11. Jensen
— ? —
Jensen
She’s looking at me like I’m a stranger. Like everything she thought she knew about me has been stripped away and she’s seeing me for the first time.
I suppose she is.
“Show me,” she says. “You said there was a threat. Show me.”
I walk to the desk. My legs feel unsteady beneath me. I’ve kept this phone for five years, charged it once a month, checked it obsessively in the early days and then less and less as the years wore on. But I never deleted the messages. I never could.
The drawer slides open. The phone sits where it always sits, tucked beneath a stack of papers, hidden but never forgotten.
“I kept it.” I pick it up. The weight of it’s familiar in my hand. “I told myself I was keeping it as evidence. In case I ever found out who sent it. In case I ever needed proof.”
“And did you? Find out who sent it?”
“No.” I turn to face her. “I spent years trying. I hired people to trace the number. I followed every lead. I chased every thread.” I shake my head. “Nothing. Whoever did this knew how to cover their tracks.”
She holds out her hand. “Let me see.”
I power on the phone. I navigate to the messages, to the conversation that has haunted me for five years.
I hand her the phone.
She looks at the screen. I watch her face as she scrolls through the messages. I know what she’s seeing. I’ve looked at these images so many times they’re burned into my memory.
The first photo. A gun. Black metal against a white surface.
The second photo. Kiara in her wedding dress.
The same dress she was wearing when I was supposed to meet her at the altar.
She’s standing in a room I don’t recognize, her back to the camera, adjusting her veil in a mirror.
She has no idea she’s being photographed.
She has no idea someone is standing behind her with a camera while a gun waits nearby.
Show up and she dies.
Her hand is trembling. The phone shakes in her grip.
“This is me.” Her voice comes out thin. Stretched. “In my dress. On our wedding day.”
“Yes.”
“Someone was right there, taking photos of me, and I never knew.”
She scrolls back to the first image. The gun.
“I don’t know if it was in the same room. I don’t know if it was in the building at all. But the implication was clear.” I take a step toward her. “They were close enough to photograph you without you noticing. Close enough to kill you if I didn’t do what they said.”
“So you didn’t come.”
“I sat in my car with that phone in my hand and I read those messages over and over again. I kept thinking there had to be another way.” My voice cracks.
“But they had a gun, Kiara. They had a photo of you in your dress. They were right there. If I’d called anyone, if I’d tried to warn you, they’d have known. And you’d be...”
She sets the phone down on the desk. Her hand is still shaking. She turns away from me, walks to the window, presses her forehead against the glass.
“You should have told me.”
“How? Walk into the church and announce that there was a gunman somewhere in the building? Start a panic? Give them a reason to pull the trigger?”
“You could have found a way. After. When the wedding was over and I was gone. You could have tracked me down and explained.”
“With what guarantee that they weren’t still watching?
” I cross the room toward her. I stop a few feet away, giving her space, even though every part of me wants to close the distance.
“The message said if I came near you, you’d die.
It didn’t say for how long. It didn’t give me an expiration date.
For all I knew, they were watching you for years.
Waiting for me to slip up. Waiting for me to lead them right to you. ”
“So you stayed away.”
“I stayed away because I was terrified. Not of them. Of myself.” I run my hand through my hair.
“I knew that if I tried to find you, I wouldn’t be able to stop.
I wouldn’t be able to keep my distance. I’d show up at your door and beg you to listen to me, and if they were still watching, that would be the end.
They’d know I’d broken the rules. And they’d kill you. ”
She turns to face me. Her eyes are wet but the tears haven’t fallen. She’s holding them back, holding everything back, the way she’s been holding herself together for five years.
“So you just gave up.”
“I didn’t give up. I never gave up.” I take another step toward her.
“I spent years chasing dead ends and false leads and hoping that someday I’d find the person responsible so I could make them pay.
But I never tried to find you. Because finding you meant risking your life.
And I’d rather spend the rest of my days not knowing where you were than spend a single moment knowing I led them to you. ”
“And then you showed up here.”
I close the last of the distance between us. We’re inches apart now. I can see the pulse jumping in her throat. “I walked into this hotel for a project I didn’t even want to be involved in. And there you were. Standing in the lobby. Looking at me like I was a ghost.”
“I thought you were there to torment me.”
“I was there because the universe has a sick sense of humor.” I reach out.
My fingers brush her jaw. She doesn’t pull away.
“And the moment I saw you, everything went still. All the years of staying away. All the discipline I’d built up.
All the walls I’d constructed to keep myself from looking for you.
None of it mattered. You were right there in front of me, and all I wanted was to hold you again. ”
Her breath catches. “Jensen.”
“I know I don’t deserve it. I know I made choices that hurt you.
I know you have every right to hate me for the rest of your life.
” My thumb traces her cheekbone. “But I never stopped loving you. Not for one second. Not for one day. Every choice I made was because I loved you too much to watch you die.”
She closes her eyes. A tear escapes down her cheek. I brush it away with my thumb.
“Your mother,” she whispers.
The shift catches me off guard. “What?”
“The photos she showed me. The lies she told. The timing.” Kiara opens her eyes. They’re blazing now, the grief hardening into something sharper. “She told me I was worthless. She wanted me to leave, Jensen. She wanted me to run.”
“We’ve been over this. She lied about the photos.”
“She did more than lie.” Kiara grabs my wrist. Her fingers press into my skin. “Think about it. Someone sent you a threat on the exact same day. Someone who knew exactly where I’d be and what I’d be wearing. They had access to the venue.”
The thought takes shape in my mind. I don’t want it to. I’ve spent five years refusing to let it form.
“You think she sent the threat.”
“Who else had the access?”
“She’s my mother.”
Kiara’s grip tightens on my wrist. “She’s a woman who looked me in the eye and called me an embarrassment. Does that sound like someone who would stop at photographs?”
I pull away from her. I pace to the window, then back, then to the window again. My mind is racing.
My mother. My own mother.
I think about the dinners we’ve shared over the past five years. The way she’d ask about my life with that carefully constructed concern. How she’d suggest I start dating again, move on, forget about the woman who left me at the altar.
I think about how easy it would have been. A hired photographer. A burner phone. A few threatening messages timed perfectly to arrive while I was driving to the ceremony.
“I never investigated her.” The words come out hollow. “I spent years chasing leads. I followed every thread, every possible connection. But I never once considered that she might be involved.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s my mother.” I stop pacing. I face Kiara. “I couldn’t imagine that the woman who raised me would do something like this. Even when she was cold, when she was cruel, I never thought she’d go this far.”
“And now?”
I think about Kieran. My son. The grandson my mother has never met. The child she’s kept from me for four years.
I think about Kiara. The woman I love. The woman my mother convinced to run.
“Now I think we got played.” My voice is rough. “Both of us. And while we were both drowning in grief, she was sitting at her dinner table, sipping her wine, watching us suffer.”
I cross the room. I pull her into my arms.
She resists at first. Her body is stiff, her hands flat against my chest, ready to push me away. But I hold on. I wrap my arms around her and I hold on like she might disappear if I let go.
“Fuck.” The word tears out of me. “Fuck, Kiara. I’m so fucking sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”
Something breaks inside her. I feel it happen. The wall she’s been holding up, the one that has kept her standing through five years of pain, collapses.
She crumples against me. Her fingers curl into my shirt, gripping the fabric, holding on. A sound escapes her throat.
I press my face into her hair. I breathe her in. I feel her tears soaking through my shirt, hot and wet against my chest.
“I should have been there,” I whisper. “I should have figured it out. I should have found another way.”
She doesn’t answer. She just cries. And I hold her while she falls apart, while five years of grief and anger and loneliness pour out of her, while both of us finally understand the full scope of what was stolen from us.
My mother did this.
My mother destroyed us.
And I’m going to burn her world to the ground for it.