Ain't Talkin'
Chapter 73 - f-i trie

So many years back. There had been some bad years. There had been some good years. what finally wound up mattering was that one night that it seemed the whole of a life culminated in. There was a finite point that the universe returned to, and that was the night of the harvest festival.

Not the festival where Walter Roche had realized not for the first time that he had loved Mollie Groux more than he could love anything or anyone else. Nor was it the time that he had realized that his Mollie, who would always be his Mollie, that she and he both knew, had not really preferred the company of men.

It had all been the same to Roche. He loved her and she loved him, just not in the way that the stories said they ought to.

That night she’d worn a shirt cut from an old tablecloth and sewn to her figure. She had a flower, she always did, in her hair. They’d danced and they’d loved each other, not in the way people thought they should have, the kind of love where they melted into each other.

She’d gone home early, a victim of too much wine. Roche had stayed behind to enjoy the company of others with her blessing.

Mollie Groux never made it home.

In an alley behind a shop, Will Dunham, Patchy Wilkes, and Andrew Vickers had raped Mollie Groux before beating her to death. To hear it told, Andrew had been against the whole thing, and hadn’t wanted to harm the girl just because of who she liked to go with, but he hadn’t stopped them neither.

Roche had been kind to him when he’d stepped back into the world from the white.

Walter Roche had sensed something was amiss the moment he’d walked past Mollie’s home somewhere around dawn, half-drunk and still reeling from the longest he’d stayed at a harvest dance in years.

It was the way the crisp of snow on her porch had no footprints. It was the way her gate was shut tight and Mollie had that bad habit of always leaving it open. In a blasted nothing of a world she still kept her home inviting with a gate ajar.

When Roche found her, the pool of blood around her bare thighs had already frozen to a soft purple. Her skin was already blue, and the way her eyes had clouded and frozen snapped open staring into the opal dawn had turned him.

Roche put her pants back on. Why he couldn’t say, it had just been what he’d done. Under her knees and under her legs he’d carried her off into nowhere.

He’d heard the stories of the white. He’d heard where there was a tear. He’d sought it out.

That was the first and last time he’d walked. By the time he’d found it his shoes had torn from his feet and his joints would not bend back to their natural leisure.

Walter Roche stepped through the hole in the universe, hoping against all things that maybe. . .just maybe, in the nothing that was the construct of all things, here. . .she might still be alive.

Mollie Groux had been dead then for two days, and inside the white she’d fell apart in his hands like a sandcastle woman amidst ether surf whittling away at her particles. Then there was nothing of her. There was the white, and Roche was left in it.

And he didn’t remember the way back out.

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