you couldn’t clearly see one side or the other. Yet, it had never seemed as massive to me when I was younger. Maybe I was simply accustomed to it, the lavishness lost on a child who never understood that beyond the walls of her home, there were people suffering and starving.
Wealth does that to you, I assumed, it fastens blinders to your eyes and prevents you from seeing the truth. It whittles away at your ability to understand that while you walk on marble and dress in silk, there is an entire world of people who can barely afford shoes.
I’d only experienced that type of worry for a few short months, and it had been enough to send me running back to a house that I believed might comfort me. I’d chosen the blinders because I wasn’t savvy or strong, my makeup not quite sturdy enough to live through hardship.
It made me wonder if my family’s wealth had crippled me more than I understood.
While standing in place, I tried to imagine what the ballroom must have looked like on that night, tried to understand the silence that must have suffocated the walls after all those people had been slaughtered. I tried to picture the bodies lying where they’d fallen, tried to experience the fear they must have felt when bullets were fired from a psychopath’s gun.
It was a nightmare I thought I remembered: the scent of blood, the sound of screaming, the panic racing through swollen veins and across fractured bones.
But I wasn’t here, despite what my mind told me. Or else I’d be dead like them. Yet, I had no idea how I’d escaped. The memory was as lost to me as my friends had been that night.
How had one man managed to kill so many without someone stopping him before he’d managed to kill them all?
I spun again and was disturbed to see a man standing in the distance silently watching me.
Positioned in a corner of the room where shadow concealed him, he was a silhouette that I could barely make out. I assumed he was security given the breadth of his shoulders and his height, an imposing figure that stood perfectly still and didn’t say a word in introduction.
It was obvious he saw me, and he must have known that I saw him, but he didn’t move my direction or attempt conversation. He simply stood for a minute before turning to leave the room.
I was beginning to hate this place all over again. Hate the ghosts that still lingered and the changes made during the time I was gone. Five floors, three above ground and two below, and I’d only managed to explore the same areas I’d known as a child.
In appearance, the Rose estate was the same as I remembered, but there was something more, something so vastly different that I found it difficult to put my finger on the pulse of it or taste its flavor.
A home should always make you feel welcome, but if anything, I couldn’t shake the thought that this mansion had become a cage, and I’d been stupid enough to walk inside it willingly.
Hurrying to my suite of rooms after that, I tossed and turned all night, my dreams filled with images of dead bodies and rivers of blood, of a faceless man walking within it, always watching as he pursued me.
I woke up on the third day to a noise that startled me. It ripped me from a particularly nasty nightmare, my mind not yet processing I was awake when I opened my eyes to see a maid dusting beneath a couch in a small seating area near my fireplace. She was completely oblivious to me, her movements frantic and expression frazzled.
I overreacted to the unexpected company, my terror from the nightmare and the feeling of being trapped combining into a fleeting bout of anger that caused me to snap at her for disrupting my sleep.
“What are you doing in here so early?”
The woman spun on her heel in my direction, her blond hair a mess around her head. Blue eyes rounded in fear when she saw me sitting up in bed, her lips parting and closing again as if she wanted to answer but couldn’t.
Her panic should have washed mine away, but it only made me angrier for some reason. I felt like I was in a strange place, my grogginess from sleep not fading away fast enough. I should have apologized for bitching at her for doing her