Chapter Nineteen #2
She did not answer at once. When she did, it was barely above a whisper. “I know that now.”
I closed my eyes. That word ruined me.
She knew it now, five years too late, with our daughter asleep down the hall and everything we had lost still sitting between us.
She knew it now, when the truth could no longer protect the younger woman who had stood alone in her apartment while another woman tore through her dignity and used my sins as evidence.
I turned back to her with care, every muscle in me held too tight, because the anger under my skin was looking for somewhere to go.
“She called you a toy,” I said, and the disgust in my voice tasted of acid. “She called you that without knowing who you were, what you meant to me, or how badly I was losing my mind over you.” I took a step closer. “You were never something I used, Edwina. Never.”
Her eyes shone with the strain of holding too much for too long.
“I know,” she said again.
“That doesn’t fix what she did.”
“No.”
“And it doesn’t fix what I did either.”
Silence moved between us, thick and merciless.
Then she said, “No. It doesn’t.”
I stopped in front of her, close enough to feel the warmth of her in the dim room. The wine, the roses, the tree, the rain on the windows—all of it faded behind what still sat unfinished between us.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“I would have torn the world apart.”
A sad smile touched her mouth. “That was part of the problem, Hayden.”
I nearly laughed, except nothing in me was light enough for it. Instead, I looked at her and let the darkness stay exactly where it was.
Then I said, quieter, “She was wrong about one thing.”
Edwina lifted her gaze fully to mine. “What?”
I leaned down enough for the answer to stay between us.
“I could never hate you enough to use you.”
Edwina held my gaze for a second, and then something in her face changed.
“You didn’t like me either,” she said.
The words were quiet, which made them worse. She looked down at her glass, then back at me, and what I saw in her eyes was not softness. It was truth with all its teeth showing.
“Do you remember our first days at university?” she asked. “You made my days a living hell.”
A breath passed between us.
“Why?”
That question had lived between us for years.I knew it the moment she said it. The room seemed to narrow around the word. The rain against the windows faded into the background, and every buried thing inside me shifted as if some locked door had finally been hit hard enough to crack.
I had hated her because I wanted her. I had punished her because seeing her again dragged the past into the present so violently that I could not separate blame from grief, desire from resentment, or memory from revenge.Because she had looked at me with those same eyes and remembered nothing.
The answer rose in me with the violence of a wound opening.
I crossed the distance before either of us could speak again, my hand closing around the back of her neck as I dragged her mouth to mine with every ugly truth I had kept buried for years.
The kiss was rough, breathless, full of anger and grief, a punishment we both felt for surviving a story neither of us had fully understood.
It tasted of rain I still remembered, of years I had lost to her absence, of every night I had carried her face in my head while she lived without knowing mine.
She gasped against my mouth, shocked beneath the force of it. I felt the tremor move through her before I tore myself away just enough to speak.
“Because you didn’t fucking remember me,” I said, my voice raw enough to shake. “My little Flare.”
The words hit her hard. Her eyes widened, and the color drained from her face as if the floor had shifted beneath her. For one brutal second, she only stared at me, and I understood at once that she had never followed our ruin back to the place where it had truly started.
“What?” she whispered.
Then, with more confusion, “What do you mean?”
This time, I told her. I stepped back far enough to look at her properly, forcing the words through my throat instead of letting another kiss do the damage for me. Some truths deserved language, no matter how much they fucking hurt.
“Do you remember your accident eight years ago?” I asked.
Her expression shifted at once, confusion giving way to the first faint pull of memory. She did not understand yet, but some part of her had recognized the edge of what I was talking about.
“The chain crash,” I said. “It was raining. Cars kept folding into each other, people were screaming, and you were trapped in your car.” My jaw tightened. “I got you out.”
She stared at me as if she had forgotten how to breathe. I kept going because stopping now would have meant choking on it.
“You were bleeding, half-conscious, scared out of your mind, and I saw you. I went to you. I pulled you out and stayed with you until I knew you were alive.” My voice roughened, turning harsher than I wanted it to.
“And while I was saving you, my sister and her fiancé were in that same fucking accident.”
The room went still.
Edwina’s hand rose to her mouth. Her wine was forgotten now, her face emptied by horror.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Do you understand that? I didn’t know they were there.
I should have been with them. I should have found them first. I should have—” I choked on the words and dragged a hand through my hair, forcing the rest out before it killed me.
“By the time I learned they had been in the same crash, they were already gone.”
A small sound left her, broken and barely there.
I looked at her and let her see all of it. There was no use hiding it anymore. Years had passed, and we had made a ruin of each other in the dark.
“I searched for you afterward,” I said. “I wanted to know who you were. I wanted the name of the girl I had pulled from that wreck because the second I saw you, even with blood on your face and fear in your eyes, I could not look away.” My mouth twisted.
“You were terrified, and you were fucking beautiful, and I did not know what the hell had pulled me to you, baby. I only knew it had.”
Her eyes filled, but I did not stop.
“Then my sister was dead. Her fiancé was dead. Alessia was still there, still part of a life I never fucking wanted, and everything inside me started rotting around the same truth.” I took a breath that did nothing to calm me.
“The girl I couldn’t forget was also the girl I saw every time I remembered what I had lost.”
Edwina shook her head, tears gathering now. “Hayden…”
“No,” I said, though my voice cracked around it. “Let me say it.”
She went quiet.
“When I saw you again at the café, I wasn’t sure it was you. I thought maybe my mind was fucking with me, maybe grief had finally made a fool of me. But then I saw you at the university, and I was sure.”
Pain crossed her face.
“That fucked me up,” I said. “More than I knew what to do with. Wanting you came back with the grief, and resentment came with it. I blamed you for surviving when they didn’t, even though some part of me knew how sick that was. So I made you pay for pain that was never yours to carry.”
I looked at her then, and the truth came out rougher than anything before it.
“I made your days hell because you reminded me of the worst night of my life, and because I wanted you so badly I could barely breathe around it. Cruelty gave me somewhere to put all that fucked-up rage. It gave me something to do with my hands besides reach for you.” My jaw tightened. “You asked why, Edwina. That’s why.”
Her tears spilled then. I hated myself for every single one.
“You didn’t remember me. But I couldn’t forget you.
That destroyed me. I had carried you for years, and I meant nothing to you.
Your life kept moving while mine stayed trapped in that crash, trapped with my sister dead, with guilt in my throat, with your face burned into every goddamn memory of that night.
” My voice dropped. “And the worst part was that even through all of it, through the grief, the anger, the guilt, I still wanted you. I wanted you so much it made me hate myself.”
The confession sat between us, too ugly to soften and too honest to take back.
“That’s the truth,” I said. “Ugly as fuck, but it’s the truth.”
I stepped closer again, stopping just short of touching her.
Her face twisted then, stripped of every defense. “Oh my God,” she whispered, the realization hitting her all at once. “It was you.”
“Yes.”
“I thought…” She broke off, pressing trembling fingers to her mouth. “There was someone. I knew that much. Hands pulling me out, a voice telling me to stay awake, rain hitting my face. But after the crash, everything came back in pieces. Your face was never clear enough for me to know.”
“No,” I said.
She shook her head as if she could deny the missing years back into place. “If I had known—”
“What?” I cut in, unable to take the shape of that unfinished mercy from her. “What would you have done, Edwina?”
That stopped her, because we both knew there was no clean answer.
Knowing would not have brought my sister back.
It would not have untangled Alessia, grief, guilt, my bitterness, or the fear that had already taught both of us how to destroy each other.
She looked at me helplessly, and Christ, I hated how much that face still did to me.
I had wanted it, cursed it, searched for it in memory, and blamed it for things no face should ever have had to carry.
Missing her had become its own sickness, and I had carried it for years.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Exactly.”
The silence that followed felt alive with every ghost we had dragged into the room.
After a moment, I stepped closer and lifted my hand to her cheek. The pain was still there, ugly as fuck and breathing inside me, but some truths survived even the worst ones. One of mine was that I had never learned how to stand in front of her breaking and keep my hands to myself.