Til Death Do Us Part

Trigger Warning: This story contains depictions of child abuse, domestic abuse, murder, blood and gore, and psychological trauma. Reader discretion is advised.

I always knew my life would never be what I wanted it to be, no matter how hard I tried. I’ve known since I was nine and learned to cover the bruises with long sleeves and glasses—the purple and yellow shadows that mapped my body like some cruel, living constellation. The bruises were still branded into my skin, invisible to everyone but me.

I thought I would never have to live a life like that ever again when my father went to jail. I thought the air would finally taste clean, that sunlight would warm me instead of mocking me, that the world might finally feel safe. I thought I’d be ok.

I was wrong, I realize, as I pull the knife out of the drawer. Its handle is cold and slick against my palm, the blade catching the dim light and reflecting a crimson shimmer like fire. The smell hits me first. Iron, old and bitter, clinging to the air like smoke after a storm. The blade is crusted with dried liquid—iron and age. Blood. I was so terribly wrong.

I throw the clothes from the dresser drawer so I can access the false bottom. They flutter to the floor like discarded skin, exposing the hidden layer beneath, a secret waiting to suffocate me.

Pictures. Pictures of girls. Faces frozen in a cruel, smiling eternity, eyes wide and pleading, their laughter stolen and captured in still life horror. Dead girls. Dead girls’ earrings. And a gun.

I never knew we had a gun.

Its metal gleams dully, whispering a threat I can almost hear, the weight of it heavy with violence.

I was wrong.

By then, I had completely forgotten what I opened this drawer to get. Graham’s shirt?

Oh God. This is Graham’s drawer. A shiver races down my spine, cold and sharp, and my stomach drops like a stone into an endless well. The room tilts, the shadows stretch and twist, and every heartbeat screams the truth I can’t yet speak. Why does he have this? What did he do?

The footsteps walking down the hallway to our bedroom echoed louder than the screams in my head.

Thump, thump, thump.

“Phoebe? What’s taking so long, honey?”

I needed to stop predicting. Just ask him. It’s probably not his.

But I thought the same thing about the pill bottle in the cabinet. And the shoes under the bed. And the pictures on his phone. And the red on his shirt when he came home one day.

I was wrong.

“Phoebe?”

There he was. Framed by the doorway.

There I was. Holding a bloody knife and staring at him like I was watching a stranger bend to pick up a coat.

Graham crossed the room slowly, hands empty, smile thin. “What did you find?” he asked, voice soft as a question and hard as a verdict.

The words clogged in my throat like a subway full of too many people.

“Phoebe, where did you get that?”

“Phoebe?”

My knuckles whitened around the knife, the blade trembling with my breath.

Graham straightened slowly, unshaken, his voice low and steady. “You shouldn’t dig where you don’t belong.” His eyes flicked to the photos on the floor, then back to me. “Now you know.”

My throat constricted. “Know… what?”

“That they were mine.” He said it simply, like admitting to an overdue bill. “They trusted me. Everyone does. And then… they didn’t.” A faint smile tugged his lips. “You’d be surprised how easy it is. A drink here, a ride home there. Nobody asks questions when you look the part.”

I stumbled back a step, the walls pressing in. The knife wavered between us. “Stop. Don’t—don’t say any more.”

But he stepped closer, calm as ever. “I need you to hear it, Phoebe. Because you’re different. You were never supposed to find out. You were supposed to be the safe one.” His voice softened, almost tender. “And maybe you still can be…”

My stomach twisted. Every instinct screamed to run, but my feet refused to move. The knife trembled in my hands, reflecting his smile back at me like a warped mirror.

“Did you kill them?”

“Phoebe.”

“I asked you a question!” I snapped. Everything holding me back broke all at once. My hands shook so hard I could barely keep the knife upright.

“Do you really think I would do that?” He advanced toward me.

His fingers reached out towards my face.

Suddenly his hand was on my jaw and his eyes were so sincere, so loving.

My brain said drop the knife. Lean on him. Lay your head on his chest and let him wrap his arms around you, just like always. Let this be a thing of the past, a blip in the plan, just like always.

I was wrong.

He didn’t let me finish the thought. His thumb brushed my jaw and his smile stayed in place like a photograph. “You were always good at pretending,” he said, almost fond. “That’s why I married you. You look safe. You act safe. You make everyone around you relax. Isn’t that what your father wanted?”

My whole body fizzed with alarm. “Don’t you dare talk about my father,” I snapped, the words scraping out of my throat before I could stop them. The heat of his intrusion burned hotter than the knife in my hand. “Stop—stop talking in circles.” My voice sounded thin, like something played back on a cheap speaker. The knife felt ridiculous and essential in my hand, a child’s talisman against a world that had already shown me its teeth.

Graham sat on the edge of the bed as if he’d come home from work and found me in the middle of folding laundry. His movements were plain, domestic. Dangerous in their ordinaryness. “You deserve to know,” he said. “Not because I want you to be afraid—though I can see you are—but because you should understand the shape of things. I don’t like surprises in my life.”

“Understand what?” My throat tightened until it hurt. I could hear my own pulse in my ears. The photos on the floor seemed farther away; their eyes watched like small moons. “Tell me. Tell me then.”

He watched me watch him. There was no heat in his gaze—only a clear, clinical interest, like a scientist observing a specimen. “They were mistakes that pleased me,” he said quietly, as if reciting a recipe. “They were experiments in control. It’s useful to know how little resistance you meet when you act with certainty.” He shrugged, casual. “People are predictable when they think they’re loved.”

My hand tightened on the knife until the knuckles went white. The blade wavered. “You’re—” I began, and the word died on the edge of my teeth. Murderer. Monster. I couldn’t say it. Saying it would make it more real. Saying it might make it true in the wrong way.

He laughed then, soft and without humor. “Murderer is such a big, messy word,” he said. “I prefer… cleaner language. Removal, endings, quietings.” He leaned forward, the lamp light carving his face into gentle planes. “Do you think I enjoy hurting people? No. I enjoy certainty. I enjoy the place the world makes for me when I make the rules.”

My breath came too fast. The room narrowed to his voice and the weight of the metal in my hand. “Why them?” I choked. “Why those girls?”

His eyes flicked to the scattered photos like someone glancing at a to-do list. “They were in the right place at the right time,” he said. “Lonely. Trusting. So willing to believe in one nice voice that offers help. I gave them a story they wanted to hear. Then I closed the book.” He spoke the last words like a finished sentence, like a compliment.

Panic rose inside me like tidewater. I thought of all the small, ordinary moments that had been warnings—his late-night drives, the way he offered to “take care” of things—and how I’d always forgiven the discomfort with jokes and explanations. I had rewritten my wariness into excuses until the pages matched the lie I wanted to live.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please tell me you’re lying. Tell me you planted those pictures to scare me.” The knife felt suddenly childish and useless. “Tell me you’re sick and this is some—some twisted joke.”

Graham’s face softened in a way that made my skin crawl. “I’m not sick, Phoebe. I’m clear. I don’t need jokes to get what I want.” He stood, moving toward me with the calm inevitability of a hand reaching for a light switch. “You could help me. Or you could make this very difficult.” There was no threat in the words, only the information that whatever he preferred would be the shape of things to come.

My legs felt weak. I took a step back; the bed bumped my knee. The knife’s point traced a little arc in the air between us, useless and constant. “I’m calling the police,” I said, because the words were a buoy I could reach. They trembled when they left me.

My chest hurt. I tasted metal and soap and the faint, unmistakable tang of old blood. The knife felt heavier than I had thought possible; it was an accusation and a promise and a poor substitute for courage. I imagined throwing it at him, imagined plunging the blade into something—anything—to stop the flow of his words. My hands would not obey.

He stepped closer until the light caught the hint of a scar along his jaw and the ordinary slope of his shoulders. Up close, he smelled of laundry detergent and something colder, like winter. His eyes held me without pleading. “I could do it again,” he said, soft as a confession. “And I might. But right now I’m giving you a choice.”

The room tilted. The photos were a chorus of small, mute faces. The gun in the drawer gleamed with a promise I had not chosen. My fingers searched until they found it—the cold, hard truth tucked away beneath his things—and the barrel fit into my palm like a made thing, shaped for purpose.

“My mother was a drug addict,” he was so calm and collected. “Sometimes I wonder if it was her fault that I ended up like this. The girls… they look like her, don’t they? I think I did a good job of finding ones that have her facial structure.”

With the confidence of someone who didn’t have a serial killer standing them down, I grabbed the gun.

Graham’s eyes darkened, but he didn’t move. I gripped the gun, my fingers trembling, my nails digging into the cold metal.

“Give it to me,” he said, voice low, calm, dangerous.

“No,” I whispered, though my throat burned and my hands shook.

“Phoebe.”

“No!”

We lunged at the same time, twisting, pulling, desperate. The gun wavered between us, heavy with all the fear and rage that had been building for years, and then—

A shot.

The sound cracked through the house like a thunderclap, echoing off the walls.

Silence fell immediately afterward, thick and suffocating.

One of us collapsed to the floor. The other froze, chest heaving, staring at the shadowed room, unsure of what to feel in this moment full of lost words.

I always knew my life wouldn’t be what I wanted it to be. I never could escape the bad people. They flocked to me like gnats to a flashlight, a light in the midst of darkness.

I was wrong.

The knife still gleamed, laying on the floor by our feet, and the blood had nowhere to hide.