Collapse in the Dark

"Adrenaline is just your body's way of letting you commit atrocities now and fall apart later."

The escape back to my car felt like moving through water — everything slow and resistant, reality having weight and texture it shouldn't possess. I barely remembered navigating back down the embankment, past the houses where normal people were living normal lives behind lit windows.

My car waited where I'd left it, unremarkable and patient, completely unaware that its driver had just crossed lines that couldn't be uncrossed.

I climbed inside, closed the door, and sat in the darkness of the vehicle for a long moment before starting the engine.

My hands gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled intensity, the pressure tearing at my freshly reopened cut. I could feel blood dripping onto my thigh, warm and wet and evidence of injury layered on injury, damage accumulating beyond my body's ability to heal.

I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths in an attempt to steady myself, but my body began to shake uncontrollably. Shock was finally setting in properly after the adrenaline had sustained me through the immediate crisis, my system crashing as it recognised it was relatively safe and could finally afford to fall apart.

A scream of anguish escaped my lips as tears began to pour from my eyes, falling into my lap and mixing with the blood. The sound was raw and animal, barely human, expressing something too large and too terrible for words.

The man I thought I loved has just killed in cold blood and walked away.

The reality was unbearable. Karl — my partner, the person I'd trusted with my life countless times — had murdered someone. Had snapped their neck and hidden the body and simply left.

And I'd helped him. Had moved the body, had stolen evidence, had contaminated the crime scene, had made myself complicit in every possible way.

And now the body has my blood on it!

The thought sent a fresh wave of horror through me. My DNA was all over that corpse — on the shoulders where I'd grabbed him, on the jacket where my bleeding hand had soaked through the bandage, mixed with his blood on the carpet where I'd knelt.

Any forensic examination would find me. Would place me at the scene. Would raise questions I couldn't answer without admitting guilt.

For the sake of my grandmother, don't let it be Luke. Anyone but Luke.

The plea repeated like a mantra, desperate hope that maybe — somehow — the dead man wasn't my cousin, wasn't Jane's beloved grandson, wasn't someone whose death would break her heart during the final months of her life.

But I knew. Deep down, beneath the layers of denial and desperate rationalisation, I knew.

It was Luke. Had to be Luke. The address was Luke's. The house was Luke's. The man who'd appeared in that room was almost certainly Luke.

Which meant Karl had killed my cousin. Had murdered Jane's grandson. Had destroyed yet another piece of my family in pursuit of... what? The case? Some personal vendetta? Obsession that had transformed into further violence?

Sitting there alone in the car, waves of self-loathing washed over me with force that felt physical, nauseating, inescapable.

I hate what I've become.

What love has made me do.

What Karl has done and that now I'm complicit in his crime.

The guilt was crushing, a weight that seemed to grow heavier with each passing second. I'd gone from witness to accomplice, from investigator to criminal, from someone who upheld the law to someone who'd actively subverted it.

I hate this city.

The anger surged suddenly — irrational but intense, needing an outlet beyond self-recrimination. I hated Hobart, hated Tasmania, hated the small island where everyone was connected to everyone else in ways that made anonymity impossible and secrets toxic.

I hate Karl.

That truth felt both liberating and devastating. I hated him for killing someone. For putting me in this position. For transforming love into liability, intimacy into complicity, partnership into mutual destruction.

I hated him for making me choose between my duty and my heart, between the person I'd thought I was and the person I'd become.

But most of all, I hate myself.

That was the worst truth, the one that cut deepest and would leave the most permanent scars. Because Karl's actions were his responsibility, but my response — my choices, my compromises, my active participation in concealing murder — those were mine alone.

I sat in that car — shaking and crying and bleeding — and felt my entire sense of self crumble into something I barely recognised.