Rue (following on from Funeral Games)

Now that the central figures were gone, the anger hollowed into silence. The performance had ended. No one was left to fight but ghosts.

I found myself in a small rental on the outskirts of town—one of those new builds with walls so thin you could hear the neighbours peeling fruit. I was barely keeping up with the rent. The recruitment agency called when they had something—sorting parcels at a DHL depot on the night shift, grounds maintenance for a business park, cooking limp sausages and hash browns in glassy breakfast rooms of corporate centres. Not exactly the triumphant return.

Still, it was enough to buy four large bottles of whisky a week, which I nursed like medicine. I didn’t get drunk exactly—I diluted each day into a kind of stupor. A low-frequency hum. I’m amazed they kept hiring me. But I’d learned how to show up, how to nod at the right time, how to pass just under the radar.

Then came the care home job. Cleaning. Not glamorous, but quiet. The rooms were all variations on the same theme: pastel curtains, wipeable chairs, a television always left on mute.

And then I saw her.

My old stepmother.

She didn’t recognise me. Didn’t know her own name, most days. But there she was, curled like a paper flower in bed, with that same absurd Marie Antoinette hairstyle, wilted now, flattened at the crown. The nurses called her darling. She snapped at them. Some parts of her were still sharp.

I didn’t say anything. Just cleaned around her. Emptied the bin. Wiped down the radiator cover. She watched me with glazed, feline suspicion, then looked away. It wasn’t a scene—no final reckoning. Just a whimper of memory.

There was a letter on her bedside table. I picked it up. It was from her son. No envelope. One page, torn along the bottom. Angry. Desperate. Full of accusation and half-memories, scrawled in blue biro with crossings-out and a jagged edge of pain. I read it. Twice.

Then I put it back.

One of the younger staff introduced herself to me.

She had short hair, dyed a sort of copper that caught the light in a way that made you want to believe in second chances. Her name was Jo.

She worked the morning shift, same as me. Noticed how I lingered longer in that one room. I think I told her the woman reminded me of a teacher I’d had once. It didn’t matter. She didn’t believe me, and I think I was grateful for that.

“You should come to something,” she said one day, wiping down the tea trolley. “It’s a bit weird but I think you’d like it.”

That’s how she put it. You’d like it.

Next Thursday, after our shift, she met me outside. She drove. I didn’t ask where we were going. The car smelled faintly of mint gum and old takeaway. When we pulled up outside a church hall, I knew.

I nearly didn’t get out.

She said, “Just come in, sit down, you don’t have to say anything. Hell, you can leave after five minutes if you want.”

I stayed the whole hour. Said nothing. Listened to strangers tell stories I’d rehearsed in my own head. I felt like I was being cracked open gently, with gloves on.

Jo never pushed. But she kept asking. Kept showing up. Weeks passed. I kept going. One night she said, “You should talk to someone, properly.”

So I did.

And now it’s been two years. Two years of trying to climb out of myself. Of therapy. Of slowly turning the mirror back around. Of relearning how to speak without flinching.

We got the dog six months ago. A gangly black mutt with too many toes and a tail that thumps against the radiator when she hears me unlock the door.

Jo named her Rue.

I’d once told her, drunk on memory, about the dog I’d imagined owning when I lived in Geneva. When things still felt like they might go right. She remembered.

That’s all it took.