“No. What isn’t fair is calling my mother while I watched my apartment burn and hearing her tell me it wasn’t her problem because she already knew who did it.”
Her breathing turned ragged. “I panicked.”
“You chose.”
“He’s my son.”
“And I was your daughter,” I said again, but this time it did not break me. This time it sounded like a door closing.
She began to cry harder. “Please don’t do this to the family.”
“The family?” I looked around the hotel lobby, at the beige walls, the vending machine, the suitcase containing everything I currently owned. “There is no family here. There is you protecting Weston, and there is me surviving what he did.”
“Ivy—”
“Do not call me again unless it’s to tell the truth to the police.”
I ended the call and blocked her number before my hand could tremble.
That night, for the first time since the fire, I slept for nearly six hours. My dreams were not peaceful. Smoke still found me. But when I woke, my phone was silent, and silence, I discovered, could be a kind of shelter.
Part 5
Rebuilding did not feel heroic. No music swelled in the background. No montage carried me gently from ruin to renewal. Rebuilding was sitting in a government office under fluorescent lights, waiting for a replacement driver’s license. Rebuilding was crying in the aisle of a department store because I could not decide which towels to buy and suddenly missed the frayed green ones I had owned for ten years. Rebuilding was learning that grief is not only for people. You can grieve a mug, a chair, a sweater, a handwritten recipe tucked into a cookbook, a dented saucepan your father once used to make soup when you had the flu.
For weeks, smoke followed me everywhere. It clung to memory rather than fabric. I smelled it in clean hotel sheets, in the steam from my coffee, in the cold air outside the grocery store. Some nights, I woke convinced the alarm was screaming again, my body already halfway out of bed before the room came into focus. The victim services counselor told me this was normal. I hated that word. Normal made terror sound orderly.
Grant Holloway kept me updated when he could. Weston pleaded not guilty at first, then changed his plea after the evidence became too heavy to pretend around. The gas station footage. The accelerant report. The keychain. The partial confession he had given my mother, which she eventually admitted to investigators after Detective Keene made clear that lying would not save him. I was told she cried through the entire statement. I wondered whether she cried for what he had done or for the fact that she had failed to bury it.
The prosecutor asked if I wanted to give a victim impact statement. I said yes before I could talk myself out of it.
The courthouse smelled of polished wood and old paper. I wore a navy dress borrowed from a coworker and shoes that pinched my heels. Weston looked smaller than I remembered when they brought him in, his face pale, his hair cut short, his eyes fixed on the table in front of him. My mother sat two rows behind him. She looked older, but not softer. When I walked past, she reached slightly toward me, then stopped when I did not look at her.
I had written my statement the night before in a notebook because typing felt too clean. My hands shook when I unfolded the paper, but my voice did not.
I told the court about waking to smoke. I told them about running barefoot down four flights of stairs, about the stranger’s blanket, about watching flames move through the only home I had. I told them about the objects no insurance check could replace. My grandmother’s quilt. My father’s records. The photographs. The birthday cards. The proof that I had belonged to people who were gone.
Then I looked at Weston.
“You didn’t just break into my apartment,” I said. “You broke into the last safe place I had left. You made a choice to protect yourself by creating a fire you could not control. Whether you knew I was inside or not, you decided my home was disposable. You decided my life was an acceptable risk.”
His face crumpled then. For a second, I saw the boy he had been, the one who used to build forts out of couch cushions and steal fries off my plate. I felt sadness, but it did not change the truth. Love, history, blood, proximity, none of it could unburn a room.
I turned slightly, not enough to face my mother fully, but enough that she would hear every word.