Chapter 64 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Every time I close my eyes, it’s like a dark paradise / No one compares to you”
— “Dark Paradise” by Lana Del Rey
I’m at the playground again. It’s too cold for anyone with common sense or love of feeling in their fingertips to be out here, so I have the place all to myself. The swings creak in the wind, chains rubbing against the crossbar. Screeeee. Screeeee.
Unlike the other, smarter people who usually come here, I no longer care if I have sensation in my nose. Let it be numb; that way, it matches the rest of me.
I got to the courthouse too late. By the time I parked and ran up the steps, the microphones were being dismantled and the satellite trucks were packing up. A cameraman told me I’d missed it. Lazarev made a shocking statement and left. That was that.
I sat down on the steps, pulled up Twitter, and watched the whole thing. I felt sick when it was over. Not only was my article wrong and incomplete, it also hurt people needlessly. I’m a myopic bitch, a life-ruiner. Like always, everything bad that’s happened is all my fault.
I push off with my toes and let the swing carry me back and forward. Screeee. Screeee. Only in a massive city can you feel this alone.
You disgust me. That’s what Kir said before he left.
No three words have ever been so devastating.
Nor has an aqua-colored envelope ever looked so horrible.
The fact that it contained a letter saying my daughter wanted to talk to me didn’t really console me, either.
Why would she want that? Doesn’t she know how fucked-up I am?
Even a masked murderer can see that. It would take her one look at me for her to come to the exact same conclusion: that I’m disgusting.
She’s old enough to see it. She’d be five. That’s plenty old enough for this playground. I bet she’d have a favorite swing and that she could do the monkey bars all by herself now.
You disgust me.
Screeee.
Screeee.
I don’t hear him coming. That’s nothing new. He’s never made a sound unless he chose to. But I feel him coming. A warmth on my back, eyes swallowing me up. The crunch of shoes on the rubberized fake mulch.
Kir stops a few feet from the swing set. He looks like absolute hell. His clothes are pristine, as always, but his face is unshaven and the circles under his eyes are black enough to be bruises.
I don’t say anything.
He doesn’t, either.
Screee. Screee.
My toes drag against the mulch until the swing stops swinging and I’m left just sitting there, hands wrapped around the cold chains, watching him watch me.
“I tracked your phone,” he says. No apology for that part. Not even a little bit. If there was ever a time I’d be mad about that invasion of privacy, it’s long gone now.
Kir looks past me at the empty playground. The slide, the monkey bars, the little climbing wall with the colored handholds. His eyes move across all of it with a slowness that tells me he’s not just seeing what’s here. He’s seeing what I see when I come here.
“I understand now,” he murmurs. “Why you keep coming back.”
I grip the chains tighter. The cold metal burns my palms.
“What I said to you,” he continues, “what I called you…”
I clear my throat. “Please don’t repeat it.”
“I won’t.” He takes a breath. “I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong, Jillian, and I knew it the second I walked out of your apartment, but I was too goddamn proud and too goddamn hurt to turn around.”
I look at the ground. At his shoes, expensive and mud-flecked.
Then Kir drops to his knees in front of me.
Right there in the playground, in his thousand-dollar pants, he drops like someone cut his strings.
My breath catches in my throat because I have imagined this so many times since he left.
In the shower, in Macy’s borrowed bed, in the back of a cab, in a church pew at five in the morning.
I have played this scene in my head a million different ways, but not one of them prepared me for the real thing.
He reaches for my hands. I let him take them, and like always, his fingers are burning hot where mine are so cold and lonely.
He heats me up with that single touch. He pulls my hands off the chains and holds them together in both of his, pressing my knuckles against his forehead.
His head bows. His shoulders curve inward.
I can feel him breathing against my skin in short, ragged bursts.
“I’m sorry,” he says into my hands. “For all of it.”
A tear rolls down his cheek and lands on our knuckles. Then another.
“You changed me,” he explains. “Before you, I was just running my father’s errands and calling it a life.
The things I did were… They were horrible, to say the least. And then you bit through my glove, and I was done.
Right then. First night. It was a kill shot through the heart, but not the one that was supposed to happen. ”
Another tear splashes on our hands. I feel it spread warm across my frozen knuckles.
“I don’t deserve you. I know that. I broke into your home.
I terrorized you. I put a gun to your back and made you smile for your neighbor while I stood behind the door.
I beat him half to death because he asked you to dinner.
” He swallows hard. “I watched you through a camera. I followed you to this playground and I didn’t understand what I was seeing, and when I finally did understand, I used it to hurt you.
I took the worst thing you ever went through and I threw it in your face. ”
He’s clinging to me hard enough to hurt now, but the pain is a good thing. It grounds us both.
“You are the bravest person I have ever known, Jillian Pierce. You carried a child you didn’t ask for, and you loved her enough to give her a life you couldn’t.
” He lifts his head. His eyes are red, wet, and vulnerable.
“I love you. I loved you before I knew your name. I’ll love you long after you tell me to go back out the window I came through.
Mask or no mask, gun or no gun, it doesn’t matter anymore.
I’m here on my knees in front of you to tell you I love you, because this is the only way it feels right to say it. ”
My own eyes are leaking now. “Kir, you can’t say that. You can’t love me. How could you? I ruined you. Everything I wrote was wrong, and you told me not to publish, but I did it anyway. I ruin it all, Kir, I’m a fuck-up, I’m a—”
“Stop.”
“No, listen to me!” I insist. “You shouldn’t love me. Don’t. I’m telling you to—”
“I’m telling you to stop.” He pulls my hands down from his forehead and holds them against his chest, right over his heart. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
“Of course I do! I have everything to—”
“You did your job,” he says simply. “You did what you thought was right.”
I’m still torn up with guilt. “But I—”
“My mother made her choices and my father honored them. The responsibility belongs to them, not us.” I shake my head, but he squeezes my hands until I look at him. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he repeats. “Not to me. Not to anyone.”
More arguments are right there on the tip of my tongue, but Kir’s heart is beating under my palms, steady and sure, and his eyes are so open it hurts me to look at them.
“I love you, little fox,” he says again.
“I love you and I want the future we’ve dreamed of.
I want Sunday mornings where neither of us has anywhere to be.
I want to burn dinner and eat cereal instead and fall asleep with you in my arms. I want to drive you to New Jersey, whenever you’re ready.
I’ll wait in the car or I’ll hold your hand, but I want to be there when you finally meet her. ”
That breaks me. A sob rips out of my chest and I pitch forward off the swing into him. He catches me, steadies me, kisses my temple.
“Okay,” I whisper into his collar. “Okay. Yes. To all of it.”
But there’s a missing moment that follows.
This is the part where he kisses me and pulls me to my feet, and we walk toward that happy ending together.
It doesn’t happen, though. For a second, nothing does.
The swing croaks behind us from the momentum of my fall, Screeee, Screeee, but Kir’s heart pauses and mine follows suit. There’s a hesitation in his breath.
I lean back and look at him. “… Kir?”
“I want those things so fucking badly, Jillian.” Slowly, he unpeels my hands from his and puts them at my sides. “But that’s why I cannot have them.”
“What?” I squeak in confusion. “What do you mean you can’t—”
“I’m stepping down,” he says. “As CEO. Effective immediately.” His eye circles are darker than ever.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “Okay, so you step down. That doesn’t mean—”
“I’m quitting and I’m leaving the country, Jillian.”
The playground goes very still. Even the wind seems to hold its breath.
“Leaving,” I repeat.
“Leaving,” he confirms.
“When are you coming back?”
He looks past me at the empty swing. “I don’t know,” he rasps. “Maybe never.”
This doesn’t make sense. None of it does. My head is spinning in every direction at once and the ground feels unsteady beneath my knees. “Why?” I ask, shrinking back from him. “If you love me—and you just said you do, you just said it—then why are you leaving?”
“Because I do love you. That’s exactly why.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!”
“It’s not about the article, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says. “And it’s not about your daughter, either.”
“Then what the hell is it about?!”
He’s still on his knees. The grime is soaking through his pants. He looks up at me, and whatever wall he’s been building behind his eyes finishes construction right there in front of me.
“I walked into your life with an order to kill you,” he says hollowly. “And you fell in love with me anyway.”
I want to tear my hair out by the root. Big, red clumps of it. “So?!”
But he’s shaking his head. “I can’t be the kind of man who builds a life on that, Jillian. There’s blood in the foundation of us. There always will be.”
“I don’t care how it started, Kir. All that matters is—”
He stands up and I fall quiet. “That’s exactly the problem.
You should care. The fact that you say you don’t tells me I’ve already done too much damage.
You should be terrified of a man who did the things I did to you.
If you’re not, then…” He stops. His jaw works for a second.
“Then it means I broke something in you that I don’t know how to fix. Staying will only break it worse.”
“You didn’t break me,” I sob. “I was already broken.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true!”
“It’s not, but even if it is, I won’t be the man who takes advantage of it. I’ve done enough to you already.”
“You’re not taking advantage of anything,” I whimper as my heart breaks and breaks and breaks. “I chose you. Every single time, I chose you. Those were my choices, Kir. Mine.”
“You chose a mask,” he corrects. “You chose something in the dark that couldn’t hurt you.”
“The mask became you. You know it did!”
He doesn’t argue, but nor does he accept what I’m saying. He just stands there with playground muck on his knees and tears drying on his face, the loneliest man alive. I can see him pulling away even though he hasn’t moved an inch. He’s already gone. He decided this before he came here.
The apology was real. The love is real.
But so is this.
“You mean it. You’re really leaving.”
He nods and looks at me. “Mountains stay, little fox,” he whispers. “Fires just burn themselves out. It’s better for you that way. I’m sorry. I love you so much, and I’m so fucking sorry. Goodbye, Jillian.”
Then he turns and walks away.
I watch him cross the playground, stepping over the low border and onto the sidewalk.
His coat catches the wind. He doesn’t look back.
He doesn’t slow down. He rounds the corner at the far end of the block and then he’s just gone, swallowed up by the darkness the same way he once appeared out of it.