4338.210 · July 29, 2018 AD
Locked, Open, Ajar
Behind a locked bathroom door, the shower steam does what the drive home couldn't — strips away the day's careful packaging and lets everything collide. The afternoon's images tangle with something older and uglier, and the body stops distinguishing between what it's reaching for and what it's running from.
The tights have a stain. The fabric is black enough to hide it, but Duncan knows where to look — and the cop in him surfaces before the rest of him can decide whether washing evidence in the shower is paranoia or instinct. The hot water runs. The steam seals the room. And with his eyes closed and nothing left to look at, the images arrive uninvited.
Mikael in the viewfinder. Lena's hands on his back. The golden room and the grey light and the thing that happened between three people in a building that's been holding secrets since 1849. But the afternoon won't stay in its frame. It collides with another morning — a Wednesday, an Ulverstone kitchen, a front door that was already open — and the body channelling everything through the only release mechanism it has left stops caring which memory it's trying to discharge.
Then silence. Clean skin. A fogged mirror he doesn't wipe. And the short walk down a dark hallway to a bed where a woman is sleeping in a wool jumper she's owned longer than she's known him. He pulls her close. She murmurs. He closes his eyes.
