Delaney's newsroom didn't have walls so much as borders of noise ; phones ringing uneven, scanners muttering, keyboards clacking under fluorescent glare. She'd known The Vanguard Dispatch for thirty years, from intern coffee runs to this open‑plan chaos of desks clustered amid coffee mugs, Post‑its, and glowing screens.
Editors lined the center, patrolling deadlines; reporters hunched over profiles and feeds. Whiteboards tracked slugs and priorities; Slack buzzed with source hunts. Hierarchy ruled ; editor‑in‑chief in glass office, managing editor on patrol, features team carving human stories from culture, sport, identity.
Her desk nestled in the fray, perfect for deep dives she'd written since before most staffers started. Collaborative yet cutthroat, gossip flew fast as copy ; messy, alive, almost home.
Delaney glanced up from her screen as Ms. Vargas — the features editor, sharp‑eyed and always in tailored blazers — paused by her desk, coffee in hand.
Delaney managed a quick smile, heat rising in her cheeks. "Thanks. Just following the threads."
That was enough to carry Delaney out the door twenty minutes later, laptop bag slung over her shoulder, weaving past the open‑plan desks and ringing phones of Persona-lity Magazine's office. The fluorescent buzz faded behind her as she stepped into the gray afternoon, the city's damp chill a relief after the recycled air.
Home was a quick walk — a narrow one‑bedroom walk‑up she'd claimed as her own four years ago, stairs creaking underfoot. She dropped her bag by the door, keys rattling on the hook, and shrugged off her coat onto the lone armchair. The space was small but hers: high ceilings, mismatched furniture, and walls that breathed Jim Morrison.
Books on Morrison lined every flat surface — biographies thick as bricks stacked on the coffee table, dog‑eared paperbacks of his poetry wedged between poetry anthologies on sagging shelves, first‑editions propped like shrines on the windowsill. No One Here Gets Out Alive lay open on the kitchen counter next to her half‑empty coffee press; The American Night marked her bedside stack. Posters of The Doors peeled slightly at the edges: Morrison mid‑howl at the Miami show, grainy black‑and‑white from Whisky a Go Go. A massive physical media collection dominated one wall — vinyl LPs alphabetized (L.A. Woman double‑pressed at the front), cassettes labeled in Sharpie, CDs in protective sleeves, even a battered reel‑to‑reel of bootlegs she'd scored online. Morrison's voice was woven into the place like smoke; she'd play Strange Days low while writing, let his gravel drawl fill the quiet.
She poured a glass of water, lingered by the turntable, finger hovering over Morrison Hotel. Not tonight. Instead, she booted her laptop, the fighter's clips flickering back to life — glitter robe, pop entrance, that easy grin hiding whatever coiled underneath.
She lived only a short walk from her mother's after that — close enough that dropping by felt less like a choice and more like gravity. By the time she knocked, the sky had deepened to bruised purple, and her mother answered already mid‑sentence, apron dusted with flour from whatever was baking inside.
Something was off the moment Delaney stepped through the door — wrong, like the house held its breath. The air hung thick with a weird, sour undercurrent — stale sweat and unwashed linens mingling with something deeper, metallic, the unmistakable rot of a body left too long in one place. Her mother, 78 and wiry despite the years, moved with brittle efficiency, but her eyes darted toward the living room like she was guarding a secret, lips pressed thin.
In the dim glow of a single lamp, Delaney's father... was on the couch. He was 76, hadn't shifted position in two weeks by the look of the permanent dent in the cushions — maybe longer, if the unnatural stillness meant what she feared. Faded sheets draped his body like a shroud, covering everything but a pair of bare feet dangling at the end, ghostly white against the worn fabric, toes splayed rigid, mottled skin cold and lifeless in the lamplight. No breath stirred the cloth over his chest; no faint rise and fall. Just silence, heavy as stone. The TV murmured a forgotten sermon in the corner — "...in the valley of the shadow..." — casting flickering shadows that made the whole scene feel like a vigil no one had called.
Delaney's stomach twisted, a chill crawling up her spine, but she swallowed it down, following her mother to the kitchen without a word. Their talks always started civil, frayed quick into the familiar tense rhythm — clipped words, loaded silences, the weight of an unresolved past neither would name yet. She sat at the scarred oak table, a relic from their Christian family's unchanging home, while her mother poured from a pot that had outlasted two marriages — three, now? — steam rising like denial.
Her mother hummed, stirring sugar in too slow. "Busy playing independent woman. Even if that's not God's way." The words landed soft but barbed, the old jab at Delaney's solo life — no partner, no children, just a one‑bedroom apartment and a byline. In their family's faith, a woman's path curved toward husband and home; anything else read as rebellion, a path to quiet judgment.
Delaney left before the kettle could boil over again — or before she asked about the couch, the smell, those white feet, the quiet — the door click echoing like a full stop. Back in her own space, Morrison's books stared down like old friends, silent witnesses to the night. That fighter's name flickered back, a loose thread begging to be pulled, even as the image of her father's shrouded form — and her mother's refusal to name it — clung like damp rot.