He takes the ring out of the drawer for the last time and does not put it back.
For ten years it has been a way of keeping the wound open, a small cold thing he could hold when he needed to remember why the world felt unfinished. He turns it over in his palm now and thinks about all the versions of this he has imagined and never done — the letter he could send instead, the call to someone who still owes him a favor, the long list of ways a man can ruin another man without ever leaving his own kitchen.
He has tried all of those, in his head, a hundred times. They all end the same way: the man in the government car still gets to wake up tomorrow, still gets to be someone else, still gets to have a face in a mirror that isn't the last thing his brother ever saw.
Victor does not believe in balancing scales. He has said that to himself for ten years, and it was even true, for a while.
He puts the ring in his coat pocket instead of the drawer, where he will carry it until it is finished, and picks up the phone to find out what a man buys when he has decided, finally, to stop imagining.
Victor: An Early Serial — Part V of V. ← Previous: Victor(4) · Series index
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