Chapter Seven #2
I hadn’t answered because there had been nothing left to say.
Elias couldn’t understand. He hadn’t watched a life end in his hands.
He hadn’t stood on that rain-slick road with the weight of a dying heartbeat fading against his palm.
He hadn’t learned what it meant to make the wrong decision and live every goddamn day in its aftermath.
He hadn’t carried the ghost of the girl he saved into a classroom years later and watched her stare through him without recognition.
He hadn’t known what it meant for guilt to breathe. To speak.
We ended the call without warmth, our voices thinning into static until there was nothing left but silence pretending to be closure.
I set the phone down as if it had seared through my palm, the ghost of Elias’s voice still circling somewhere behind my ribs.
I stood in the dark for a long time, letting the stillness crawl through me.
The shadows in this city didn’t cling the way they used to, they gave you room to breathe without reminding you of everything you’d buried.
That was why I had come here. That was why I stayed.
It wasn’t because I gave a damn about teaching, or because I still believed in knowledge or redemption or any of that academic bullshit.
I stayed because here, no one knew what I had failed to save.
No one asked why I chose the wrong car that night, why I could remember the sound of Edwina’s voice but not my hers.
And yet, even after I’d rebuilt my life from the wreckage and buried every trace of that road beneath years of silence, fate still dragged her back to me.
Edwina Carter—alive, unknowing, standing in front of me again.
And now she was mine to destroy in the only fucking way I knew how. Slowly, beautifully, completely.
After the call ended, sleep didn’t come.
The quiet thickened, stretching long and thin, pressing against my ribs until I could feel my pulse pushing back.
I didn’t bother turning on the lights. I knew every inch of that apartment by muscle memory, the creak in the floorboards just outside the kitchen, the uneven breath of air that slipped under the door of the room I never let anyone enter. The studio.
If it could even be called that. A hidden room at the far edge of the apartment, windowless and cold, always smelling faintly of oil and solvent and decay.
The walls were covered in unfinished canvases, some half-done, others torn apart mid-stroke, as though completion itself was too dangerous a thing to allow.
That room had become the only place where I could bleed without anyone seeing the mess.
I stretched a blank canvas onto the easel and opened a tube of black.
The paint bled across the brush, heavy and wet.
I dragged a line down the center, then another beside it, and another after that.
The repetition was grounding at first. Controlled.
But then my hand shifted, unbidden, the strokes softening into shape, the curve of a mouth, the faint downward pull at the corner, the tension she held there when she thought no one was watching.
Her mouth. The silent defiance that lived inside her stillness.
I froze.
Fuck.
Fucking fuck.
My grip tightened around the brush until my knuckles burned.
I hadn’t meant to paint her. I hadn’t meant to see her face bleeding through the dark.
But there she was, emerging beneath every stroke I laid down, the woman she had become, and the girl I had seen trapped beneath the glare of fractured headlights.
The memory came back raw and vivid, the image of her skin too pale under the chaos of red and blue, the sound of her shallow breath that night before everything went still.
I tried to destroy it. Pressed the brush hard against the canvas, dragging the wet bristles through the curve of her mouth, through the outline of her eyes.
I smeared the color until the shape was nothing but shadow, but even beneath the ruined paint, I could still see her. I could always fucking see her.
The brush slipped from my hand and hit the glass of water on the table, paint bleeding into it in slow, black swirls that spread through the clear.
I watched it move, hypnotic, curling in on itself, the same way she did in my mind.
Quiet, constant, impossible to erase. I should have burned the whole goddamn thing, should have watched the canvas curl into ash and taken her with it.
But I didn’t. I just stood there, the taste of turpentine and whiskey still in the back of my throat, breathing her in as if the scent of her ghost could kill me.
I didn’t clean the brushes. I didn’t move.
I stayed there surrounded by solvent and silence, staring at the half-formed face that refused to disappear.
Edwina had become a haunting stitched into the marrow of my days, a pulse that refused to die, a shadow that followed even when the lights were gone.
I told myself it didn’t matter, that I’d wake up tomorrow, walk into the lecture hall, and not look at her. That I’d remember where the boundaries were.
But the canvas said otherwise. And somewhere beneath the guilt, beneath the discipline I wore like a second skin, beneath the quiet that passed for control, I already fucking knew this wasn’t the last time I would paint her.