Chapter Twenty
Outside, it was evening already, and rain was drumming lightly against the bedroom window, the water holding the city lights in falling.
I was curled up on the stiff leather armchair before it, dressed in Theo’s soft clothes and staring at the unlighted screen of my phone.
I couldn’t help but compare it to that tiny flip phone I had Inside, obsolete in reality for decades now.
How I wished to have it again, to be able to dial Kai’s number and hear his voice, hear him grumble to me, You just like making me worry, one last time.
There was nothing I wanted more than to be able to preserve that life, to have it packed and gathered around me like an armor.
To make it physical. Was it unnatural to crave physicality when all physical things were meant to decay?
Was Lawrence right to see the future as a thing of the mind alone, an intangible cerebral experience?
Looking for an answer, I was about to type the words ‘Kai Alwyn Park’ into the search interface when Theo knocked on the door.
With my heart pounding as though I were about to get caught doing something terrible, I locked the screen and pressed the device to my chest, condemning the room in absolute darkness for the second it took Theo to crack the door open.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” he asked under his breath, moving his fingers over the touchpad next to the door to turn on the lights before coming over to set a cup of tea on the little table next to me.
With arched brows I looked at him, and he quickly explained, “Peace offering.”
Letting my phone slip in the space between my thigh and the armrest, I took the steaming cup between my palms, accepting the apology.
“Thanks,” I murmured, carefully tasting it. Chamomile and a dollop of honey. My favorite. Because he wanted me to know that he remembered.
“So,” he began, crossing his arms and leaning on the wall with one shoulder. “I was thinking—”
“Wow, you still do that?” I teased him, hoping for relief, for friendship. Because I also wanted him to know that I remembered.
Humorously, he rolled his eyes and continued, “If you really want to do this, you should let me help you.”
“And how will you do that, Fraser?”
“Sell the apartment. Move in with me. Let me take care of the bills, and you try to go back to the Public Defender’s Office, do your pro bono work in the meantime. Whatever.”
Whatever. And yet I was the heedless romantic?
“Although I do appreciate you and your hero complex, I’m afraid you can’t just throw money at this problem,” I cooed.
He smiled, irresistibly. “But I like throwing money at your problems.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s also some kind of complex. A control thing, probably.”
“So many issues,” he sighed at the ceiling, self-deprecating, but never really. “Remind me again why you were with me?”
“Your body, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
For a moment, it almost felt like we were back in college, fresh-faced, playful, easily amused. This was what had made the relationship so hard to leave. Not the things that had changed throughout the years, but the things that had stayed perfectly the same.
Setting down the cup, I stretched my limbs on the chair and asked somewhat unconsciously, “Do you have a cigarette?”
He frowned then, and I felt myself mirror the expression as I slowly realized my request, the mindless reflex of it.
“Since when do you smoke?” he asked.
I shook my head, touching my fingers to my mouth. “I don’t know. I did in there. I mean everyone did. It was a different time.”
With shadowed eyes, sharply, he pronounced, “You mean a different reality.”
“Right,” I breathed out. “Sorry. Yes.”
“Are you sure you’re alright, Ann?”
“Yeah. Just confused, I guess,” I said, and when Theo didn’t stop staring at me, I added, “They warned me about this. It will take some time for my mind to sort out what is real and what is not.”
“This is fucking insane,” he hissed, straightening to his full height. “You should have accepted the memory deletion.”
“No,” was my unshakable, immediate reply, for this was the only thing I was absolutely certain of. “I don’t want to forget who I was in there.”
Theo let out another trembling exhalation, surprising me again by relenting the argument. Striding toward the door, without turning, he muttered, “You can sleep here. I’ll take the guest room.”
“Theo?”
“What?”
“Thank you again. For everything.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it,” he clipped, withdrawing from me in a sense that had nothing to do with physical proximity.
But then, just as I reclaimed my phone, he called, “Ann?”
“Mm?”
Looking at me, very softly, he said, “You know I love you, right? I will always love you. Regardless.”
And despite everything, I felt myself smile, genuinely smile, knowing what he meant. “I know,” I assured him. “I will always love you too. Regardless.”
◆◆◆
In the dim, melancholy lamplight, I tried once again to get past the strange tactility of the phone’s screen and type out the words.
Kai Alwyn Park.
The first result to pop up on the interface was not a social media page, a profile account, a professional website, or a record of any sort. The first result available was a local news article dated four years ago, meaning exactly two years before Kai joined the Program, the title screaming at me:
Renowned chef and restaurant owner Kai Alwyn Park loses wife in tragic accident.
I didn’t know what was more shocking. The fact that Kai was a real person, after all, existing in the same world and timeline as I did; the fact that he had been married; or the fact that I actually knew of him already.
Not as Kai, of course, but as Alwyn-Park, or rather the Crusader, because that was how Theo used to call him.
Because one of Theo’s college buddies had been the one to handle that case.
That grief-stricken man and his vengeful mission to sue literally every person who’d been responsible for his wife’s death.
The truck driver who’d been looking at his phone and had run the stop sign, the company the driver had been working for, the car company his wife had been using because one of the air bags had proven to be faulty.
I swear the guy is insane, Theo had told me after hearing about the case.
Or maybe he really loved his wife, I’d argued.
Yeah, but isn’t that what memory deletion is for? To forget when things like this happen?
Oh, but Kai would never do such a thing.
He would want to remember. He would want to make things right because that was who he was, and so that was what he did.
He made everything right. He avenged her.
And then he locked himself inside a simulation so he didn’t have to keep living in this world without her.
Because he loved her. He loved her and belonged to her and couldn’t live without her.
That was the truth.
That was the reality of it.
Shakily, breathlessly, I moved my finger over the screen when it began to darken and tapped on one of the attached pictures below the article, Kai and his wife attending some kind of award event.
She was young and beautiful, of course she was, airy as the branches of a willow tree in her long, sparkling green dress. And he was standing right next to her in his black suit and tie, also very young, also devastatingly beautiful, holding her around the waist, her hand on his, keeping him there.
There was no name for the feeling in my chest. No language had been invented yet to express the pain of losing a person you never had.
No, it wasn’t disillusionment or heartbreak or loss or grief or a wretched, goring feeling of complete and irreversible abandonment.
It was everything all at once. It was all the things we would never do, all the memories we would never share.
It was all the memories we did share and the all-consuming, physical need to return to them.
To the old cottage. To spend one more day together, hanging the laundry, swimming in the ocean, cooking dinner, reading, talking, making love, doing nothing.
Nothing at all but existing in each other’s world.
Yes, nostalgia. The sentimental yearning for something you can never have back. To be able to tell the curious girl I was in that place: You know what it means now. Now, you know.