Chapter 33

     There are some goodbyes that stay with you, the kind that don’t fade no matter how many years pass. They dig in deep, like a knife twisted between the ribs, and you carry the weight of them whether you want to or not. For me, it was her. She was the one who left the scar, the one whose vicelike goodbye still pressed against my chest whenever I let myself remember.

     I never wanted to remember.

     Her name was Meredith—or at least that’s what she told me. She was tall, strong, and had a look in her eye that said she’d seen more than her fair share of trouble. But she didn’t talk about it. She wasn’t the type to spill her secrets, and I never asked. We weren’t close, not in the way people might think. We were more like two pieces of the same broken machine, functioning together only because we had no other choice.

     I’d found her when I was deep in the game—back when I was still Sid Jangler, noir detective hero, solving cases and making a name for myself. She wasn’t a client, not exactly. She was... well, it’s hard to explain what she was. A partner, maybe. A giant housemaid, as the world saw her—someone there to clean up the messes, to do the dirty work while I handled the thinking. But there was more to it than that. There always is.

     We got the job done, every time. No matter how bad the case got, how deep we had to go, we made it out the other side. But she had her limits. She had a line that couldn’t be crossed, and I didn’t know it until it was too late.

     It was one of those jobs that should have been simple. A missing person, a woman who’d walked out of her life without a word and left her family wondering where she’d gone. I’d handled a hundred cases just like it, and I didn’t think twice when I took it. But Meredith—she knew better. She knew something was off from the start, something wrong with the way it all felt. I should have listened.

     The trail led us to a house. A big one, old and sprawling, tucked away in the outskirts of town where nobody asked questions. It was the kind of place you didn’t go poking around unless you had a damn good reason, and we had one. The missing woman had been there, we were sure of it. But she wasn’t missing anymore.

     The house swallowed us up, pulled us into something deeper than either of us had bargained for. I won’t go into the details—some things are better left unsaid—but when we found her, the woman, she wasn’t who we thought she was. And neither was Meredith.

     I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the day I lost her.

     She didn’t say it right away. She didn’t have to. Her goodbye came in the way she moved through that house, the way she stood beside me but felt a thousand miles away. I could feel it—the distance growing between us, the way her skin had numbed to the work, to me, to everything we were trying to do.

     When it was all over, when the case was wrapped up and we’d left the house behind, she turned to me with those cold, distant eyes and said, "It’s done, Sid. We’re done."

     Her words hit like a punch to the gut, but I didn’t show it. I couldn’t. I just nodded, pretending like I understood. Like it didn’t matter. But it did. It mattered more than I’d let myself admit.

     "Where will you go?" I asked, my voice sounding hollow even to my own ears.

     She shrugged, pulling her coat tighter around her shoulders. "Doesn’t matter. I’m done with this." Her voice was calm, detached. "I’ve done my part. I won’t clean up after you anymore."

     The giant housemaid, refusing her duty. Refusing the role I’d assigned her without even realizing it. The anti-oath.

     "You were never just cleaning up after me," I said, my voice low. "You know that."

     She shook her head, her face unreadable. "Doesn’t change anything, Sid. I’m done."

     I wanted to argue, to tell her she was wrong, that we were in this together. But I couldn’t find the words. Maybe I knew she was right. Maybe I knew that the cases, the work, the mess we’d made—it had taken too much from her. From both of us. And she was smart enough to walk away before it swallowed her whole.

     Her goodbye was like a vice, squeezing the air out of my lungs, but I didn’t stop her. I just stood there, watching as she walked away, disappearing into the fog like she’d never been there at all.

     I never saw her again.

     That was the end of it. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. But her vicelike goodbye stayed with me, pressing down on my chest every time I thought about her. I wondered where she’d gone, what she’d done with the rest of her life. But I never went looking. Some things are better left buried.

     Now, as I stood in the heat of the July afternoon, the memory of Meredith came back to me like a bad dream. The heather grew quietly in the marsh, and the land had settled into its new rhythm. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the past had a way of creeping up on you, no matter how far you tried to run.

     I wondered if Meredith ever thought about me, about the cases we’d solved, about the messes we’d cleaned up. But I knew better than to ask.

     Her vicelike goodbye was the last thing I’d ever get from her.