Chapter 3 - The Echoes of the Past
That night, after Nicholas left—he had simply walked out as if he were a visitor with a grievance—I couldn't sleep. I felt a phantom dampness in the air, a psychic residue of his presence. I realized that keeping Hazel safe meant I had to stop running and start dismantling him.
I began to dig through the storage box I had grabbed in my panic—a collection of childhood mementos I had mindlessly tossed into the trunk. Deep beneath baby blankets and school reports, I found a stack of composition notebooks. They were Nicholas’s diaries from middle school.
I opened one, and the handwriting was pristine, almost artistic. But the words were a descent into madness.
“The hamster didn’t learn,” one entry read from when he was ten. “It wouldn't stay in the corner. So I made it learn the difference between freedom and the cage.”
There were pages detailing "experiments" on small animals, followed by chillingly clinical observations about human reactions to pain. He had been a sociopath since he could hold a pen. I had been so blinded by his academic success and his handsome face that I had ignored the monsters under our own roof. I hadn't been raising a son; I had been harboring a predator.
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I realized then that Nicholas didn't want us back because he loved us. He wanted us back because we were his audience. Without us to witness his "control," he was just a man in a quiet house. He needed our fear to feel powerful.
The next morning, I didn't go to the dining hall. I went to the manager’s office. I didn't bring my sob story; I brought the truth, or as much of it as I could make them believe. I needed allies, and for the first time in years, I stopped acting like a victim and started acting like a strategist.
