Not to Disturb Him
Copyright© 2026 by Heel
Chapter 9
After that day, Antony’s grief no longer looked like grief at all.
The tears faded quickly, as though his body had decided they were useless, and in their place came something harder and far more dangerous—a dense, simmering anger that filled every silence and followed him through the apartment like a shadow. He spoke of the attacker often, returning to the subject again and again, as if repetition alone might give shape to something that had no face, no name, no place where his rage could finally land. He cursed the man with a bitterness that startled even himself, wishing suffering on him without restraint, without doubt, without mercy.
“People who do things like that shouldn’t be alive,” he said once, his voice low and trembling, his hands clenched as if he were holding onto something invisible. “They should be erased.”
Rita listened from her wheelchair, her hands resting quietly in her lap, her legs still and distant beneath the blanket. Every word struck her with a slow, internal violence. Not because she disagreed with him, but because she knew—too well—that his hatred was misdirected, circling endlessly around a lie she had built to protect him, feeding on guilt that had nowhere safe to go.
He blamed himself just as fiercely.
He spoke in fragments, in unfinished thoughts, in endless revisions of the same day: if he had been there, if he had walked her home. Each possibility became another way to punish himself, another reason to stay awake long after the lights were off. Sleep abandoned him entirely now, as if his body had finally accepted that rest was no longer deserved.