The Sound of Breaking

The apartment was deathly quiet, the kind of silence that has weight. Delaney stood in the hallway, a glass of water in her hand, her shadow stretched long and thin by the kitchen light.

She stopped near the guest room door. It wasn't fully closed.

Inside, there was a sound. It wasn't the dramatic, loud sobbing of a child; it was the rhythmic, jagged hitching of someone trying desperately to be silent. Viktor was sitting on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. His worn notebook lay open on the floor, the page where he wrote ELENA smeared with a single, damp circle of salt.

He wasn't just crying for his sister. He was crying because he realized he had been used. He had handed the keys to his family's trauma to a woman who looked at people like they were chapters in a thriller.

Delaney stood frozen.

In that hitching breath, she heard the ghost of herself in 1979—the night she realized that Jolene, her best friend, had been questioned by the Elders because Delaney had let her name slip. She remembered the crushing weight of realizing you have accidentally betrayed the only person who ever saw you as human.

Something inside Delaney's chest—something she had kept behind a wall of industrial sanitizer and Jim Morrison lyrics—finally fractured.

Delaney sat at her desk, but she didn't open the "Fighter" file. She didn't look at the Bulgarian police records.

Her hands were shaking. She reached for the sanitizer, her fingers hovering over the pump, then she pulled back as if the plastic were red-hot. The smell of lemon now felt like a physical threat.

She opened a new, blank document.

The cursor blinked. A rhythmic, silent accusation.

The Truth About Elena, she typed. Then she deleted it.
The Orphan of Sofia. Delete.

She started again. Her fingers moved slowly, devoid of their usual predatory speed. She began to draft a neutral piece—a profile on the Bulgarian art scene, a dry, professional look at Elena's work without the "blood and guns" narrative. She tried to write a story that leaves the "rotten leaf" on the tree.

But as she wrote the word 'family,' her gaze drifted to the corner of her desk—to the leather-bound folder containing the proof of Elena's father's crimes. It was right there. The "Simple Truth." The story that would win awards. The story that would prove that idols are always built on filth.

She looked at the door where Viktor was finally silent.

She looked at the blank document.

She was fifty-four years old, and she was caught in a tug-of-war between the woman who wanted to be a savior and the woman who was trained to be a predator.

She stopped. She wanted to add: ...but she is also the daughter of a murderer.

Her finger hovered over the 'B' key. The room felt colder. The ash was settling, and for the first time, Delaney didn't know if she wanted to sweep it away or let it bury her.

The silence in the apartment had changed. Before, it had been the silence of two people orbiting the same void. Now it was the silence of a bomb that had already gone off, leaving only the ringing in its wake.

Delaney looked at her hands. The same hands that had typed exposés that ruined careers, that had traced Jim Morrison's face with worship, that had pumped sanitizer until the skin cracked. They didn't look like the hands of a predator. They looked like the hands of a woman who was very, very tired.

She remembered Viktor's face when she'd told him to forget what he saw. The way his eyes had widened not with fear, but with recognition—the recognition of someone who has just understood the rules of the game, and realized they've already lost.

Delaney closed her eyes. She could almost smell the clove cigarettes from the concert, feel the crush of bodies, hear the cover band singer's voice straining to reach the notes Jim Morrison had made sound so effortless. She had been hunting for that voice ever since—in men, in stories, in the wreckage of other people's lives.

And Viktor? Viktor was just another boy with a notebook, another soul she'd tried to cast in a role he never auditioned for.

The cursor blinked. The sentence sat there, incomplete. A bridge to nowhere.

Elena Faulkner is a painter who understands that the past cannot be erased.

Delaney's finger moved from the 'B' key. It drifted to the 'Delete' key instead.

She pressed it once. The cursor jumped back a space.

She didn't know if she was deleting a sentence or a lifetime of programming. The sound of the keystroke echoed in the quiet room—sharp, final, and terribly, terribly small.

The sound of breaking.