Chapter 2 No.2

The next morning, Aliyah moved through the house like a ghost. Benedict and Kendall left early, murmuring something about needing to go to the office to handle the "press fallout." They didn't want Aliyah to have to deal with it. They were protecting her.

The moment the front door clicked shut, Aliyah went into Leo's room. The space was a shrine to a life cut short. She started with the bookshelf. She ran her fingers over the spines of his favorite books, the ones with worn covers and pages soft from countless readings. She didn't open them.

She pulled a large plastic bin from the closet. One by one, she placed the books inside. Then the dinosaur figurines he'd spent hours arranging into epic battles. The superhero costumes. The light-up sneakers he'd refused to take off for a week.

Each item was a memory. Leo laughing as he stomped around in his Hulk costume. His face, serious with concentration, as he read a book about sharks. Her heart should have been breaking. Instead, it felt like she was packing away someone else's life. She was sealing the good memories in a tomb, burying them so they couldn't hurt her anymore.

Her eyes landed on a framed photograph on his nightstand. It was from their trip to the lake house last summer. Benedict was holding a giggling Leo on his shoulders. Aliyah stood beside them, her arm around Benedict's waist, her head resting on his shoulder. They looked happy. They looked like a family.

It was the warmest, most perfect memory she had.

She picked up the frame. The glass was cool against her fingers. For a moment, she saw the woman in the photo. The trusting wife. The loving mother. That woman was a stranger. A fool.

Her hand tightened around the frame. She walked out of Leo's room, through the silent house, and into the kitchen. She opened the trash can.

She held the photo over the bin, looking at their smiling faces one last time. Then, she let it go. It landed with a dull clatter against a discarded coffee filter. It wasn't enough.

She reached back in, her fingers brushing against something sticky. She pulled the frame out, turned it over, and unfastened the back. She slid the photograph out.

She looked at Benedict's smiling face. The man who had held her and lied. The man who was protecting her son's killer.

Slowly, methodically, she tore the photograph in half, separating her and Leo from him. Then she tore his half into smaller and smaller pieces, until his face was just a confetti of meaningless color. She let the pieces flutter from her fingers into the trash.

She was about to do the same to her half, the image of her and her son, but she stopped. She couldn't. Not yet. She folded it carefully and tucked it into her pocket.

Later that afternoon, Kendall returned alone. She was carrying several shopping bags.

"Oh, Aliyah, you're up," she said, a little too brightly. She didn't seem to notice the packed bins lining the hallway. "Ben felt so bad leaving you, but things at the office are just crazy."

She walked past Aliyah and into the master bedroom. Aliyah followed, standing silently in the doorway. Kendall began unpacking her bags, pulling out new clothes, new shoes. She opened the closet-Aliyah's closet-and began pushing Aliyah's things aside to make room for her own.

"Ben insisted I get some new things," Kendall said, holding a silk blouse up to herself in the mirror. "He said I needed a fresh start."

Kendall was marking her territory, piece by piece.

"And," Kendall continued, turning around, a small, pill bottle in her hand. "He wanted me to give you this. The doctor prescribed them. They'll help you sleep."

She held out the bottle. Sedatives. Benedict wanted her numb. He wanted her quiet and manageable while they dismantled her life.

Aliyah looked at the bottle in Kendall's outstretched hand. She thought about refusing. About screaming. But that wasn't the plan. The plan required her to be the grieving, broken widow. The hysterical woman who couldn't be trusted.

She reached out and took the bottle. The plastic was smooth in her palm. It felt like an admission of defeat.

"Thank you," Aliyah said, her voice flat. "That's very thoughtful of him."

Kendall smiled, a look of triumphant pity in her eyes. "He's just worried about you."

That night, Aliyah didn't take the pills. She sat in the dark and listened to the recording on Leo's watch again. All of it this time. She listened to her son beg. She listened to him cry. She listened to him call her name until his voice grew weak and faded into nothing.

Each sob, each desperate plea, was a stone, fortifying the wall around her heart. The physical pain of it, the way her chest seized and her stomach churned, was a confirmation. It was fuel.

She would need it for what came next.