Blood in the gutter

 Kathryn had always been climbing. Out of the mud, out of the caravan park where the walls were thin and the nights smelled like mildew and dog piss. She climbed up through school, through a job at an office, through a promotion that became another promotion until she was Director of Projects, a title as heavy as it was meaningless. She bought a house that didn’t feel like home and filled it with sharp furniture she didn’t like. Her family called her a success.

And then there was Sylvester.

Sylvester was a man with restless hands. He built things that no one understood, machines and platforms that moved faster than anyone could catch up. His eyes always burned with the next thing, a thing that didn’t exist yet but would, because he willed it to. They met at a conference where he told her he was bored, and she told him she was too. They laughed at all the men in suits and all the stupid words they used to talk about things they didn’t care about. “You’re like me,” he said. She wasn’t, but she wanted to be.

For a while, they were happy. Or as happy as two people can be in a world that doesn’t make sense. She brought order to his chaos, and he gave her the feeling she had always been searching for—the feeling that she wasn’t just climbing, that maybe there was something at the top. He kissed her wrist when she worked late. She sat in his warehouse and watched him scribble on napkins, muttering to himself.

Her family hated him. They had climbed out of the same mud she had, but they were still caked in it—rich and bloated and loud, shouting at each other across dinners no one enjoyed. They didn’t trust Sylvester. They didn’t trust anyone.

“He’s a fraud,” her brother James said, a man with shoulders too big for his suit and a voice too loud for the room. “He’s a parasite. He’ll ruin you.”

Kathryn didn’t listen, not at first. Sylvester was building something great, he told her. It would change everything.

Then the stories began. Small, like ripples in a pond. A competitor claimed Sylvester had stolen their tech. Anonymous accusations, forwarded by strangers, too vague to deny and too loud to ignore. His business wobbled on its feet, and Kathryn watched him late at night, hunched over his desk, his hands gripping his hair.

“It’s your family,” he said. “They’re trying to ruin me.”

She didn’t answer.

Her family didn’t stop. James dug deeper, found debts, incomplete contracts, little threads Sylvester hadn’t tied neatly enough. They pulled on them, and the whole thing started to unravel. Sylvester’s people left him. His ideas turned to smoke. The press called him a failure. His competitors called him a fraud.

One night, he showed up at her house. It was raining. It always rains in these moments, and Sylvester stood on her porch with his hair plastered to his face and his voice soft and small.

“Tell me you believe me,” he said.

But she didn’t say anything, because she didn’t know what to believe.

Her brother and his friends came for him the next night. It was quick, and brutal, and over before anyone could stop it. The papers said they “found Sylvester’s body” outside Kathryn’s house. They said it was a tragedy. They said no one knew what had really happened.

But Kathryn knew.

She stood at her window and looked down at the street where his body lay. The rain had stopped by then, but the blood still ran into the gutter. Her family told her it was done, that they’d saved her, as if any of it mattered.

The next day she went to work and moved her teams around like pieces on a board. The projects kept moving. Deadlines came and went. At night, she sat in her kitchen and listened to the house creak. Sylvester was gone, and his machines were silent.

She thought about the mud, the climbing, the noise. There was no meaning in any of it. Her family was ugly and stupid, but they were alive, and Sylvester was dead. She was supposed to feel something, but she didn’t.

Kathryn poured herself  yet another drink and looked out the window at the empty street. The blood was gone now. It always washes away.