SHATTERED BY CHOICE

The Wrong Side of a Mirror

Anthony’s POV

I have a photograph of Sylvia on my phone but not as my wallpaper. It's buried three folders deep in an old album I have never deleted. I don't look at it often, but I know exactly where it is.

That night, after I dropped Luca at my parents' house, I sat in my car in their driveway for twenty minutes without going inside. The engine was off. The street was quiet. Harlow at night is the kind of quiet that asks you questions you've been avoiding.

Eight years.

My marriage to Evelyn was over, and I should have felt something like relief. Instead I felt like a man who had just taken off a shoe that was the wrong size for eight years and didn't know yet how to walk without the limp.

My phone lit up. It was my brother Reuben.

"Are you alive?" he asked jestifully when I picked up.

"Barely."

"The papers are signed?"

"Signed, filed, finished."

He exhaled. "How do you feel?"

"I don't know yet."

"Anthony." A pause. "She called me."

I gripped the phone tighter. "Who called you?"

"Sylvia."

The name went through me like cold water. "When?"

"This afternoon. She said she's back in Harlow. Her mother was in an accident." He stopped. "She didn't ask about you. She called to ask for the name of a good hospital in the area because she'd been gone so long she didn't know which ones were still decent."

"Is she okay? Sylvia?"

"She sounded fine but worried about her mom."

I put my head back against the seat. Sylvia was back in the city on the same day my marriage ended. I didn't know whether to call that fate or a cruel joke, and I had never been the kind of man who believed in fate anyway.

"Don't do anything reckless," Reuben said.

"I'm sitting in a car in Mom's driveway."

"That's how reckless things start. The sitting and thinking part." His voice was dry. "Come inside. Mom made chicken stew."

I went inside.

Luca was already in the kitchen, sitting on the counter while his grandmother pretended to scold him for it and secretly let him taste everything. My father was in his chair reading. The house smelled like everything a home was supposed to smell like.

I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched my son laugh.

Whatever I thought about Evelyn, whatever I had spent eight years blaming her for, she had given me Luca. And Luca was the only clear good thing in the story of my life.

"Dad, come taste this!" Luca waved me over.

I went, and I tasted, and I smiled because my son needed me to smile.

“Wow it tastes so yummy". I whispered

Later, when Luca was asleep in the guest room, I sat with my father in the sitting room. He turned the television volume down without me asking.

"You want to talk?" he said.

"Not particularly."

"Good. Neither do I." He unmuted the television for exactly three seconds, then muted it again. "Evelyn was a good mother. Whatever else she was, she was a good mother."

I said nothing.

"I'm not defending what she did," he added. "I'm just saying what I saw."

"I know."

He nodded and went back to his programme.

I went to bed around midnight. I was not tired, but I lay down anyway. The ceiling was white and blank and gave me nothing useful to look at.

Sylvia was back.

Eight years ago she had looked at me across a crowded room and I had known. That was the only way I could describe it. I just knew. And then one night came apart at the seams and everything I knew was buried under rubble.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I picked it up.

It was not a name I knew. Unknown number. A single line of text.

"There are things about the night Sylvia left that you were never told. Meet me tomorrow at Coffee Harbour on West Lane, 9 a.m…come alone."

I read it twice. Then a third time.

My thumb moved to delete it. I stopped.

Whoever had sent it knew the name of the night that broke everything. Nobody talked about that night. Not in my family, not in Evelyn's family. It was a subject that had been sealed and buried.

I put the phone face down on the nightstand.

Sleep did not come for a long time. And when it finally did, I dreamed about a door opening in a dark hallway, and someone I trusted stepping through it.