Fiction: Turning Points #8

He wanted to say the words yesterday, but today, that train has left the station. With it goes any vestige of his multiple attempts to find a new direction. He feels it like a weight descending through his body. It is the accumulated years of trying, the moraine of New Year resolutions relentlessly pushed aside by the force of the ice scouring his heart. It's never worked, making resolutions the night before. It's always the night before.

Words, jumbled and morphed into meaningless, unfinished sentences.

He tries to force some order to his mind now as he sits on the deck of his rental, a watery Scotch unfinished, his birthday guests long gone.

Cold. Remote. Thoughtless. Arrogant. And, for good measure, selfish. Are those words really describing him? Imperceptibly, a sort of torpor sneaks its way around him. He can't think about that now. Those words. Those stones on which people find their path away from him.

The night breeze has an icy bite to it. His body begins to tremble until he can no longer stay out there.

Back inside, he finds he doesn't know what to do. His bed, despite its beckoning warmth, fails to woo him.

His mind brings him back to the day before; he tries to shut it down. No way, Jose.

Her clenched jaw and shallow, rasping breath had reared up at him. She'd looked nothing like his sister, made even more remote by her packed suitcase and the thick, dark hoodie. She had snapped the hood up over her head. Even the black boots she wore like weapons.

'Fuck off, Dom', she'd hissed. 'Like I said, and like mum wanted, I'm taking the money and you can have that fucking house, for all I care. I don't want to live there anymore.'

She'd stopped at the door. 'She's dead, Dominic. And I'm not her.'

Dom sinks into the armchair but remains bent forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. His thoughts cascade, a waterfall he can't control.

Imperceptibly, he begins to tremble again, every muscle in his body tensing and releasing in a cycle of minute twitches. 

He wants the money.  Craves the  comfort of the six-figure sum. 

Of course, his sister knows what she's done, what he's done. He's almost certain of that. 

He feels the truth stab him between the shoulder blades. 

His phone pings. He recognises the number. Why's he texting now, for Chrissake?

Yet Dom's eyes are drawn to the words on the screen.

Chances are, you're about to lose.

He knows what he has to do. He has to try one last thing. 

It has to be the house. It'll save him.

It was never a part of his plans. 

But plans change.