META Offices
London, United Kingdom
January 2011
11:53 AM
Ezra finds himself at his workstation, hands covering his face. The lights are too bright and the room is spinning a little too quickly for his taste.
He tries to calm his breathing, tries to remember what his boyfriend had told him. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Over and over until the world felt stable enough, over and over until things felt some kind of okay. But since returning to London and receiving the news, “okay” became an unfamiliar, foreign term.
The investigation was called off a little over two months back. Investigators from Seattle deemed Iris Hu’s case as unsolvable and hopeless at that point. There was nothing that could lead them to a centimeter or inch closer to her; nothing that could give them some kind of peace of mind. He and Leo simply had to live with the possibilities. Multiple thoughts of how Iris could have met her end left multiple puncture bites all over his conscience and mind, filling them with gruesome images that kept him up for weeks on end.
The possibilities are venomous.
They kept Ezra up at night. Closing his eyes for more than an hour, maybe two if he was lucky, would almost always lead to seeing Iris dead. The previous night, he saw her with bullet wounds in her chest. The night before that, her body appeared mangled and bruised. The previous week had a bloated, greyed out image of her chasing him down, water pouring out of her mouth. Iris’ voice, soft and eager and sweet, had screamed and cursed and accused him of her death. It sounded garbled.
