🕯️ THE IVORY SMILE
Chapter Five: The One I Let Live
~ by Alban Krane, as remembered
There are wounds that don't bleed.
They just echo.
You hear them when you're alone—
when the tools are clean
when the blood has dried
when your hands stop shaking.
And still… she laughs.
Room 108 | Cedar Hollow | Another Thursday
The room was too warm that day.
They'd cranked up the heat, maybe to coddle our brittle bones. But all it did was make the air sticky, dense, like breath you couldn't swallow.
Camille had moved closer to the center now. She no longer sat off to the side like a guest. She'd become part of the furniture, part of the ritual. Her recorder now rested openly on a clipboard with notes. Red ink. Red lines. Red underlines.
Gus was already pissed before I opened my mouth. I could see it in his twitching temple. A man who knew things were slipping away.
Florence was still, but the pages of her notebook had begun to curl at the corners, like they couldn't bear the weight of what she was recording.
I stepped in slow, careful.
My back ached more than usual.
My left hand was twitching again.
"Not all of them died," I said.
"Some begged. Some ran. Some fought."
"And one…"
"One asked me to stop."
"So I did."
I saw the glint in Camille's eye when I said it.
The tension in Gus's fingers.
Even Florence's pen paused for half a second.
"Her name was Marla Vane. And I think… I think I loved her."
The Fifth Smile (That Never Came)
I was in Baltimore.
Another name. Another face.
A rented apartment above a failing bookstore where the wallpaper peeled like sunburned skin.
Marla Vane worked at the counter.
Sharp-witted. Dark hair. Eyes that saw too much.
She read Donne and Ginsberg, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and always wore boots like she might need to run.
I wasn't stalking her at first.
She wasn't connected. Not directly. Not by blood. Not by legacy. But her fiancé was: Mark Ellison — a defense lawyer who helped cover for one of the five. Helped suppress the hospital photos. Convinced the court that Olivia had been drinking.
"Boys will be boys," he'd said in the closing argument.
So I followed Marla to find him.
But somewhere along the way… I forgot the difference.
We spoke every day.
About poetry. About music. About grief.
"You have a sadness in your hands," she said once.
"How can you tell?"
"They always hover. Like they want to touch something they shouldn't."
She didn't know.
But I think…
She did.
The plan was simple.
Wait until he visited her.
Wait until he was alone.
Take him apart like the rest.
But he never came.
He'd dumped her, apparently, right before the engagement announcement. Said she was "too intense."
And then she cried. Right there. In the shop. In front of me.
I watched her break.
I saw the same crack that had split through me when Olivia died.
We had dinner.
More than once.
She touched my hand one night across a table smeared with wine and candlelight and whispered,
"You're the only one who really sees me."
She asked me to stay the night.
I did.
But I didn't touch her.
I watched her sleep instead.
Counted the freckles on her shoulder.
Wondered if redemption looked like that.
And in the morning,
I left a note on her pillow.
"He hurt you. I wanted to hurt him. But I can't take anything more from you."
"Your pain doesn't belong to me."
"Goodbye."
"—A"
I found Mark Ellison a week later.
Dragged him into an alley behind a courtroom he no longer deserved to walk through.
Took his tongue first.
Then his hands.
Then his smile.
But I never wrote a poem for him.
Not that time.
Because Marla deserved silence.
Back in Cedar Hollow
Camille was the first to speak this time.
"You fell in love."
"No," I said. "I remembered how to."
Gus scoffed.
"You expect us to believe you spared her? After all this?"
"Yes."
"Because you loved her?"
"Because she reminded me of Olivia."
Florence scribbled something and then looked up.
"Do you know where she is now?"
"No. I never looked. If she's still alive, I want her to stay that way."
"Would you kill her now?" Camille asked. "If she came back?"
I didn't answer.
My hands were shaking again.
"Next week," I whispered, "I'll tell you about the one who bled for attention."
"And what I carved into her ribs."
[END OF CHAPTER FIVE]