Chapter 21 On Record
(Arlo)
Before I ever met her husband, I already knew. The moment the bike failed, the moment terror flooded me in a way that felt too precise to be random, a name surfaced uninvited.
Lyra.
I almost lost Berrie. Yes, I did lose her as my Berrie but if she is alive, healthy, and safe, she can hate me for the rest of her life and I would still be grateful. Once there is proof Berrie needs, Lyra will be my sworn enemy, pregnant or not.
The CCTV of the shelter should have caught something. Anyone passing. Any movement. But somehow, conveniently, it hadn't worked that night. A malfunction, they said.
I didn't believe in coincidences anymore.
Berrie wouldn't return my calls so I started digging on my own.
Calling places. Walking routes. Mapping angles.
Looking for cameras that weren't obvious of shops, garages, private buildings.
I worked quietly and obsessively, piecing together fragments because that's what I do when something feels dangerous and unfinished.
Well this was the police's job but I had to respect Berrie's wishes.
The more I learned, the more unsettled I became by how little it surprised me. That was the part that stayed with me. The truth is, the more I look back on Lyra now, the harder it is to understand how I ever called it love.
I thought I did. At the time, it felt real enough.
It was urgent, consuming, and impossible to step away from.
But standing where I am now, I can see how distorted it was.
Therapy helped me name it. I told my therapist it felt like I had been living in a fog with Lyra, clutching onto her and calling it love because I didn't know what else to call survival.
He told me that people in abusive relationships often confuse endurance for devotion, fear for attachment, and persistence for loyalty.
That the longer you stay, the more your brain rewrites the story to survive it.
You begin to measure love not by how safe you feel, but by how much you can tolerate without breaking.
Pain becomes proof and staying becomes virtue.
He said the mind does this quietly, efficiently, because believing you are choosing the relationship is less terrifying than admitting you are trapped inside it.
So you call hypervigilance "care." You call walking on eggshells "commitment.
" You call the relief that follows cruelty "passion," because the alternative is facing how much of yourself has been eroded just to keep the peace.
Loving Berrie should have woken me up. In some ways, it did.
But I was already broken inside, and clarity didn't arrive all at once.
It took months, after Berrie and I were together, for me to fully come to terms with what I felt and what I had been through.
The price of denial was high. Too high. It wasn't just about losing Berrie. It was about breaking her heart.
So when Lyra went after Berrie, everything shifted.
That was the line she crossed that erased whatever ambiguity remained. So I did something I never imagined I would do: I went looking for her husband. I had only his name, I worked quietly, following threads until I found his workplace. After that, the rest came easily.
He was actually eager to meet. He already knew who I was. He thought Lyra and I were together now. I decided not to meet him alone and he didn't object. When I told March, she said she would bring Berrie. I asked Levi to come with me.
When we arrived at the cafe, we found him sitting and waiting. He looked older than us, but seemed kind.
"Mr. Andrew?"
He looked up and smiled, "Yes, you must be Arlo?"
"Yes I am. This is Levi."
The moment we sat down, the bell over the café door chimed, and my attention snapped up before I could stop it. Berrie and March stepped inside.
She looked beautiful, she always did, but there was exhaustion in her posture, in the careful way she moved.
My chest tightened. I stood up. Every instinct in me wanted to cross the space between us, pull her into my arms, and remind her that I was here, that I wasn't leaving, that she wasn't alone in this.
She met my eyes briefly. I held her gaze, steady, hoping it carried what my hands couldn't. March slid into the seat beside her with the efficiency of a bodyguard. Berrie sat across from me. Andrew straightened slightly.
After the introduction he said, "Thank you for coming everyone. I have been looking for Lyra everywhere."
Levi gave him a slow once-over, then said, "So, how does a man like you fall in love with that b..."
I shot him a warning look. "Levi. We just met the guy."
"It's a fair question," Andrew said mildly.
"I've asked myself the same thing. I guess when I first met her, I was really lonely, I only had my job to live for and she came in like a storm.
She was fire," he said simply. "Wild and unpredictable.
Everything felt brighter around her. She made the ordinary feel like an escape. "
I felt it the second Berrie's gaze dropped.
My stomach twisted. I knew that she was remembering the letters and the words I had once written, thinking intensity was poetry instead of warning signs.
I wanted to go back in time and tear them apart with my hands.
I wanted her to look at me and see how horrible I feel about it all but she kept her eyes lowered.
Andrew continued, "She made me feel chosen," he said. "Special in fact. Like I was the only person who really saw her."
He paused, then exhaled slowly.
"But fire burns eventually," he added. "She lied easily all the time," Andrew went on. "Not always about big things. Small things at first. There were stories that shifted and details that never quite aligned and when I questioned it, she'd cry or laugh, or accuse me of being controlling."
Levi muttered, "Classic."
I watched Berrie closely. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap, knuckles pale.
"She was cheating on me," Andrew said, his tone steady, almost clinical. "With a man named Rossi. He's dangerous, as in deeply involved in criminal activity."
He paused, then went on. "When I found out she was pregnant, I realised she never stopped cheating when she assured me she did.
I refused to raise a child that wasn't mine.
After that, she went to Rossi. He denied the child was his and refused any responsibility.
So before disappearing, she had the brilliant idea of stealing money from him. "
Andrew exhaled slowly, the weight of it finally surfacing. "Now he wants the money back. He doesn't care what happens to her or the baby or anyone. Since she vanished, he's been coming after me, convinced I'm the only way to reach her."
He rubbed his hands together, anxious despite himself. "He's given me a month to find her and get the money back to him. That's the deadline. The problem is that it's a lot of money. More than I have."
His voice faltered slightly. "I don't want to stay married to her. I want a divorce. But I don't want her hurt either and I don't know what he'll do if I can't deliver."
The café hadn't grown quiet so much as it had drawn inward. Levi broke first.
"Wow," he said slowly. "Okay. This is, how do I put this delicately, an absolute, flaming, legal-grade shit show."
March snorted despite herself.
Andrew didn't smile, but his mouth twitched faintly, the closest he ever came to humor. He sat with his hands folded neatly around his coffee, posture calm and eyes sharp.
"She told me," he said evenly, "that she knew a man who would never refuse her. Someone who would do what needed to be done without asking too many questions. Someone she could steer and play like a fiddle."
My chest tightened. I looked at Berrie. Her eyes closed slowly..
"She meant me," I said.
Under the table, I let my hand drift closer until my fingers brushed Berrie's. She pulled away, just slightly, but the message landed all the same.
"There's more," I said. "We also believe she's the one who tampered with the brakes of Berrie's bike."
Andrew's head snapped up. "You mean—"
"Yeah," I said quietly.
"Why?" he asked, disbelief etched across his face.
"I don't know," I admitted. "Jealousy. Retaliation. Control."
"God," he muttered and turned to Berrie. "I'm sorry, February."
She exhaled slowly. "Me too," she said. "But it's not your fault. She's a snake."
"So," Andrew said after a beat, "this is usually the point where someone suggests going to the police."
Levi glanced between us. "I was going to give it another minute, but yeah. That."
March frowned. "Even without proof?"
I answered before Andrew could. "We don't have proof," I said carefully. "Not yet. But we have testimony. We have motive and we have a pattern."
Andrew nodded. "And that's enough to open a file. Not to arrest her but to start documentation." He continued, "We need to report everything. The threats. The manipulation. The bike incident. We ask for it to be logged as a potential escalation case."
Berrie tilted her head. "What does that actually do?"
"It puts her on record," he said. "It means patrols stay alert. It means if hookup calls come in near you Berrie, they respond faster. It means if anything else happens, there's already a paper trail."
"And protection?" Berrie asked.
Andrew met her eyes. "We ask for safety guidance. Check-ins. Emergency contact priority. Maybe a temporary no-contact advisory if she reaches out again."
Levi leaned forward, elbows on the table. "So just to clarify, we're not doing a Scooby-Doo thing, right? No breaking into garages, no 'enhance the image' nonsense."
"No," Andrew said firmly. "Absolutely not. That would complicate things and possibly put us at risk. I have friends in the department," he admitted. "People I trust. I didn't involve them earlier because everything pointed to speculation driven by emotion. That doesn't hold up."
My stomach twisted. "So now?"
"Yes, now we go to the police," Andrew said without hesitation. "Together to give statements."
Levi nodded slowly. "And if they say it's not enough yet?"
"Then it's on record," Andrew replied.
I could feel Berrie stressed out. I turned fully toward her. "I'll be there the whole time," I said. "I won't leave you in that room. Not for a second."
She nodded once.
Levi stood, pushing his chair back. "Great. Let's go be extremely composed, law-abiding adults while absolutely spiraling internally."
We stood and left together, and as we reached the door, I slowed, turning toward Berrie.
"Will you ride with me?" I asked. "There's something I want to show you later."
She hesitated but then nodded.
"I actually came with Asa," she said. "He brought us and waited outside."
Irrational Jealousy flared in my chest, I forced it down before it could show. When we stepped outside, Levi announced he'd ride with March. Asa had already gotten out of the car, smiling shyly as we exchanged greetings.
All of us did, except Levi.
Levi just stared. At Asa. For once, he was completely speechless.
March eventually chuckled and shoved him toward the car. "Come on, Levi. We need to go."
He stumbled closer, stunned into a loop of quiet "wows," while Asa's ears turned an unmistakable shade of pink beneath his hair.
Well that was..odd.
Then it was just Berrie and me.
We walked to my car. I'd brought it because I knew she wasn't ready for the bike yet. We drove to put everything on record, unaware that this single decision would carry consequences far larger than either of us could imagine.