Before You Wake ✓

t h i r t y

ANDREW EXPECTED THE bedroom to be in no different a state from the rest of the studio due to the open floor plan. But when he pressed past the stained ivory divider he was met with a heady, intoxicating scent: a mixture of rain, soap, fresh cut wood and tobacco. It smelt like her.

Rim's bedroom was meager and didn't have much to boast about. In the center was a twin bed with a delicate carved wood headboard to match the divider. The dresser was covered with framed pictures — of a preteen Rim attempting to navigate a cello larger than she was, of a Rim so small she didn't even look like Rim, balanced on the shoulders of a big, hairy man with an easy smile. Andrew ran a finger over the glass. Ali Harbi.

He pulled the third drawer of the dresser out and to its back a thumb drive no larger than his finger nail was taped. Andrew pocketed it and returned the divider to its position behind him, taking one final look at the bedroom before he did so.

On his way out of the apartment he stopped by the kitchen, turning the locket over in his palm. He added it to the thumb drive in his jeans pocket, for safekeeping.

The trip back to the motel was long and he began to feel his head nod, the sun climbing in the sky as a new day consumed the night. Every time his eyes closed, sleep threatening to overcome him, he could see Janae, sad and alone as she roamed the halls of their building. The three of them had come to Virginia Tech together and she was the last one standing, left to grapple with the vacancies left by her two best friends. The bus lulled, the sound of the tires against the asphalt soothing but guilt kept him dry eyed and wide awake as they pulled into Culpeper city lines.

Andrew was expecting an ambush when he got to the motel but he was surprised to slip into his room and find Sam still serenely snoring. He was thankful, because he had liked the chance to go through what Rim left him in privacy.

Pressing the thumb drive into the dock in Frank's laptop, Andrew's hand hovered hesitantly over the keyboard. Open it, he urged himself, eyes staring intently at the dialogue box that materialized on the screen once the drive loaded.

The first file on the drive was a text document, titled 'to Andrew'.

This was it. The explanation Sam had wished they had gotten, the one Andrew was too hurt to hear.

Andrew

I'm not going to insult you with excuses or justifications. I'm not going to pepper you with all the reasons why you should forgive me. I'm just going to start at the beginning.

The letter was a synopsis of the life and history of Rim Alharbi. Not of the innocuous, cello playing environmental science major with the sleepy eyes and raised scar, but of a child saddled with a workaholic father who tried his best after the death of her mother — of a Rim who often felt like she was being shut out and left in the dark by a father to paranoid to expose her to his work. A father who, as time has shown them, was entirely justified.