VIPER || Oscar Piastri

Chapter 122

[POV: Narrator]

Andreanna Saunterre drove the final few miles home in a box of cold air. The janky old heater that'd stopped working sometime last autumn was coughing out weak puffs that barely reached her fingers, and her wipers were trying their best to drag tired arcs across the windscreen despite the rain.

She hated this kind of night; Where she was four-days-of-work tired, shoulders taught into a knot, the streets looking like shallow mirrors, occasionally blinding you with oncoming headlights.

Finally home, she killed the engine. The sudden quiet made the rain sound bigger.

For a second she stayed there, holding the wheel, feeling her car tick as it cooled, and when she opened the door and the night pushed in — wet, metallic, and biting. She wrestled an umbrella open, stepping out as water splashed onto her ankles as she speed-walked.

The porch light caught her, then, yellow and a little warmer, and she shut the glass doors behind her, trapping in whatever heat was left. She shook the umbrella hard enough that droplets smacked the bricks, and all she could smell was wet fabric as she opened the main door. Inside, the house was as it usually was; the radiators clicking, creaks in the walls she could neither explain nor predict.

Andi didn't call out when she came home.

Old habit.

She never announced herself to an empty house.

Except it wasn't empty this time; There was a pool of light coming from the dining room that cut across the hallway, running a line of orange straight out into the dim. A sound came with it: a voice, two, maybe, because it seemed like another chimed in with a laugh.

Andi tipped the umbrella against the wall, pulling her toes out of her soaked-through shoes, nudging them under the radiator. Her jumper was sticking at her wrists, damp at the cuffs, so she peeled that off too. It was warm enough now.

She tip-toed past the wall of photographs — because there was no way of getting to the dining room without doing that, even if she'd rather it that way — and met herself at seven with a fringe and two missing teeth; at eleven in a too-big blazer; at fifteen, chin lifted, daring anyone to look too long. She managed to stop herself from cataloguing the chronological years as she passed, but she couldn't help the deja-vu. She remembered turning a key at this hour when she was nineteen, coming home after late shifts to the long dark hall and a mug exactly where she'd left it because Dad was away.

Back then the house hummed, because there was no one in it to sing.

But it didn't sound like that now.

She stepped into the dining room. The old oak table — her childhood dinner table, nicked and scarred the way a school desk is nicked and scarred — held three plates, three glasses, and a basket of bread. Her dad had his fork suspended in one hand while his other anchored a story. Oscar was opposite him, leaning back, listening and smiling with his whole face.

It didn't look like her dining room.

Because there were people here. And it was warm.

"There she is!" her dad beamed once he spotted her looming in the doorway.

Oscar was already halfway out of his chair before she'd even thought about saying hi. The legs of it screeched as he shoved it back, and then he was in front of her, pulling her in.