Chapter Ten — Home
1153 Words
Zara's POV
The helicopter set down three blocks from my building.
No ceremony. No explanation. The two wolves who had accompanied me from the mountain — large, quiet, professionally blank in the way of people who had been told exactly what to do and intended to do only that — waited until I stepped out and then lifted off again before I had taken ten steps. I stood on the empty street and watched the lights disappear into the Friday night sky and then I turned around and walked home.
Three days.
I had been gone three days and the city looked exactly the same. The same streetlights. The same corner shop with the flickering sign that had been flickering for two years. The same sounds — traffic, distant music, the particular nighttime hum of a city that never fully slept. Everything exactly as I had left it on Tuesday night when I walked to my car and the world I understood ended without warning.
I pulled my coat tighter. Kept walking.
My building came into view and I slowed without meaning to. Stood on the pavement outside it for a moment. Looking up at the lit windows on my floor.
I needed to go in. I knew I needed to go in. I was tired and I was carrying three days of mountain and stone and impossible things and my own apartment was twenty meters away and I needed to go in.
I went in.
The lift was slow. It was always slow — I had been meaning to complain to the building manager about it for eight months and had never found the time. I stood in it now and watched the numbers and breathed and told myself that whatever I was feeling in my chest was exhaustion and nothing else.
The doors opened on my floor.
And I stopped.
There was a smell in the corridor.
Not unpleasant — the opposite. Familiar in the specific way that certain things are familiar before you understand why. Warm and known and carrying the particular quality of something that belonged to a part of my life I kept carefully separate from everything else.
I stood in the lift doorway and breathed it in and thought — that is not possible. I am imagining things. I am exhausted and I am imagining things.
I walked to my door.
The smell got stronger.
I put my key in the lock. Turned it. Pushed the door open.
My father was sitting in my living room.
He stood up the moment the door opened — fast, the way people move when they have been sitting still for a very long time waiting for something and it has finally arrived. James Osei, sixty years old, retired cardiologist, the most composed man I had ever known in my life, looked at me from across my living room with an expression I had never seen on his face before.
He crossed the room in four steps and put his arms around me.
I stood very still for a moment. My father was not a demonstrative man. We were not a demonstrative family — we expressed things sideways, through practicality and presence and the occasional proud phone call. He had not hugged me like this since I was eleven years old and standing outside a hospital in the rain being told my mother was not coming home.
My arms came up.
I held on.
"Zara," he said. Just my name. Into my hair. Low and rough in a way his voice almost never was.
"I know," I said. "I know. I am sorry."
He pulled back. Held me at arm's length. Looked at me the way doctors look at people they love — checking, assessing, looking for damage with clinical eyes that could not turn off even when they wanted to. His hands were on my shoulders and they were not entirely steady.
"Are you hurt," he said.
"No," I said. "I am fine."
He looked at me for a long moment. The doctor in him cataloguing. The father in him overriding the catalogue because I was standing in front of him and that was what mattered.
"I could not find you," he said. "Three days, Zara. Nobody could find you."
"I know," I said. "Sit down, Dad. I will tell you everything."
We sat in my living room until past midnight.
I told him what I had decided to tell him on the helicopter — the version that was true in its bones even if the details were altered beyond recognition. I had been taken. Drugged. I did not remember much of what came after — flashes, fragments, nothing useful enough to give the police anything to work with. I had been left somewhere and I had found my way back.
He listened without interrupting. That was his way — complete silence while information was being delivered, questions after. I had inherited that from him. I had always thought it was the doctor in both of us.
"Who took you," he said when I finished.
"I don't know," I said.
"Zara."
"I genuinely don't know," I said. Which was true enough. I knew what they were. I did not know the specific people who had ordered it.
He looked at me for a long time. James Osei who had raised me alone from eleven and knew my face better than anyone living.
"You are not telling me everything," he said.
"I am telling you what I can," I said.
A pause. Long and weighted.
"The police," he said finally.
"Tomorrow morning," I said. "I will go first thing."
He nodded. Looked at his hands. Then back at me.
"I was on the first flight," he said. "The moment Claire called me."
"I know," I said. "Thank you."
"You are my daughter," he said. Like that was the only explanation necessary.
It was.
I reached across and put my hand over his and we sat like that for a while in the quiet of my living room with the city making its nighttime sounds outside and neither of us saying anything because some things did not need words and this was one of them.
He stayed in the spare room that night.
I lay in my own bed for the first time in three days and stared at the ceiling and waited for sleep to come and thought about the smell in the corridor — how I had known he was there before I opened the door. How the smell had been distinct and clear and completely impossible from that distance.
I thought about what Lena had said.
It starts small.
I turned over. Pulled the blanket up.
I was not thinking about that.
I was not thinking about any of it.
I closed my eyes and eventually, somewhere in the deep hours of Friday night becoming Saturday morning, I slept.
- Writer
