The six months of self-isolation began quite simply. It started almost right after her mother’s death—well, technically not immediately, since she had to deal with the funeral and the police investigations. But once all of that was over, she no longer had much reason to go out.
The first day, she slept on the kitchen floor.
It wasn’t intentional. She had meant to make tea. She had meant to eat something. But the mug never made it off the counter, and somewhere between her body folding in on itself and the silence swallowing her whole, she just... stopped moving. Morning bled into afternoon. Then evening. She didn’t answer her phone. She didn’t turn on the lights. And when a knock finally came—gentle, uncertain, like someone testing the weight of her grief—she stayed completely still, pretending to be someone who no longer lived there.
The second day, someone left a bag of groceries on her doorstep. No note. Just bread, peanut butter, and the kind of boxed soup she used to eat in college when she couldn’t afford anything else. She didn’t know who sent it. But on the third day, it happened again. This time with apples. Crackers. Toilet paper. After that, she stopped asking questions.
Honestly, she never meant to stay inside. It just became easier. There were no bloodstains here, no yellow tape, no faint scent of iron clinging to the walls. This house—the one she’d moved into just a few months before her life detonated—felt like the only thing untouched. Which made it the only place she could still breathe.
You might ask why her mother's death left such a mark.
There was no correct answer, really. She hadn’t been home when it happened—a detail that seemed to matter to people for some reason. The police. The lawyers. The nosy neighbors who suddenly started treating her like a cautionary tale. As if not being there somehow made it better. As if arriving twenty minutes after the screaming stopped was a blessing.
They didn’t see what she saw. They didn’t walk into the hallway of her parents’ house and find her mother’s phone on the floor next to a smear of something dark and wet. They didn’t follow it into the kitchen.
Her mother was already gone. The paramedics told her later that the wound was fatal. Immediate. She hadn’t suffered. But she must’ve. In some way. Because there was shattered glass in the sink, and blood on the refrigerator door, and the look on her father’s face when he turned to see her standing there—that had to mean something.
There was no rage left in him by then. No panic. Just... resignation. Like he already knew where this ended.
He said her name once. Just once. Quietly. Then he sat down on the floor and waited for the police to arrive.
She hadn’t said a word to him since.
Some days, she wondered if it would’ve been easier if he’d run, or screamed, or denied it, or begged her to believe it wasn’t him. But he hadn’t done any of that. He’d just looked at her like the damage had already been done—and then sat in his own wreckage like a man who’d finally stopped pretending to hold himself together.
All in all, she hadn’t stepped outside since all those havoc. Not because she couldn’t. More because she didn’t know how to be a person after that.
*to be continued*
