12. Dante
DANTE
The past doesn't release me. It continues.
Matthew, tear-streaked, wearing an old college tee—he never adjusted to the expensive brands I tried to buy him—stares at me. "What are you telling me?"
"I'm sorry," I whisper. And I am. But not enough.
"Don't do this," he says. "Please. I love you, Michael."
I glance away, looking instead toward the leather sofa in the furnished apartment. The elegant grain of the hardwood floor. The automated blinds, the concierge button by the door. The life I refuse to surrender ever again.
"I'm sorry. I'll give you money, I'll—"
"Damn your money," he yells through snot and tears. "I want you. That's all I've ever wanted."
I lift my eyes and force myself to meet his gaze. "The problem is, I've always wanted more."
Virgil shudders beside me, and I swallow but refuse to look his way. Tears stream down my face. I am certain that if Virgil were not here, I would surrender to this loop and live in it forever. It is the hell I deserve.
"I love you, Michael. Please."
"I'm sorry," I say. "But I don't feel the same.”
He hiccups another sob, gathers his things, and storms out. The door is too heavy to slam, and instead it closes quietly. A whisper of a sound to mark the end of my soul.
I don't wipe the tears still on my face as the memory shifts once more.
But I do glance at Virgil. He's crying as well, a tear glistening on his upper lip.
He meets my gaze, and in his eyes I see something unexpected, not the disgust I deserve, but a sorrow so deep it could only come from recognition.
It doesn't comfort me. It makes it worse.
"Next memory," I say. We're not finished with this portion of my genesis. Not yet. And I will own my sins. The space we stand in shifts once more.
"You can't mean her," I whisper hurriedly to my father. The party beyond us brims with clinking glasses and soft jazz.
He glances back. "Why not? She's a beautiful girl."
"She can't be twenty."
"She's nineteen. Legal. And quite pretty, if I say so myself."
I look back at the soft-cheeked girl giggling behind her champagne glass, who smiles shyly at me. I return it before turning to my father again. "She's nearly a decade younger than me."
"What does it matter when you aren't interested in women anyway?"
The moment stretches for the longest time before my father chuckles and throws back his drink.
“Yes, Michael, I’m aware. It’s been intelligent of you to keep things discreet.
Not everyone needs to know every aspect of your private life.
Think of this like a business transaction.
Wealthy men don't actually spend time with their wives, anyway.
You want this deal to go through, don't you? "
Some part of me wants to say no. But the cost has already been paid. I’ve already surrendered the only part of my life that wasn’t arranged around work or reputation. What’s one more thing, when the rest, the most important, is gone?
I glance at the girl once more—at the careless way she looks at me, the assumption of safety in her eyes. At least I wouldn’t hurt her. If she’s to be traded from one man to another for the sake of influence and appearances, at least I could offer her politeness and freedom from cruelty.
"Yes," I breathe.
Another shift in the genesis we stand caught in. One final shift of the room, one final memory, and I already know which one. My teeth clench hard. Virgil moves toward me, almost as though he wishes to place a steadying hand on my arm, but he doesn't touch me.
I open the door to my apartment. My wedding is in six months, and I've barely shared more than a handful of dinners with my fiancée.
I need to gather the courage to tell her the truth and see if she's interested in an arrangement, so to speak.
I have no interest in seeing others, not after M— Not after the choices I made. Never again. But she might like to.
When I step over the mid-century rug in the foyer, strange sounds greet me. My body registers them before my mind does. There’s a wrongness in the air, a rhythm that doesn't belong. Groaning. The slap of skin. A banging against the wall that shakes a picture frame askew.
My feet carry me forward against my will, through the apartment like a ghost drawn to its own death, until I stop in the doorway of the bedroom.
A man stands with his back to me, trousers around his thighs, a woman pinned against the wall beneath him. The dull thud of the headboard knocking the drywall stops abruptly.
A spill of pale hair slides down his shoulder. Familiar.
Then he turns.
My father.
My fiancée stiffens first and screams, shoving him away as she snatches a blanket to cover herself. “Oh—Michael. Oh…”
My father only chuckles as he pulls up his pants.
I'm frozen somewhere between fury as hot as lava and an ice cavern so cold I may never move again.
"All right, all right." My father throws up his hands, then closes the bedroom door behind him as he ushers me back into the living room. "You caught me."
"Are you— How could you?"
"Son, let's not act like you're actually interested in her."
"You’re fucking my fiancée,” I hear myself say.
He frowns at me as if I’m accusing him of taking my parking spot. “Well, you certainly haven't been."
I stare at this man, at the way he leans down to the coffee table and pours a glass of bourbon as though this is already a minor issue he'll have his assistant handle by morning.
"Oh, come on, son. If it bothers you so much, I won't do it again. You have my word. She came on to me and, well, look at her. How could I say no?”
He's offering me a glass, and I'm staring and staring, wishing the logic would coalesce in my brain. Finally, I breathe, "She’s twenty years old."
"And?"
"You're nearly sixty."
He chuckles and throws back another drink. "I've always been a ladies' man. Can't help it, really. You must take more after your mother in that respect."
Realization hits me. It crashes into me with the force of a car going off the Brooklyn Bridge, hitting the icy and unyielding waters below.
"How old was my mother when you were with her?"
He frowns. "She was eighteen when she had you."
"And how old was she when you met?" Math is running through my mind. My father was over thirty when I was born.
He scoffs. "Enough of this, Michael. I'm sorry. I will make it up to you and—"
"How old," I roar, "was my mother when you fucked her the first time?"
He stares for a moment, as though he didn't realize I had this in me. Then he laughs. "Age is just a number. She was a whore long before I touched her."
My fist shoots forward. There's a crunch. Blood spills onto his ivory, misbuttoned shirt. He cries out, and the door flies open. My fiancée covers her mouth with her hands.
I snatch up my coat and walk toward the door.
"Michael," my father roars. "If you leave now, you will never work for me again. You will never work in investment banking again!”
I chuckle derisively. "Bold of you to assume I'd ever wish to." Then again, perhaps not so bold. I'd already sold every fiber of moral integrity I possessed to do so.
"You'll end up on the streets. You'll end up—"
"I'd rather starve to death on the streets than ever see your face again." Then I turn to my fiancée, to the girl caught up in the power games of hungry men. "You deserve more than this, more than selfish men like me. And like him. Go to college. Don't let yourself be used anymore."
The look she gives me is unreadable, but there's something in it, almost like regret..
Then I close the door on my life, and I make a vow to myself.
Winter air hits my face and my knuckles throb where they connected with my father's nose. Blood—his blood—is already drying in the creases of my skin. I welcome the sting of it. Proof that I can still feel something.
Never again.
The words form in my chest, ice crystallizing, hardening, into a vow. Never again.
Never again will I accept a handout from anyone.
Never again will I trust another soul with even a fragment of my heart.
Never again will I let family or love blind me to reality.
If I make my way in this world, it will be by my own blood and sweat.
And no one—no one—will ever get the chance to destroy me this way again.
I can feel the vow wrapping around me. Not like armor. But a tomb.
The memory dissolves, and we stand once more before a door. This one is weathered wood, ancient-looking, with rusted iron hinges. The color of old blood. I reach for the handle.
It doesn't turn.
I try again, twisting harder. Nothing. The knob refuses to give even a millimeter beneath my grip.
"It happens sometimes," Virgil says quietly. He's moved closer while I struggled, near enough that I could touch him if either of us could bear it. "When the weight of what we've witnessed is too fresh. The path forward requires something we're not yet ready to give."
"I don't want your consolation." My voice comes out ragged, scraped raw.
"Of course." He slides down beside the door and settles on the ground, his back against the frame.
"Will you not help me try to open it?"
He looks up at me, golden curls resting against his forehead like a Renaissance painting left out in the rain. "I told you. I cannot open the doors for you."
"Then what is your purpose as my guide?" I yank as hard as I can, desperate to escape this place, but the door won't give. "Are you my judge? You've seen how monstrous I behaved. Will you damn me now?"
He remains silent for so long that a buzzing ache beckons me to look back, to return.
A part of me wants to. Wants to sit in that apartment where Matthew weeps and begs, and I stand cold and unmoving.
If I deserve hell, then that is the greatest punishment.
For that moment to loop repeatedly until my soul burns to ashes.
"I don't see a monster in you, Dante," Virgil says.
"I used people." The words spill from me with more passion than I'd normally allow. "I let that bastard manipulate me, and I became just as heartless as he was. I was wrong, Virgil. I belong here, in hell." My hand falls from the knob. "Why are you even bothering with me?"
He tilts his head and offers me a strange, sad smile. "Ah. And that's why you can't open the door."
I stop my efforts to stare at him.
"Unforgiveness. It will block you from moving forward. I've witnessed this before."
A laugh tears out of me. It’s ugly, uncontrolled, nothing like the measured chuckle I've perfected for boardrooms and cocktail parties.
Something about racing through the most painful moments of my life in rapid succession has ripped an old, bruised scab off me, and now I'm weeping fresh blood and pain.
"Are you telling me to forgive that bastard?
" I point behind us, toward the space where my father had stood. "After everything you just witnessed?"
"Monsters aren't monsters when they're born." His voice is gentle, unhurried. “And I’m actually asking you to forgive yourself for trusting him.”
I scoff, but gather myself. I am not twenty-eight and senseless anymore. I'm a man of hard choices and security I crafted by my own hands. "You sound like some cheap armchair therapist. You don't know the number of people that man harmed.”
"I don't doubt it.” Virgil's gaze holds mine, patient as stone. "I wonder, though, why he did so? Why do you think men treat those they see as beneath them without dignity?"
A memory slices through my mind unbidden. Ms. Hernandez's crumpling face as I intoned, Do you want to explain why you've wasted ten minutes of my time? The way she'd flinched when I said perhaps her mother would die. The way I hadn't cared.
The bell ringer in the cold, her smile dying as I lectured her about personal responsibility.
Matthew's voice, broken and begging: I want you. That's all I've ever wanted.
My own voice, cold as the December air: The problem is, I've always wanted more.
I meet Virgil's soft, judgmentless gaze. Something in my chest cracks. Not breaks, not yet, but fractures along a fault line I didn't know existed.
"I don't know," I whisper.
A click echoes into the silence.
The door swings open.