Chapter 5: Shattered Reflections
The silence after the Mustang’s departure had solidified, filling Garret’s room like poured cement. He didn’t sleep. He watched the digital numbers on his clock radio bleed from 2:17 to 4:03, each minute a grain of sand adding to the weight on his chest. The streetlight outside had stayed dead.
His thoughts were a scratched record, needle stuck in the groove of Connor’s friendly, empty tone. I’m buying your friend some pie.
At some point, the stillness became unbearable. It was worse than the yelling. The calm after Connor’s storms always was, because it meant the lesson had been administered and absorbed. The world was just supposed to carry on.
Garret pushed back the twisted sheets and padded barefoot into the hallway. The house was a tomb of quiet breaths. Past his mother’s closed door, the bathroom door stood ajar. He slipped inside and locked it, not turning on the overhead. The pale, pre-dawn light from the small window above the toilet provided a sickly, blue wash.
He leaned on the sink, the porcelain cold under his palms. His reflection was a ghost in the medicine cabinet mirror—dark circles under blue eyes, russet fur mussed from the pillow. He looked young.Scared. Pathetic.
Look at you.
The thought wasn’t his own. It came in Connor’s voice, the low, raspy one he used when no one else was around. The one that didn’t bother with charm.
Garret’s breath fogged the glass, obscuring the ghost. He wiped it away with a jerky motion.
“Shut up,” he whispered to the empty room.
The voice in his head didn’t listen. It never did. Shaking like a fucking puppy. I told you not to mingle with her. Or her kind.Her ‘kind’. Meaning anyone not family. Anyone who could be used as a lever. Martha, with her easy laugh and her hand in his, was just the latest fulcrum.
“You didn’t touch her,” Garret muttered, arguing with the phantom. “You just… showed her the nice version. The fucking… pie version.” He sounded insane. He felt insane.
Think she’ll still hold your hand when she knows who she has to deal with? The voice was all amusement now, a smirk given sound. When she figures out that hanging with you comes with a side of me? That every time she looks at you, she’ll remember me sitting across from her in that booth, asking about her dad’s shitty job and her mom’s shitty car?Being so. fucking.nice.
A hot, sour pressure built behind Garret’s sternum. He gripped the edge of the sink until his knuckles ached.The reflection blurred.
“She’s not part of this,” he said, louder.
She is now. The voice was final. Absolute. Because you pulled her in. You’re a leaky boat, Garrett. You let people in, and I have to bail you out. I have to make them understand the rules. You make me do this.The pressure exploded. It wasn’t a scream. It was a silent, violent convulsion. His right hand, balled into a fist, slammed against the mirror. Not to break it. The impact was a dull, painful thud.
His other hand came up, not a fist.Claws out.
He dragged them down the glass with a sharp, squealing scrape that made his teeth ache. Five parallel lines etched across his own reflected face, distorting it, cutting it into fragments. The sound was awful. It was perfect.
He did it again. Another set of gouges, crossing the first. The phantom Connor in his head went quiet, maybe impressed by the violence, maybe just bored. The real work was done.
Panting, Garrett stared at the ruined reflection. The gashes were deep and milky in the glass. His face, fractured and bisected, stared back—one blue eye wide in one shattered pane, the other narrowed in a snarl in another. He looked like a monster. He felt like one.
This was who he was. Not the funny, sarcastic guy in chem lab. This scratched-up, furious thing in the dark. This was what Connor had forged. This was what Martha, with her simple world of study dates and holding hands, had just gotten a signature-grade introduction to.
He ran the pad of his thumb over one of the claw marks in the glass. A fine, crystalline dust came away. He’d have to explain this. His mom would see it. She’d get that pinched, worried look, her eyes darting between him and the damage, and she’d ask questions he wouldn’t answer. Another quiet mess for her to tiptoe around.
The first grey light of morning began to bleach the blue from the sky outside the window. A bird chirped, idiotically cheerful.
The fight drained out of him, leaving a hollow, shaky fatigue. He turned on the cold tap and splashed water on his face, avoiding his own eyes in the broken mirror. The water dripped from his muzzle onto his t-shirt.
He needed to know. He needed to see the wreckage.
Back in his room, he dug his phone from the blankets. The screen was dark, but uncracked. He held the power button, a dull dread pooling in his gut.
It chimed to life. A notification glowed – a single text message, received at 3:47 AM.
It was from Martha.
His thumb hovered over it. This was it. The verdict. The ‘it’s not you, it’s your terrifying brother’ speech. Or maybe the ‘you overreacted, he was lovely’ dismissal. Either way, it was over. He took a breath that didn’t feel deep enough and opened it.
The message wasn’t long. It wasn’t eloquent.
Martha (3:47 AM): hey.im ok. he dropped me off. he talked the whole time. about you, mostly. weird stuff. childhood stories. it was… intense. i need to think. dont call me for a bit, ok?
Garret read it three times. The hollow in his stomach yawned wider.
Weird stuff. Childhood stories.Connor had talked. Of course he had. He hadn’t threatened her. He’d just… narrated. Selected the anecdotes. Probably the ones that made Garret look weak, or unstable, or that made Connor look like the long-suffering hero. He’d built a case, right there over shitty diner pie. And he’d done it so well that all she could say was ‘it was intense.’
Don’t call me for a bit.
Not ‘never call me again.’ But not ‘let’s talk tomorrow.’ It was a holding pattern.A quarantine. Exactly what Connor wanted. He’d created just enough doubt, just enough unease, to put a wall there. A wall Garrett had helped him build by being exactly who he was: a problem.
He didn’t reply. What was there to say? Sorry my brother psycho-analyzed me to you over cherry pie?
He tossed the phone back onto the bed. It landed face-up, Martha’s message still glowing on the screen, a tiny square of condemnation.
Down the hall, he heard his mother’s alarm clock go off, a muffled, rhythmic beeping. The day was beginning.A normal Tuesday. He had a history lecture at ten.
Garret looked at his claws, still faintly dusty with mirror-glass. He looked at the shredded reflection he’d left in the bathroom. He looked at the text on his phone.
Connor hadn’t hit him. Hadn’t yelled. Hadn’t needed to.
He’d just taken a single, small thing that was Garret’s—a flicker of something normal, a girl who liked him—and he’d held it up and explained it, twisted it, until it wasn’t his anymore. Until it was just another piece of evidence in the long, ongoing trial of Garret Mayfield.
And the worst part, the part that sat in his gut like a stone, was the old, familiar need that surfaced right alongside the rage. The need to call Connor. To hear his voice. To ask him, man to man, what he’d said. To have Connor tell him, in that calm, certain way, what it all meant. To have someone, even his jailer, explain his own life to him.
The alarm clock beeping stopped. His mother’s door opened. Footsteps shuffled towards the kitchen. The world was moving on.
Garret picked up his phone, his thumb brushing over the cracked screen. He didn’t call Martha. He didn’t call Connor.
He opened a new text window. He typed a single sentence, sent it to a number he knew by heart, and then immediately powered the phone down completely. The screen went black.
The sentence was simple, just five words. It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of fact, the only one he had left in him.
Garret (5:12 AM): I saw the marks you made.