47 #2
You had no place amid that.
I made it for you. I have already apologised for that, but I had not told you why.
Using what I knew about you, I made you board the plane. I knew which fears to press and what sort of kindness you would follow. I told myself the circumstances justified it, but I couldn’t make myself believe that.
I have lived most of my life with men calling my fear rage because rage made a better story. It could be punished, locked away, chained to a floor and written into files.
Fear asked questions they did not want answered.
None of that excuses what I did. It just tells you where the worst decisions of my life began.
When I brought you home, I thought I could keep myself from you with rules, distance and work. Survival, made loud enough to drown out everything else. I thought I could make you hate me so I could make myself do the same and leave quietly.
That plan had already failed in Stonebrook, when you spoke to me as though you could see past the chains.
The photographs made it worse. The kiss ultimately ended the pretence.
By then, there was no distance left to hide behind.
But loving you only gave fear your name.
I had to go back because there is no later. If I wait until every road is safe, Cromwell may find us first.
I don’t write it now to scare you. You are a smart woman. I know you will understand.
This part wasn’t supposed to be written, but I feel it needs to be:
My family offered me a picture of you accepted among them, wearing the gákti that was made for my mother, and you becoming mine.
I wanted that picture badly enough to ignore what it required from you.
I should have refused the moment I suspected what they were planning. I knew enough to deflect them and to warn you, and I chose not to. Because I wanted it. Selfishly.
Outside the tent, I almost asked you to go through with it.
Then I remembered what I had done to you. And what I had to offer. What waits beyond.
No clean name. No safe life. A house at the edge of the world. A future measured in escape routes, traps, and loaded weapons.
I would not put a ring on your hand like another chain.
So I give it to you wrapped in cloth inside this envelope. It belonged to my mother before Arthur. Keep it if you can forgive me. Wear it only if your answer to the question I failed to ask is yes. I will not ask you to make that promise in my absence.
I am sorry for the taking.
I am not sorry for loving you.
If I do not return, do not make a prison out of waiting. Let them care for you. Let Conall tell you the truth.
Live, Leah.
Make art. Make trouble. Grow old enough to become more terrifying than you are.
And if you remember me, remember me as I was with you after you set me free. Not the man who showed you how cold winter can be, or the one you first knew in chains.
Remember the man who sat still beneath your lens and believed, for one second, that even monsters could be seen without being condemned for what had made them that way.
‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’
—Kierkegaard
Forever yours,
Elias.
The page blurs. I drag in a breath, but it hooks halfway and tears my soul into shreds.
The ring lies in my palm – a narrow band of silver, etched with a braided pattern worn almost smooth by his mother, and with a bright rock in its centre. With his question burning straight through it. Straight through the bone. Straight through my chest.
A sound comes out of me. Smaller than a sob but way uglier, drawn out of a place I had kept locked since the first time I looked at his ruin and made it my own.
My fingers close around the ring so tightly the edge bites into my skin, and I bend over the table as if my body can fold itself around the hole inside me.
His words roll in my head and splinter in my lungs.
Brute’s nose bumps my ankle. Menace presses his head hard against my shin and remains there. His brother licks once at my clenched hand. As if they can see the fragments coming off me and are trying to put them back.
The contact drags me back into the room. Back to the apples and plums scattered across the table. Back to the ring cutting into my palm. The cabin he built around me like a shelter and a sentence in one.
Elias had brought me here and taught me how to live in this place where not even clouds can find me. He gave me guard dogs. He gave me access to his family.
So I could survive.
Without him.
I re-read the last paragraph.
The paper shakes in my hand.
Then I read the whole letter again, and blistering flames arise from the grief inside me. By the second pass, I am furious enough to make more stupid decisions.
He has done it again: changed my life and called the absence of my choice protection.
‘Anders knows very little…’ I say aloud as my eyes find the line.
No one can share my pain. He thinks he’s left me to survive, but he’s done worse. He left me alone without asking whether I wanted survival without him.
Then one thought cuts clean through the heat: no one knows.
The engagement. The lies. No one had known. They suspected something was wrong.
So none of the Nielsens knew I was brought unconscious to this place. Yet the cabin had been ready. The journey had worked. Elias had managed all of it – while coming straight from bloody Stonebrook?
He could not have done it without someone who understood records and routes and how to make a person disappear. Someone who keeps me safe behind the mountains and nothingness even now.
My eyes drop back to the letter, hunting through the handwriting until the words snag.
Sindre knows more.
The rage frosts over.
The ring goes into my pocket. I fold the letter once and shove it right after the ring, then fish out the truck keys from my jeans pocket.
Menace plants his bottom on the floor as Brute clings to my leg when my hand snaps at the door handle.
‘Come on,’ I tell him. ‘We’re going to ask Sindre how, exactly, he helped kidnap me.’
Because I will be damned if I’m letting anyone else make a choice in my stead again.