The Caretaker

The air in my office hung bruised long after Arthur left. His mandate echoed against the plaster walls, a gavel striking hardwood. *Stop the renovation. For your own good.*

I rolled the altered vellum tightly, my fingers stiff and uncooperative, and shoved it back into the leather drafting tube. A familiar, suffocating band wrapped around my ribs, compressing my lungs.

The kitchen offered the sterile comfort of routine. Stainless steel, wipe-clean granite, the mechanical drip of the coffee maker. I moved through the motions of the morning, wiping down the island with a microfiber cloth. The physical labor was supposed to burn off the panic. It wasn't working.

My smartwatch buzzed against my wrist. A text illuminated the small screen.

*Checking in. Heart rate looks elevated. Did you take your morning dose?*

Harrison. He monitored the health data on the watch he’d given me for Christmas. A digital tether disguised as brotherly care.

I opened the upper cabinet next to the sink. The amber bottle sat front and center, dwarfing the multivitamins. Escitalopram, mixed with a specialized compound. Filled directly at Harrison's clinic pharmacy. *For your unique neurology, El,* he always said, his voice dripping with that maddening, clinical sympathy. *Standard doses just don't stabilize you.*

I pressed my palm flat against the cool granite to stop the trembling in my arm. Arthur was right. The house was getting to me. The dust, the hollow echo in the closet, the blank spaces on the blueprints—it was all triggering the old paranoia.

I shook a single white capsule onto my palm.

The moment the plastic touched my skin, the kitchen floor tilted.

The smell of brewing coffee vanished. The ambient air dropped twenty degrees in a microsecond, biting at my exposed throat with the sharp, metallic tang of a deep freeze.

Ice crunched under my boots. I wasn't standing in the kitchen. I wasn't holding a pill. I was gripping thick, wet nylon. A sleeping bag.

It was heavy. Impossibly, dead-weight heavy. I was dragging it backward across the hardwood floor of the upstairs hallway, leaving a smeared trail of melting snow and something darker. Something thick and red seeping into the wool of the Persian rug.

My knees hit the kitchen tile with a hard crack.

The plastic bottle slipped from my hand, bouncing against the counter and scattering white capsules across the floor like teeth.

I gasped, my lungs pulling in the warm, coffee-scented air of the present. The stainless steel fridge hummed. Sunlight caught the edge of the chrome sink.

I pressed my hands over my eyes, pulling my knees to my chest. It was just the stress. Arthur had warned me. Harrison had warned me. The renovation was unraveling me. My fragile mind was slipping, fabricating horrors out of dust and old wood. I was a broken thing they had to constantly manage.

I reached out, my fingers blindly tracing the grout lines until I found one of the fallen pills.

I stared at my reflection in the dark, polished glass of the oven door. The frightened, unstable little girl was still right there in the glass, trapped in a house that belonged to the men who managed her.

I placed the capsule on my tongue and dry-swallowed.

The pill tasted faintly metallic, just as it had since she was ten.