your mother,” Romily replied.

Though there was something new in those gold eyes of hers. A kind of wariness, but he’d expected that—just directed more at him and what he’d done and less toward his mother, who he’d always seen as a victim in all of this. Maybe the only victim.

He was going to have to think about that.

In the meantime, it was something to usher this woman into the house where he’d grown up, though he didn’t remember a time that he’d ever really been a kid. A place where so many terrible things that happened. Some by his own hand.

It was something to watch Romily sit and talk with his mother, who still couldn’t look Zachary in the eyes.

“It was so nice to meet you,” Romily said when they stood up to leave.

Zachary watched his mother’s eyes flash with that old fury. She could never quite mask it. It reminded him of the fights she’d started here. The way she’d poked and prodded Pete, never leaving well enough alone, like she wanted the explosion more than she wanted peace.

He hadn’t remembered that part in a long time either.

“Zachary always did like a project,” his mother told Romily. There was even more of that temper on her face, then. “Careful, though. He doesn’t like to solve his puzzles. He likes to smash them.”

“See you next week, Mom,” Zachary said, without giving her a reaction. He knew that was what she wanted.

He wasn’t particularly surprised that the ride back down that hill was silent.

“Did… what happened to her make her mean?” Romily asked hesitantly.

“Sometimes I like to tell myself that I did,” Zachary said, because that’s what he would have said a week ago. But everything felt different now. Even this. “The fact of the matter is, she’s always been as toxic as Pete was. Just less violent.”

“Yet you see her every week.”

“I bought that house. I didn’t buy it for me. I wouldn’t live there again if you paid me.” He glanced at her, but she was looking out the front window. “When I got out of prison and made some money, this was the only amend that I could make. The only one that she’d accept.”

They rode across the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous deep red metal stretching above them and the Bay its usual glory on all sides. There were boats out, and the bayside towns gleamingpretty in the distance. San Francisco gleamed like a jewel ahead of them.

“I know why she said what she did about puzzles,” Romily said, as if she was being careful with her words. “But why did she say I was a project?”

“My mother is under the impression that I like broken things,” he told her, matter-of-factly. “Broken women, especially.”

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