Mabel

I looked down and stifled a scream. The detective was right. A delicate smattering of red blood decorated the tips of my white sneakers. My hand flew to my mouth as I kicked the shoes off, desperately thrashing to be rid of them. I couldn’t be here.

I started running. Detective Santiago yelled something after me, but I couldn’t hear over the sound of my own terror ringing in my ears. If he wanted to talk to me so badly, he’d have to wait.

I didn’t even look at where my shoes flew as I ran to the bathroom, gagging and so close to being sick. Maurice’s blood. On me. My skin crawled at the thought, and it was all I could do to keep myself moving away from prying eyes.

Shoving the restroom door open, I ran to the sink and splashed cold water over my face, panting as I looked back at myself in the mirror. Wide-eyed and pale with my dark auburn hair as a contrast, I looked like I might as well be the dead one. I tried to swallow down my nausea, tried to push away the thought of a dead man’s blood touching part of me.

How was it even possible that I didn’t notice I’d been walking around with Maurice’s blood on my shoes? I gripped the sink basin, white knuckled, and leaned over to sip water straight from the faucet.

Water dripped down my chin, wetting my shirt, but I didn’t care. I focused on one thing, and that was trying to bring my racing heart back to a normal pace. I needed to breathe. Calm down.

A flash of my blood-covered shoes came to mind again, and I saw them more clearly, remembered them.

I stopped as it all made sense. The detective was wrong—that wasn’t blood on my shoes. It was paint.

Leaning back from the sink, an irrational, wild giggle escaped my mouth. Not blood, paint. I had been so careful not to step in the blood around Maurice’s body, and thinking about it, there was no way it could have splashed up onto my shoes.

Holy shit. I felt like I could collapse from relief.

Maurice had always hated those shoes, my unofficial painting shoes, colored with stray splashes of all different kinds of paint, the red being the most obvious. He’d told me in no uncertain terms not to wear them, but I didn’t listen, obviously. “Keep your ‘artist’s’ life away from work,” he’d say. “There’s no place for that here.”

Tears sprung to my eyes. He was such an asshole. It shouldn’t bother me so much that he was dead.

I didn’t realize how deeply he’d gotten under my skin or how much his snide comments fueled my fire. The plan was to someday sell my paintings for more than he’d earn in a lifetime as a concierge for The Ivy. I had this fantasy of selling my paintings to the wealthy residents here and one of them casually bragging about acquiring my work in earshot of Maurice.

Then I’d be the one showing up and smirking at him. Maybe I’d even buy an apartment here just to mess with him. I could boss him around and put him down for a change.

That was the daydream I’d had a dozen times before, but now it was obsolete. I almost felt sorry for being so vindictive. I shook my head. I’d never expected to be upset at something like this. It was weird to find myself caring about his feelings all of a sudden. Maurice shouldn’t matter to me this much.

But at least now I wasn’t seconds away from a panic attack. I could breathe and think clearly again. “It’s just the shock of it all,” I told myself out loud in the mirror. I smoothed my hair down and tucked the loose strands behind both ears. It was still in disarray, but it at least looked a little neater. “Maurice doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

Licking my lips, I looked down to rummage in my pocket for my lipstick. I’d put it in there this morning just in case, and I definitely needed something to look more put together right now. I wrapped my fingers around the tube and brought it to my lips, leaning toward the mirror again, when I saw a man standing behind me in the reflection.

I screamed, throwing the lipstick across the bathroom.