Say You Hate Me

Hazel

“UGH, I hate you!”

I remember saying those words when I left this house six years ago.

“I’m leaving and I’m never gonna come back!”

I was only eighteen then, but I meant every word I said. Those were the last words I ever said to my father in this house.

And now, here I am.

Six years later and the house didn’t change much. The iron gates still opened with the same low groan, like the property itself was reluctant to let me back in. The driveway still curved through the oaks my mother had planted before I was born. The fountain still ran in the center of the circle, throwing its thin silver ribbon into the cold, because no one had ever told the water that the man who owned it was dead.

I sat in the car longer than I should have.

Through the windshield, the Ellington estate rose out of the gray afternoon in all its limestone arrogance — three stories of old money and older secrets, windows like watchful eyes. Somewhere behind one of them, my father was lying in a casket in the family room, and I was in the driveway checking my lipstick in the visor mirror like a coward.

"Miss Ellington?" The driver's eyes found mine in the rearview. "Shall I take your bags in?"

Miss Ellington. Not Hazel. I'd been gone long enough to become a title.

"Yes, please. Thank you," I said, and made myself open the door.

Grief is strange in the body. I'd learned that at eleven, when my mother died and my hands forgot how to hold things. I'd broken three glasses that first week, just watching them slide out of my fingers. Now, at twenty-four, it lived somewhere lower. My legs carried me up the front steps like they belonged to someone else, someone graceful and composed, someone who hadn't read the words your father is dead on her phone screen in a California laundromat and forgotten, for one full minute, how to breathe.

Bennett opened the door before I touched it.

He'd gone grayer. The proof of time in other people's faces. But his bow was the same, precise and unhurried, and his voice cracked only a little when he said, "Welcome home, Miss Hazel."

Miss Hazel. Better. Closer.

"Hi, Bennett."

The foyer swallowed me whole. Marble and silence and the great curved staircase, and everywhere, everywhere, people in black. Maids I recognized and maids I didn't, moving with trays and red eyes. Men in dark suits with clear earpieces posted at the doors, more of them than I remembered. The air smelled of white lilies and lemon polish and underneath it, faintly, my father's cigars, as if the walls hadn't gotten the news yet either.

"The Board is assembled in the study," Bennett said quietly. "The attorneys as well. Mr. Hale has asked twice whether you've arrived."

Of course he had. My father wasn't cold and the vultures had already found the good branches.

"And the—" My voice failed on the word. I tried again. "My father, where is he?"

Bennett's face did something careful. "The family room. The viewing is private until tomorrow. Miss Hazel, if you'd like a moment before—"

"Yes," I said, too fast. "A moment."

I did not go to the study, where the Board and the lawyers and whatever remained of my father's empire sat waiting to carve him up politely over coffee. I wanted to go to the family room, but to be honest, I couldn’t do it. I was too afraid to see him with my own eyes. Because if I do, then all of this is real. He was really gone.

So I went up the stairs. Like a ghost choosing which rooms to haunt.

The second floor hallway was a museum of my own life. Here was the console table I'd hidden under during hide-and-seek, still bearing the tiny chip where I'd knocked it with a flashlight. Here was the window seat where I used to read on rainy days, its cushion reupholstered in a blue velvet my mother would have hated. Here was the wall that used to hold my school portraits in a rising line, year after year, and still did, I realized, my throat closing. He'd kept them going. There I was at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, photos I'd emailed from California in lieu of visits, framed in silver like I'd never left.

He'd hung them straight. He'd hung them all perfectly straight.

Don't cry, I told myself. Not yet. If you start now, you won't make it to the study.

I kept walking. Past my old bedroom. Past my father's rooms, where the door was shut and a maid stood outside it with folded linens and swollen eyes, and we nodded at each other like strangers at a border crossing.

And then I was at the end of the east hall, in front of the last door, and my feet stopped on their own.

Caden's room.

Six years, and my hand still knew the exact height of this doorknob.

I don't know what I expected. That it would be locked, maybe. That my father would have turned it into storage, or stripped it to the studs, or sealed it like a tomb. But what I found when the door swung open was worse than all of those:

The room was exactly the same.

Afternoon light fell through the window onto clean floorboards, and the air had that held-breath stillness of a place no one enters anymore.

The bed was there, the desk was there, the shelves that had sagged under trophies and paperbacks were there, the walls had posters on them, framed awards, and a framed jersey. Number 12, Caden Durham.

Looking at everything made my chest twist and ache, but I stepped inside anyway.

My footsteps sounded enormous. I crossed to the window — the same view he'd had all those years, the back lawn and the tree line and the pool cover stretched taut and gray — and my eyes caught on the windowsill, and my whole chest went tight.

The carving was still there. Small, crooked, gouged into the paint with a pocketknife the summer we were thirteen: C.D. and under it, in my own furious twelve-year-old hand where I'd grabbed the knife to prove I wasn't scared of it, H.E. He'd laughed at how deep I'd cut mine.

"Careful, Hazy. Now they'll know you played with a knife."

No one else had ever called me Hazy. He'd only done it because it made me want to hit him.

Caden came into our house when I was twelve. He was the same age. Father said that his parents died in a car accident, and he had nowhere to go, so he was going to stay with us for some time. I remember seeing him for the first time when he arrived and I couldn’t be more excited to have a new friend. And despite that smug, cocky look on his face, he was glad to have a friend too.

I touched the letters on the windowsill. The paint had been redone around them. Someone had painted this sill, carefully, and gone around the carving. I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know what to do with any of it.

I found the other thing without meaning to look. Low on the doorframe, on the inside where a casual eye would miss it: pencil marks. Two columns of them, climbing. C — 5'1", H — 5'2" — I'd been taller for one glorious year and never let him forget it — and up and up, the handwriting changing as we did, until the last two marks, the ones from the week I turned eighteen. His line was towering over mine by then. His name written out in full that last time, no initial, the letters careless and sure of themselves: Caden.

I remember, six days after that pencil mark, I woke up in this room.

I hadn't let myself remember it in years, but the room remembered for me, and it came back the way it always did — in pieces, like something shattered.

The gray light of not-quite-morning. The warmth on my skin that was the ghost of him and nothing else. I was naked. My whole body sore. Reaching across the sheets and finding them cool. Cool, which meant he'd been gone a while, which meant he'd lain there awake, waiting for me to fall asleep deeply enough to leave.

The closet stood open. Bare hangers, still swaying. That detail had never stopped being obscene to me, that I'd woke up in time to see the hangers still moving.

I went to the window. Me at the window in his t-shirt, and below, in the blue dark of the driveway, the black car idling. My father shaking Caden's hand like a business concluded.

I started yelling his name, and I knew he heard me. But he didn’t look up. Caden went into the car and he never once looked up.

And the car was moving.

I started running down the stairs. Running as fast as I could to make it there in time. But when I got there, the car was already driving away. Still, I chased after it. I called out his name. But the car didn’t stop. And my father ran after me.

“What are you doing?” He scolded me. “Stop this! You’re being indecent!”

I found out later that Caden had left back to England.

Eighteen years old, standing in an empty room that smelled like him, understanding for the first time in my sheltered, guarded, iron-fisted life, that a person could put their mouth against your ear in the dark and say, "stay with me, Hazy, stay right here," and be on a plane to England before the sheets lost his shape.

I never got a letter. I never got a call. I got six years of silence and a father who forbade his name at the dinner table, and I took the first college acceptance that put the most distance between me and this doorframe, and I told my father I hated him on my way out.

My fingertips were still resting on the last pencil mark. Caden, in his own hand. And I suddenly heard a voice.

"Still stalking in my room, are we?"

I knew the voice before I turned. That was the worst part. Six years, an ocean apart, and my body still knew that voice like it knew stairs in the dark. Lower than it used to be. The English in it deeper, like Oxford had sanded off whatever New York had managed to leave.

I turned around.

He was leaning in the doorway with his hands in the pockets of black suit trousers, no jacket, and white shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm.

He was bigger. Not just taller — built, broad through the shoulders in a way the boy on the doorframe never was. His skin was darker, sun-gold. And the ink — God. It climbed out of his collar in a dark curl at the side of his throat and poured down both forearms where the sleeves were rolled: dense black work, script and shadow and something with wings, all the way to the backs of his hands.

The boy who left had been clean as a promise. The man in the doorway looked like every warning my father never let me hear. Only his eyes were the same. Dark, unreadable, fixed on me with that old, infuriating patience.

And even after all these years, one look into his eyes and I still feel that pang my chest.

"Hello, Hazy," Caden said, a smirk hanging on his lips.

The name went through me like a blade through silk. Clean, no resistance. Damage you don't feel until you see it.

I took my hand off the doorframe. Straightened my spine the way this house had taught me.

“Caden.” I said. My voice almost breaking, but I managed not to let it show. "You're back,"

Something moved behind his eyes. I couldn't quite decipher it.

"Yeah." he said. "I’m back."

— End of Chapter One: To Be Continued. —