There are people who exist fully only in relation to one other person.
Marcus Holloway was that kind of man. He had no ambitions he could name, no hunger that gnawed at him in the night, no vision of who he might become. He simply was — drifting through his days with a quiet, aimless contentment — until Elena walked into them. She was the thing that made him want to be something. For her, he learned discipline. For her, he built a life with intention. For her, he discovered that love isn't just a feeling — it's a daily act of transformation.
So when Elena told him she wanted a child, he wanted one too. Not because he'd ever dreamed of fatherhood, but because she had, and her dreams had become his own.
That child was you.
Scientists are sometimes asked: what would happen if the sun went dark? They have answers — cold cascading through the atmosphere, crops failing, oceans freezing at their edges. The calculations are grim and precise. But those scientists are working from observation, from physics, from the behavior of matter in the absence of warmth. With Marcus, no one needed to calculate. The people who lived alongside him watched it happen in real time.
Elena died bringing you into the world. And Marcus — the man who had only ever needed one thing — lost it entirely.
You were raised by your grandmother for your first six years while your father unraveled at a distance.
In that time, he served eighteen months in prison for what he did to the obstetrician. The assault was brutal enough that charges couldn't be avoided. He drank through the years that followed, surfacing occasionally to prove he was still capable of ruin before sinking again. Your grandmother never said much about it.
Then she died too. And there was nowhere left to go.
Living with your father is a particular kind of haunting.
The apartment is a shrine. Elena's photographs line every wall — her laughing, her leaning into Marcus with that easy confidence she seemed to carry everywhere, Her clothes still hang in the closet. Her shoes are still by the door. Some nights, through the thin wall between your rooms, you can hear him — not crying exactly, but something beneath crying, something that sounds like a man drowning slowly on dry land.
He doesn't speak to you much. Sometimes he throws things. Once a glass, once a plate, both aimed at the wall near your head rather than at you — a distinction that feels smaller every time it happens.
You're seventeen now.
You have two outfits that are really yours, and one of them is developing a hole at the seam. There's a boy named Peter — easy to talk to, funny in a way that doesn't seem like he's trying, the kind of person who makes you aware of your own reflection. You want, for once, to feel like yourself when he sees you.
Marcus left for the afternoon. The apartment is quiet in a way it almost never is.You stand in front of your mother's closet for a long moment. Then you open it.
Her things smell like something you don't have a word for. You move slowly at first, then less slowly. There is a blouse the color of a late afternoon, and it fits like it was made for you. Of course it does. You move to the mirror — her mirror, still in its place .
You lose track of time.
The door opens.
You don't hear it until it's already happened. Marcus is standing in the frame, coat still on, keys still in his hand. You watch his face move through something that doesn't have a clean name — grief and fury collapsing into each other.
He looks at you the way a man looks at a wound.
The thing he throws hits the wall six inches from your shoulder. Then he crosses the room in three steps and his hands find your arms and the push is hard enough that you have to catch yourself against the dresser.
"It should have been you."
"Get out of her clothes. You took her life. You took her face." A sound escapes him — not quite a word. "And now you want to steal the rest of her too."