Page 107 of The Quiet Tenant

“Right there.”

She looks back. Smacks her lips. “Right. Thank you.”

She turns around, one, two, three steps just like you, then stops and doubles back.

“Listen,” she says. “I’m not really supposed to be in here. No one was supposed to come in. I just”—she thinks. Trying to decide, probably, how to best lie to you. “I had too much to drink.” She bites her rosy lips, rolls her own eyes at herself. “I just couldn’t hold it anymore.”

You stare, each of you both the deer and the headlights.

She’s waiting for you to say something.

“Understandable,” you tell her.

“Right,” she says. “So please, if you could not tell him you saw me in here? It’s no big deal, really, I don’t think, but I don’t want him to…I’d rather he didn’t know.”

You blink.

“I won’t tell,” you say. An idea, a bargain. “Actually, I’m not really supposed to be here, either. It’s—it’s complicated.”

You’re his cousin,you remember.In her head, you’re his cousin. His loner cousin, who decided, for reasons unknown to the world, not to attend the party in the yard. You are busy. Shy. The kind of person who’d rather keep to herself.

“We’re a complicated family,” you tell her.

She smiles. “What family isn’t?”

You nod in agreement.

The shadow of a frown on her beautiful face. “Is everything okay, though?”

You swallow. “Everything’s fine. All good. It’s just, you know. Family stuff.”

She nods.

“I should probably let you use the bathroom now,” you say.

“Right.”

She lingers a brief moment, then turns back to face the door behind her.

Two women keeping each other’s secrets. Two women, silently agreeing to leave each other alone.

Maybe she’ll get it, too. Maybe she’ll know you did it all for her, too.

But now comes the part that will ruin you forever.

This is the part you can only experience from outside your body. This is when you shut down all the places in you that feel pain, sadness, anything.

This is the part where you learn from him. A soldier. Someone who sticks to the plan.

There is a key hanging by the door, in its usual place. Grab it.

Climb the stairs.

Knock on Cecilia’s door.

She doesn’t tell you to come in. Instead, she opens the door for you. She welcomes you in. The dog is napping, crated in a corner of the room. Away from the guests and the chatter.

This is when you shed a part of yourself, trap it within the walls of this house forever. Maybe people will hear it, years from now. It will come out at night asking for forgiveness, begging to be loved.

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