32 - Isa #2
The economy of it. No excuses, no long explanations, just the failure named and owned. It hits harder than any speech would. My throat tightens.
He stops there. Just states the truth and waits. He doesn’t drop his gaze, not once. He holds me there, anchored and unable to wriggle free, waiting for something from me—a punch, a curse, a forgiveness I’m not sure I can give.
I almost reject it. The words sit on my tongue. Too little, too late. But then I see what he's really saying. For men like Nico, action is the only real currency. He’s standing here in the aftermath, not running. That’s what matters.
“You set up the trust,” I say, not a question. “You found the lawyer, did all the paperwork, made it happen before anyone asked.”
He nods once. “You needed it. And so did she.” I know he means Meiling. The words land heavy.
“Okay,” I say, my voice rougher than intended. "That's enough."
Something in his shoulders loosens, just slightly. We're mended, him and me, in the language we both speak. Competence and action, no fuss. I forgive him without saying the word. He understands it without ceremony. That’s how we operate.
The silence after is thick and absolute, heavy with all the unsaid things that will never be resolved, only lived with.
Then Marisol cracks.
Marisol doesn’t just break the silence, she stabs it with a fork and drags it, shrieking, into the open. She starts with a snort—genuine, ugly—and then she’s off, her words tripping over one another, not a single one of them designed to help herself off the hook.
“Oh good, he got his turn, very efficient, very Nico, gold star for the military man,” she says.
The sarcasm is the old kind, the old armor, but it’s dented and she knows it. Her fingers are splayed on the tabletop, white-knuckled, her jaw set against tears she refuses to let fall. “Meanwhile I’m over here about to burst because I was such a bitch and I need to—”
She falters. She’s waiting for me to save her, or at least to throw her a line so she doesn’t have to say it for real.
I don’t. I force myself to be still, force myself not to glance at the door, at the exit, at Nico.
I wait. Give her nothing. Make her do it properly, even though part of me wants to walk out before she can finish.
"Fuck." She runs her hands through her golden hair. "Okay. Okay. I called you a bomb waiting to go off."
She stares at me, daring me to flinch, but her eyes are red-rimmed and so earnest it’s physically painful.
"You did." The memory of it still burns.
"And you know what? I was right." The honesty in that makes me blink. "You did go off. You killed two people. I'm not gonna stand here and pretend I was wrong about you being dangerous because hello, blood, murder, the whole thing."
She takes a breath, and suddenly all the chaos drops away. Her voice cracks.
"But I was wrong about which way you'd explode. I thought dangerous meant you'd hurt us. Instead you detonated to protect us. You went full bomb, but you aimed it at the people threatening your family. And I treated you like a threat to manage instead of family to trust."
She lets it hang there, the last word falling like a stone in water. Trust. Family. The words I want most and deserve least.
The rawness of it, coming from someone who deflects everything with jokes, lands hard. My body wants to run. That old instinct to flee before anyone gets too close, before I let them matter again. But I dig my fingers into the underside of the desk, grounding myself in the pain.
She breathes in, shaky, and suddenly all the old Marisol evaporates: the performative cattiness, the calculated irony, the way she dominated rooms and conversations alike. What’s left is raw and quiet and so vulnerable I almost can’t bear it.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t see which way you’d point the blast,” she says, voice trembling in a way that’s more child than adult. “I’m sorry I treated my own family like an enemy.”
I want to tell her it’s not that simple, that she wasn’t wrong, that she was only protecting herself the way we all do. But the words won’t come. Instead I find my voice, low and flat.
“You weren’t wrong to be afraid of me,” I say, my hand sliding away from the table edge. “I am what you said. A bomb. Dangerous. The thing is being family anyway.”
She laughs—a sound halfway to sobbing—and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, that’s the thing, isn’t it."
The world tips, just slightly, as her words land.
I see the moment she means it, the way her features soften, the way she blinks hard to clear the tears.
I see Nico watching too, his face a study in careful neutrality but his eyes a little brighter than before.
For the first time since the night everything went to hell, I can actually feel them: my family, right here, in this godawful conference room.
I want to forgive her. I want to take it in, make it mean something.
I try. For a second the anger rises—how easy, how neat it is to wrap things up in words, to walk away and say “sorry” and pretend the damage never happened.
But beneath it, an old tiredness, the exhaustion of being at war with the people who matter most. I see my own face in the polished surface of the table, eyes rimmed red, jaw set.
I hardly recognize myself. I look like someone who could use a little forgiveness, too.
The urge to run is gone, replaced by something else—heavier, but steadier.
“I forgive you,” I say, and I mean it.
Really mean it, not just as a performance or a peace offering, but as a small act of demolition, a controlled burn of the old grudge so something better can take root. There’s a hollow ache in my chest where the anger used to live, and for the first time since the Lins, I can almost breathe.
Marisol exhales, all of her tension going out on that breath. She nods, eyes glistening, mouth still twisted with the effort of holding herself together.
“We’re good?” she asks, voice small as a kid’s.
“We’re good,” I say. And we are.
We sit for a long moment in the silence, letting the air around us settle.
Nico doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t have to.
He’s already said his piece in the only language he knows—action, not words.
He stands first, stretches, and then offers me a hand up.
I take it, surprised by how steady my grip is now.
Marisol stands too, smoothing her skirt and faking a breezy laugh, but the lightness in her movements is genuine this time.
When we leave the conference room, the receptionist doesn’t look up. She just hands me a business card for Mr. Roth’s assistant and a cardboard folder with copies of the filings inside.
“Congratulations,” she says, like I’ve won something, and maybe I have.
The humidity hits when we exit, immediate and suffocating, but somehow easier to breathe than the recycled air inside.
I touch the chain at my throat, the one I've worn for fourteen years, then I touch her tattoo at my wrist. That key opened nothing for Meiling.
Now her name will open everything for girls who'll never know mine.
It doesn't buy me absolution. The fund, the scholarships, the futures. None of it erases what happened in that house. I know that with the same certainty I know the sun will rise tomorrow. The blood on my hands stays there, permanent as the tattoo on my wrist.
"Thank you," I say to both of them, the words feeling strange in my mouth. "For coming. For…saying that stuff."
“Fuck it,” Marisol says then launches herself at me and pulls me into a tight hug.
I’m so surprised that I hug her back.
Maybe that's what family really is. Not the people who have to love you, but the ones who choose to after seeing exactly what you're capable of. The monsters who claim you as their own.
And the crazy bitches who hug you too tight.