Confessions of a Murder Suspect

34

I left the living room without saying anything to anyone. Harry called after me, but I just kept walking—yes, robotically—down the hallway to my room.

I entered the space that had been my safe place ever since I could remember and closed the door before someone saw me do something I would never live down.

I sat cross-legged on my bed and looked through the window at my grand view of Central Park. The fluffy treetops were like a green reflection of the clouds above, and there was a wide band of blue between the canopy and the sky.

I hardly understood what was going on as my throat tightened up and my gut began to heave. I started to break down. Before I knew it, I was shaking and croaking and gasping for air. And that quickly turned into sobbing, which wracked my body with convulsions that threw me facedown on the bed in a big wet mess.

I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t turn off the cascade of feelings that I didn’t fully understand.

I am not a robot.

When I was finally able to take a few breaths without shuddering, I wiped my face with my sleeves and sat very still. I had no previous experience with all-out grief, but I had to admit the obvious:

I missed my parents, and I was scared. About what this would do to each of my siblings, and about what my siblings would do to one another. And about what would happen if one of them really was guilty. Would I protect him as fiercely, and without conscience, as my parents had protected me?

But there was more. I realized I’d lost something that until that moment I hadn’t appreciated. My parents were supposed to live until they were so old that they wanted to die. I was supposed to learn from them, and fight them to the wall every time we disagreed, and eventually go into the world on my own.

Now I understood that an unspoken promise had been broken. As unreasonable as it may seem to you, friend, I was furious at them for abandoning me and Harry and Hugo and even Matthew, who hated them. I felt betrayed.

For one thing, I had never forgiven them for Katherine’s death.

It was a hard kernel of anger that I could barely stand to examine.

And there was another thing I’d never forgiven them for.