I didn’t know how to respond. My mind was racing, trying to piece together what I had just seen, trying to make sense of what was happening. The gloves. The marks on his hands. The police insignia branded into his skin.
“What happened to you, Nate?” I asked, my voice trembling with a mix of confusion and concern.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he lifted his palms higher, as if showing me the marks more clearly, the emblem like a stamp burned into his flesh.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said quietly. “Please. Just… don’t ask me about it.”
But I couldn’t stop myself. The questions tumbled out before I could stop them. “Who did this to you? Why didn’t you tell me? Why the gloves? What does it mean?”
Nate took a deep breath, and for a moment, I thought he was going to say something. But then, he just lowered his hands and reached for the gloves, slipping them back on with practiced ease, like it was nothing.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice cold and distant now. “I’m fine. I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Please, just… just let me be.”
And that was it. The door between us slammed shut. He turned away from me and left the bathroom, disappearing down the hallway without another word.
The next few days felt strange. The normal rhythm of our house—Lila watering her plants, me tinkering with the yardwork, Nate sitting quietly in corners or working through his tasks—had become suffocating. There was a heavy silence in the air, thick with unsaid words and a distance between us that hadn’t been there before.
I tried to act like everything was normal, but I couldn’t shake the image of Nate’s branded palms. The insignia was seared into my mind, a symbol that felt wrong, out of place. I knew what I’d seen, but I didn’t know what it meant. And Nate? He’d built a wall between us. That conversation in the bathroom had been the closest I’d come to breaking through, but I hadn’t. Not really.
It wasn’t until one evening, when Nate was in the backyard and Lila was in the kitchen, that something happened that made me realize just how deep this went.
I was standing in the hallway, staring at the door to the guest room. It had been Nate’s space for the summer, and it had stayed mostly untouched. He had settled into it with that quiet air of detachment, and I hadn’t dared to intrude. But tonight, something was different. There was a feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me I needed to go in.
I walked to the door, my hand resting on the doorknob. I hesitated. Was this an invasion? Was I overstepping? But then I remembered his hands. The insignia. Something was wrong, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
I opened the door quietly and stepped inside.
The room was dim, the curtains drawn to keep out the fading daylight. There were clothes scattered across the floor, but everything else was neat enough. Nate’s backpack was perched on the chair by the desk, the zipper half open. My eyes immediately fell on the small filing cabinet in the corner of the room. It was one of those metal ones with a single drawer, the kind you use to store documents or old papers. The drawer was slightly open, just enough to make me curious.
I knew I shouldn’t be snooping. But I couldn’t stop myself.
I walked over to the cabinet and pulled the drawer open slowly. Inside, there were a few old papers—some blank notebooks, a few receipts. But beneath those, there was a small envelope, yellowed with age. I pulled it out, my fingers trembling. The envelope felt oddly heavy, as if it contained something important, something that didn’t belong.
I opened it carefully, almost reverently. Inside, there were several photographs. They were old, faded, and yellowing at the edges. I spread them out on the desk, each image more disturbing than the last.
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