After Geneva

There’s a kind of comfort in failure. It softens the edges of expectation.

My father welcomed me home like a prophecy fulfilled. I hadn’t just returned — I had confirmed something. That I would never amount to much. That no matter how far I wandered — Geneva, love, reinvention — it would end here. With him. In the old, crumbling house I grew up in. In defeat.

He smiled like someone proven right.

And in a way, I had been preparing for this all my life. I slipped into the role like a suit laid out years ago that still fit: the damaged son, the fuck-up. The clever, melancholy boy who couldn’t quite hold his life together. A perfect mirror to his own failings. He liked that. It gave us symmetry.

The house hadn’t changed. If anything, it had calcified. Time didn’t pass there — it thickened. Dust on the mantels. Boxes never unpacked. The smell of mothballs and something faintly sweet, like fruit left out too long. My stepmother drifted through it all in house slippers, like a ghost too proud to admit it was dead.

She’d taken to speaking in half-thoughts. I’d find her at the window, mouthing sentences to no one, or reapplying lipstick for the third time before lunch, convinced someone important was coming. Her world, once full of sharp remarks and subtle dominance, had softened into ritual and fog.

They had me where they wanted me. I was trapped — but I was useful. He could drink with me. She could scold me for things I hadn’t done. It gave their days shape.

And for a while, I accepted it. I cooked. I cleaned. I trimmed back the garden so it didn’t fully swallow the path. I tried, feebly, to redeem myself through service. Not for them — for something buried deeper. A version of me that still wanted to be seen. Or forgiven.

But the centre couldn’t hold.

His decline came quietly: slurred words, misplaced objects, laughter without context. Then the little folk. Tiny figures at the edge of the garden. “They’re very civilised,” he said once, almost reverently. “If I see them again, I’ll point one out.”

At night I heard him talking to them through the vent.

My stepmother, meanwhile, slipped further away. She accused me of theft, of moving her things, of stealing her post. She locked herself in the bedroom and whispered to the police that I was plotting something. That I had plans.

And then her son began appearing.

A lifetime of being told he was special had soured into madness. He was her avenger. Her protector. Her favourite hallucination. He watched me like a man sharpening knives in his mind — convinced I was orchestrating some inheritance coup. The house, such as it was, had become a fortress under siege. And I was the traitor inside the gates.

The night it snapped began like any other.

My father collapsed in the bathroom — curled on the cold tiles like a question mark. His legs no longer responding. His voice, barely breath.

I called the ambulance. I held his hand. For all the dysfunction, he was still my father. Still a man. Still afraid.

Blue lights flickered outside.

I heard someone downstairs.

Drawers opening.

Metal clinking against wood.

When I reached the kitchen, he was standing there — my stepbrother. A carving knife in his hand. Eyes wild. Not angry. Not even furious. Just... certain. Like I was the final piece of a puzzle that had haunted him his whole life.

The paramedics loaded my father into the ambulance.

Upstairs, my stepmother was applying powder for someone long dead.

The house breathed in silence.

I stood in the doorway.

He stood at the foot of the stairs.

And for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what came next.