Dead Girl Playing

POV: Willa I bought fried rice from the place on Clement Street. The good kind, with fried plantain on the side and extra tomato stew. I even smiled at the woman behind the counter when she added a free bottle of water. Marcus loved that rice. He always said I was the only person who remembered exactly how he liked things. I was going to surprise him. The walk from the bus stop took twelve minutes. I counted them without meaning to, the way you count things when your hands are full and your mind is already somewhere else. Already imagining his face when he opened the door. Already hearing the laugh he had when something caught him off guard. The key turned easily. That should have been the first sign. I always locked both bolts. Only the bottom one was locked. I pushed the door open with my hip, bags rustling against my legs, still smiling. Then I heard it. I didn't understand it at first. A sound from the back of the flat. Low. Familiar in a way that made my brain refuse it. I set the bags down slowly, like the noise was made of glass and I didn't want to shatter it into something I'd have to look at. I walked down the hallway. The bedroom door was half open. I pushed it the rest of the way. Marcus. My sister Jada. My bed. Time didn't slow down the way they say it does in films. It stopped. Completely. Like someone had reached into the room and turned off the world. Then it came back all at once. Late every night, I worked double shifts at the clinic. Every birthday dinner I canceled because Marcus said he was tired and needed the quiet. Every time Jada borrowed money and I gave it without question, because she was my blood and blood didn't keep score. Every promise he made in the dark when it was just the two of us and the city was asleep. Three years. Three years of choosing him over everything. I saw all of it in the space of one breath. They noticed me at the same time. Marcus scrambled back against the headboard. Jada grabbed the sheet and her eyes went wide, but there was something else underneath the shock. Something that looked almost like relief. Like she'd been waiting for this. "Willa." Marcus's voice came out strange. Thin. Like a man testing ice he already knew was broken. "Willa, listen. This isn't..." I didn't move. I stood in the doorway and I looked at my sister's face and I looked at his face and I looked at my bed and I was very, very quiet. That silence scared him more than anything else could have. "It just happened," he said. "It wasn't planned. It didn't mean anything." Jada sat up. Pulled the sheet tighter. "Willa, don't make this into something dramatic." Don't make this into something dramatic. The laugh that came out of me didn't sound like me. It was too high. Too brittle. "You're in my bed," I said. My voice was flat. "With my boyfriend. In my flat. And I'm not supposed to make it dramatic." "You're never here," Marcus said, and I felt it land in my chest like something physical. "You're always at work. Always tired. Always somewhere else in your head. I've been trying to talk to you for months." "So this was a conversation." "Willa, come on." Jada looked away. That was when I knew she wasn't sorry. She just didn't want to watch what was about to happen. I don't remember picking up the glass from the nightstand. I remember the sound it made against the wall. I remember screaming something that didn't turn into words, just sound, just everything I had been carrying for three years coming out through my throat all at once. I remember my hands shaking and Marcus standing up with his hands raised like I was a threat, like I was the one who had done something wrong. "You're being crazy," he said. "You made me crazy," I said back. "You both did." Jada finally looked at me. "You were never really present, Willa. Not for him. Not for anyone. You're always somewhere else. That's not his fault." I went still again. Because she was right, in the cruelest possible way. Not about what she'd done. Never about that. But about the version of me she'd described. The woman who worked until her hands went numb and still came home with rice because she was trying to love people from a distance, from inside all that exhaustion, hoping it would be enough. I had been replaced. Not just cheated on. Replaced. Jada had become the version of me that had time to be soft, to be present, to be there. And Marcus had let her. The room felt like it was closing. The walls. The ceiling. The smell of the food I'd carried all this way going cold in the hallway. I couldn't breathe. I didn't look for my bag. I didn't grab my phone. I just turned and walked and then I was running and the night air hit me and I was outside, and my eyes were full, and I couldn't see the road properly and I kept running anyway because there was nowhere to stop. There were headlights. A horn, long and sharp and final. Everything went white. The white didn't fade immediately. It held. Like the world was deciding something. And in that held moment, before the dark came back or the pain came or whatever was supposed to come next, all I could think about was the rice going cold in the hallway of my flat. Twelve minutes on the bus. The woman behind the counter who gave me the free water. The way I'd smiled at her, like everything was fine, like I was a person walking toward something good. Three years of being that person, the one who worked the double shifts and remembered exactly how people liked their food, the one who believed that love was a verb, and you showed it in small careful acts, every day, without keeping score. And none of it had been enough. Or maybe it had all been too much. Too much of the wrong kind. All the sacrifice and not enough of just being there, warm and soft and present and selfish enough to ask for what I needed. Maybe that was the real betrayal. Not Marcus. Not Jada. Me, for building a version of love that asked everything of me and left no room for me to exist inside it. The white finally let go. And the dark rushed in to fill the space it left.