1I have always hated the word murder. It sounds like a heartbeat, doesn't it? It sounds like the end of a human life. Listen to the thump of rhyming syllables, then consider the pause that follows. One final pulse of the heart—then silence.
I have come here to tell you my story. I have never shared these things with anyone. But it is time.
Seven months ago, I watched the sky darken with bees. It was a swarm, an uncanny marvel, a masterpiece of chaos. Before my eyes, tens of thousands of tiny bodies rose from the ground like an inversion of rain.
Six months ago, I fell in love for the first time in my life. Honestly, I did not believe I was capable of any such thing. Love is usually a boon but always a weakness.
Five months ago, the local farmers' market began its spring season. Imagine the aroma of fresh strawberries and cut flowers.
Four months ago, the river rose beyond its banks. There was a storm that forced the water to swell and surge.
Three months ago, I celebrated my birthday for the first time in more than thirty years of life.
Two months ago, I placed a phone call to an agent of the FBI.
And one month ago, there was a murder.
Do you hear it now? The word murder is a brief, brutal demonstration of its own meaning. A perfect pulse. The last one.
It was raining that day, and the steady drizzle drenched my clothes and plastered my braid against my nape. The corpse lay on its back on a pallet of autumn leaves. Its eyes were open, lips parted. I stood at the edge of the stain of blood that seeped slowly outward. There were too many stab wounds to count.
But I am getting ahead of myself. A life is measured in heartbeats. My story is measured in secrets. Before we go any further, I must bring you into the past.
2It began with red.
I was hiding under the kitchen table when my brother found me. I can't be sure of my age—four or five, probably—a pale, barefoot girl with a messy blond braid. Busy in play, I did not notice Finn's approach until he leaned over the edge of the table, blotting out the sunlight.
"Come on," he said. "There's a mess to clean up."
"What happened?"
"Get up."
I glared at him. "You clean it up. I didn't make any mess."
"Liv." His tone made my name into a command. Finn was three years older, not exactly an authority figure but close enough.
I crawled out from under the table. The curtains undulated in a summer breeze that circled the kitchen, warm as breath. Finn led me down the hall to the living room and stopped in the doorway.
Red on the floor. I blinked, trying to verify what I was seeing. A track of scarlet splotches trailed from one end of the living room to the other. The drips varied in size and shape, some as big as my palm, some mere pinpoints. The window screens shimmied in the breeze, casting rectangles of light on the floorboards and fluorescing each crimson blot. I smelled something unfamiliar—iron, rust.
"I'll get the mop," Finn said, leaving me there to marvel.
The front door seemed to be the origin point of the mess. It stood ajar on the far side of the room, creaking slightly in the wind. The path of blotches began there, splattering the floor between the hat stand and the shoe rack, dribbling past the couch, skirting the end table, crossing the open space by the threshold where I stood, and terminating at the basement door. I had never seen our tidy house so disfigured.
Finn appeared at my elbow again, holding the mop, the bucket, and a bin of bleach-scented rags. His face was solemn beneath his corn-silk curls.
The rest of the living room seemed normal. The basement door was shut and bolted, as always; it had never once been left open or unlocked. Pappa's armchair, threadbare but sturdy, sat in its usual corner. The items on the end table hadn't been disturbed: a stone figurine of a wolf, a book of Viking sagas, and Pappa's favorite knife, a six-inch dagger in a leather sheath. Only the red was out of place.
"How did it happen?" I asked.
My brother didn't answer.
"Finn? Who did this?"
He remained silent, but his face said that he wasn't the one to blame. I knew all my brother's expressions; I could discern his mood from the pattern of his breath alone. Just now, he was determined, not worried or ashamed, which meant the catastrophe was not of his making.
"Was it Pappa?" I asked.
There were only three of us in the house: father, son, daughter. Suspects were limited. Still, Pappa was not the sort to make a mess of this caliber, let alone leave it lying there to ruin the living room floorboards. He liked everything in its place, always.
"I'll go fill the bucket," Finn said. "You mop, I'll scrub."
The red was persistent. The more we tried to erase it, the more it spread. Finn scoured so hard that his fingers went white at the knuckles, but he succeeded only in smearing the stain wider. My mop proved equally useless, merely pushing the crimson into the cracks. Red dyed each rag in turn, tinted the mop strings, and pinked my bare feet.
"It's just getting worse," I said. "Where's Pappa? He'll know what to do."
"He's working," Finn said. In other words, we were on our own.
My brother rose to his feet, and I could see the cogs whirring in his brain as he surveyed the living room. His eyes were crystalline cobalt. I leaned on the mop, glad for the respite; my arms ached from the unaccustomed effort.
Finn strode off down the hall again. "Wait there," he called over his shoulder. "Don't follow me."
Glancing down, I took stock of my appearance. My shorts were tie-dyed scarlet, my hands inked to the wrist, and even my braid had not escaped: a few clots of crimson stood out vividly against the white-blond canvas of my long, limp hair.
This is a memory, you understand. My first memory.
Finn returned wearing rubber gloves that went up to his elbows. He brought a smaller bucket and a caustic stench into the room. I backed up, coughing and covering my nose. My brother's mouth was a taut line, and I did not like the set of his jaw. It was the same stoic expression he wore when he and Pappa sparred with their wooden battle-axes. Finn left those sessions covered in bruises and welts.
He poured a noxious froth onto the floor, then wiped it up quickly but carefully with a sponge. His movements were controlled and precise, as though the liquid in the little bucket might explode if he wasn't careful enough.
"What is that?" I asked behind my palm.
"Lye," Finn said without looking at me.
"Lie?"
"Pappa showed me where the container is. I'm not telling you where. It's not safe for kids."
It didn't occur to me to argue that he was a kid too—seven or eight at most. Finn had taught me to fish, build a fire, and splint a broken finger. He was in charge whenever Pappa left us alone overnight or locked himself in the basement for days. I never thought of my brother as a child.
The fumes from the lye made me gag, but Finn was undaunted. Pour and wipe, pour and wipe. In a few minutes, the floorboards shone clean. Only in certain lights did a faint peachy hue become visible. Subtle but permanent, the stain endured throughout my childhood.
Now, looking back, I don't know how Finn disposed of the lye. I don't know if he understood the danger of using it. I don't know if he was yet aware of its true purpose in our home. Pappa taught Finn a lot of things I never discovered.
"We both need baths," he said. "We'll have to burn these clothes."
At that moment, a question bloomed in my mind.
"The red," I said. "What was it?"
I'd been so caught up in the whirl of work that it hadn't occurred to me to wonder. Finn closed his eyes as though he'd been waiting for this question.
"It was paint," he said, without emotion.
"Paint?"
"Yes. Pappa spilled a bunch of red paint on his way to the basement. He's working now, and I don't know how long he'll be down there. I wanted to clean it up before he was done."
"Okay."
And that was that. I took Finn at his word; I always did. At that age, the imagination is psychedelic in its intensity. Little children don't form conjectures, and they can't distinguish reality from pretend. They do what they're told—at least they did in my house.
I did not think about the events of that morning again, not for years to come. But I did not forget either. There is a knowing and a not-knowing. Sometimes a person's first memory is unimportant: a smell, a voice, or the face of a loved one, a random event that the brain saves for no particular reason. But sometimes a first memory is essential and revelatory.
Finn said I could have the first bath, using up most of the hot water and relegating the tepid leftovers to him. We lunched on peanut butter and jelly, then went out back and burned our clothes along with the mophead, sponge, and rags. He gave me the box of matches and showed me how to strike one without singeing my fingers. In a whoosh of heat and light, the last remnants of red were erased.
Copyright © 2026 by Abby Geni. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
