It was easier this way.

No expectations, no vulnerability.

It was safer this way.

No one could hurt me if no one could reach me.

I did what I knew best; I drowned in numbers, in equations and unsolved theorems, in statistics and algorithms.

I filled my mind with so much data, so many problems to solve, that there was no room left for anything else.

Math never abandoned me.

Numbers never bled out in my arms.

There were only answers. Right or wrong. Truth or false. There was no grief in formulas. No gnawing guilt in an equation. Just problems with solutions, and I could solve them over and over again until my brain was too exhausted to think about what I’d done. But the guilt still had a way of seeping through the cracks, anyway.

I saw him every time I closed my eyes—his face, his hands.

I could still feel the pressure of his fingers digging into my sleeve as if he still had something left to say.

Knock. Knock.

I clenched my jaw.

She knocked every damn day. Every morning. Every night. Every time she left a plate of food outside my door to rot.

Knock. Knock.

I ignored her and the soft, rhythmic tapping against the wall that used to be ours.

Knock. Knock.

She never stopped.

She kept knocking, and I stared at the ceiling.

She kept knocking, and I sat in the dark—feeling nothing, feeling everything—waiting for her to give up.

But she never did.

Knock. Knock.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, sucking in a shaky breath. I wanted to tell her that I had buried myself next to our father, and there was nothing left of me.

Go away, B. Just stop.

She should have gone to her mother for comfort.

She should have realized I couldn’t be what she needed.

The worst part wasn’t even the knocking.

The worst part was when I woke up in the middle of the night, my chest so tight I couldn’t breathe.

When the walls of my room seemed to close in on me, the air thick and suffocating. When my body betrayed me—shaking, gasping, folding in on itself like I was ten years old again, huddled in a corner, pleading for the pain to stop.

I would slide off the bed, pressing my back against the wall, my knees to my chest, my fingers tangling in my hair.

I was so fucking weak. I had survived worse than this. So why did this feel like the one thing I couldn’t come back from? I squeezed my eyes shut, my breath coming in shallow, ragged pulls.

I was supposed to die when I was six.

But I had fought it. I had clawed my way back to life.

And for what?

To take another life?

To ruin the only man who ever gave a damn about me?