CHAPTER 02 - Noah Black
I don't know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don't know how to feel
But someday I might
Someday I might
What was I made for? – Billie Eilish
I run.
I run even though my legs are protesting, screaming for rest and begging to give out.
My breath catches.
A knot tightens in my throat and my heart beats so erratically it feels like it’s going to explode in my chest.
I run with everything I have left. With the last crumbs of strength I have.
The tears came the instant I walked out the trailer door. And now they mix with the rain that’s starting to fall.
Maybe it’s the world crying with me.
Feeling sorry for my situation.
But I know that’s just an illusion.
The world doesn’t care about me.
Fate never thought twice before breaking me.
In fact, the cold, heavy drops seem to be laughing at me.
It’s as if the entire sky is mocking my misery because in this godforsaken place it rarely rains, but today, of all days, when I’m face to face with the ghost I carry inside me, the sky opens up and assaults me with a storm, making the pain in my wounded skin, in my already shredded soul, even worse.
Even with the rain, with the pain, I keep running away from him, from the past that eats away at me, but mainly from the guilt that’s been consuming me since the moment I learned he was dead.
Dead!
He should be dead, not alive, not standing in front of me, cocking a gun!
I must be hallucinating.
The beating I took yesterday is clouding my thoughts.
Or the medications are driving me crazy instead of making me better.
That must be it.
Maybe it’s the fact that I’m taking care of Lilian that’s messing with my head.
I thought I’d managed to camouflage the guilt, believed that helping her would lighten the burden, but I think instead of helping me, this situation is making me hallucinate, because he’s dead!
A shiver runs down my spine and it has nothing to do with the cold lashing my body, but with his presence washing over me, because even though I don’t want to believe it, deep down I know it was him inside the trailer.
I would recognize him even after a hundred years apart, since every single day I blame myself for what I believed had happened to him.
Because I never got over him leaving.
Because you can’t get over the impossible.
Bryan was the only man I loved, gave myself to, and then destroyed his life.
I don’t know how he survived, but it’s clear he’s not dead and that the years have changed him considerably.
He’s bigger, stronger, more of a man.
Not that he wasn’t before, but now he’s more intimidating.
Bryan Trevor was always the type of man who made the entire town sigh.
The type all the girls wanted, the guy who made even the most confident men feel small, and I knew the moment his blue eyes fixed on mine that my life would never be the same.
That night was supposed to be just foolish recklessness, but once I met him, sneaking out of the house became an irrelevant detail compared to everything that would come after.
If I close my eyes, I can relive every touch, every laugh, every shared breath. I can almost hear our voices intertwined in that forgotten dawn when we gave ourselves to each other.
For a second, I can hear my voice saying I loved him.
But right now I can’t close my eyes because that would make me relive what destroyed me, and I can’t take this torture anymore.
My legs fail and I let my body hit the ground, collapsing into the wet earth. My chest is so tight I’m afraid it’s going to crack into a thousand pieces.
I want to scream, to howl, to purge this pain that tears me apart, but I can’t, and I’ve learned, in recent years, in the most painful way, that the worst scream is the one that never escapes your throat.
The tears intensify when I let myself relive the few seconds we were face to face just moments ago.
His face is more mature and carries a shadow that wasn’t there five years ago. Even wearing jeans and an overcoat, I could see the ink covering part of his neck, the side of his head, along with the tattoos screaming from his hands.
Tattoos that carry meanings I can’t even imagine.
He used to tell me I would always be the first to know everything in his life, with no idea our time was so short.
Back then, it didn’t even cross our minds that it would be impossible for us to experience all of each other’s firsts.
We were foolish enough to believe we would be stronger than my family.
I let the rain soak me as I finally close my eyes.
Not to relive the past, but to hold onto the memories of this reunion, even though they hurt as much as those of our last goodbye.
The gaze that once burned with unbearable intensity is now empty.
The smile that once saved me has disappeared, leaving a cold shadow in its place.
And I wonder: what have the years done to him?
Did life destroy him the way it destroyed me?
Why did he never look for me?
Why did he leave me all these years believing he was dead?
The certainty that he chose to move on without me tears me apart.
I feel the mud seeping into the fabric of my clothes, my hands buried in the muck. My knees ache and my body starts to tremble as the cold wraps around me.
For an instant, I think about staying here and letting the earth swallow me, letting the past drown me—but I can’t. I no longer belong to myself. In fact, I never did.
My parents might wake up soon.
It wouldn’t be unusual for them to get up in the middle of the night—not even sleep can erase their obsession with control. And if they discover I left, that I’ve been coming every night to give Lilian her medication, I’m certain they’d commit me again, or worse, hurt Sadie just to watch me suffer.
My heart tightens once more, now with another kind of fear.
The kind that crawls inside your bones.
That taught me to walk in silence.
To breathe in silence.
To bleed without making a sound.
I take a deep breath, even though the air seems to hurt going in, even though my chest keeps screaming inside, and I press one hand against the ground.
I push my body up with difficulty and get to my feet.
Every muscle protests the movement, but I’m used to pain, so I just resume walking, knowing I still have a long twenty minutes until I reach home.
Home. The word seems to mock me!
That hell was never a real home!
The road back seems darker, longer, and much crueler because images of the two of us together play on a damned loop.
The sound of the rain is the only thing accompanying me as it beats against the leaves, against the cracked asphalt, against my skin.
And for the fifth day in a row, I beg God that no one notices my silhouette, that no one sees me and tells my father I came to this side.
To the side he hates, the side he cursed and abhors—the side that would get me killed if he knew I’d started coming here again.
For the previous four days, I was able to come by car because Efraín, the family driver and also my friend, would leave the vehicle outside the fortress.
That way, when he started the vehicle to come get me, the noise wouldn’t wake my parents.
But today that wasn’t possible, so I had to make the journey on foot.
Efraín could have come to give her the medication, but I know Lilian, and I know she would never accept being cared for by anyone but me.
So I faced the fear and came, because in the end, she only has me.
Why didn’t she tell me he’s alive? Did she know, or like me, did she believe he was dead? Questions swirl in my mind along with the memories, and the urge to scream returns, but I swallow it when the mansion appears before me like an ancient castle.
Beautiful on the outside, rotten on the inside!
The dark stone structure, the high roof, the imposing columns scream power and money, but to me it’s just a gilded cage where love never lived.
How many times have I wished to walk out that gate and never come back?
How many times, in silence, have I wished for something to tear me away from here?
A miracle.
A tragedy.
Anything that would free me from the weight of carrying the Black surname on my back. But no miracle came, and I’ve had too many tragedies already—none of them in my favor.
The gate creaks as if to give me away the moment I open it. My heart races at the noise, but I don’t stop—I hurry inside, careful to close the padlock that Efraín managed to leave open.
When I approach the service entrance, I see Greta waiting for me, as she has the past few nights. The relief on her face when she sees me is visible, and I almost break down again because aside from Sadie, she’s all I have left.
Greta has been the housekeeper since before I was born.
She was my nanny, and she’s been my confidante ever since her daughter Tessa, my only friend, left town to study.
She cleaned my wounds and wanted to kill my parents more times than I myself did, but like me, she knows we don’t stand a chance against them.
She holds a fluffy towel in her arms, and the moment I approach, she hands it to me. I nod in thanks, and when we enter, she closes the door behind me. I strip off all my wet clothes, handing them to her so she can wash and dry them before my parents wake up and start asking questions.
I wrap myself in the towel and slip away, climbing each step silently, moving through the hallways and hoping no one sees me. But before reaching my room, I stop at the one next door.
The half-open door reveals her little body, curled up and protected by the pink blanket she loves more than anything. In her hands, clutched tight, is the teddy bear I gave her.
Sadie will turn five in a few months, and she’s the reason I haven’t lost myself completely—the fragile thread that anchors me when everything inside me threatens to crumble.
But ironically, she’s also the reason they keep me trapped.
They know I would never abandon her.
That as long as she’s here, I will be too.
I rest my forehead against the door and stare at her for a few seconds, wondering if he would want to meet her, to play with her, to make funny voices and bring the stuffed animals to life—or if, like the rest of the town, he would see her as an abomination.
But this doubt doesn’t last long. No matter how much everything has changed, no matter how much he’s become a stranger today, a ghost, the Bryan I knew would never do that.
The Bryan who sat with me on the rock to watch the sunset.
The one who listened to me as if my every word were poetry.
The one who touched my skin as if it were made of glass, with reverence and tenderness.
The one who sobbed desperately while trying to save me.
That Bryan. My Bryan would never be afraid of a scar.
He would never be disgusted by someone's pain, much less Sadie's.
But that was in the past, because the man I saw today bears no resemblance to the one I loved.
His eyes hold an abyss, and there was no trace of the man who made me laugh until my stomach hurt. No remnant of the guy who dreamed of running away with me. It's as if that Bryan really did die along with everything that happened that night.
I don't recognize him, and that is, perhaps, the worst pain of all.
Because he's dead to me, but I've probably died to him too.
The versions of us who promised each other the world no longer exist.
They got trapped in that night.
In that warehouse.
In that goodbye.
Now we're just shadows and fragments of what we once were.
We're two strangers with scars who still know each other's names but don't really know each other anymore.
And how it hurts to love someone who no longer exists.
A stranger!
A ghost!
I wipe away a stray tear, tuck away my thoughts, and walk away because I've already pushed my luck too far. I enter my room where there's only silence, scars, and memories that rarely let me sleep in peace.