The truth came blurting out of my mouth. “I don’t know if I’m brave enough for anything anymore.”
Her smile thinned. “Darlin’, if you’re brave enough to visit me, then you’re brave enough for anything.” Before I couldso much as take in her words, she smiled. “I might not be all here, but I know that if you’re here it means you knew me, before this.” Her arms floated round the room. “So whatever it is you’re afraid of, don’t be. You’re so much stronger than you realise.”
I stayed long after her words stopped echoing through the room.
The light had shifted by the time I moved, casting her in gold. She looked peaceful again, adrift somewhere between memory and make-believe. And yet, somehow, she’d still seen right through me.
Maybe that’s what scared me the most: that even without knowing who I was, she’d reached in and touched the part of me I keep buried the deepest. The part that’s tired of being afraid. Tired of holding back. Tired of giving everyone else the pen and letting them write my story.
All this time, I thought strength was silence. Survival. Playing along so the world wouldn’t spit me out.
But she’d said it so simply: Why be afraid when you can just trust, and love, and be happy?
It wasn’t naïve. It was brave.
Brave like painting something I thought I wouldn’t tell another soul about.
Brave like kissing Marcus again and letting myself fall, even if I don’t know where I’d land.
Brave like believing there was a life for me outside the screen. One where my Mum still gets care, where I still get to create, where I’m more than the version the internet picked apart.
I stood up slowly, pressing a soft kiss to her temple, even though I knew she wouldn’t remember it.
I turned back just before I left. “Susannah?”
She turned, smiling, like she’d never seen me before. “Yes?”
I smiled right back at her. “Merry Christmas.”
chapter twenty nine
did i love the city, or something else?
As the wheels touched the runway at JFK, I couldn’t tell whether I was happy to be back or missing London already. I also couldn’t figure out if I loved or hated London, either.
It was hard for me to really love a place. Sure, Chile was home, but it was tarnished in a way that felt irreversible. And I don’t know what invisible criteria a city had to meet for me to warm up to it, but every one I’d set foot in hadn’t hit those points yet.
New York certainly fucking hadn’t.
One question I never answered whenever anyone asked me was why I’d decided to set up Romano Security in New York if I hated it so much. And the answer was that I didn’t hate it. Not really. It was just far away enough from what happened back home for me to dull the pain of it.
And yes, it was that bad. Whatever you’re thinking happened, it happened. All because of me. All because I couldn’t say anything to stop it.
I think what I really hated was myself. Because it wasn’t my home that had made the bad things happen there. And it wasn’t New York that made the bad things happen here. Nor was it London’s fault for the shit things there.
The only recurring factor was me.
But for the first time in a long time, stepping back into New York didn’t feel like punishment. Maybe that was because of London.
London hadn’t erased the ghosts, but it had shown me something I’d almost forgotten—that life could feel different. That I could. Somewhere between the noise of the city, the places I thought I’d hate, and the moments I hadn’t expected to matter, I realised the weight I carried didn’t always have to crush me.
I wasn’t naive enough to think a change of scenery fixed anything. London hadn’t changed me. But what happened there… who I was with there… It had cracked something open in me I thought was sealed shut.
So yeah. New York hadn’t changed. It was still crowded. Still loud. Still choking me with everything I’d failed to leave behind. The difference was I didn’t hate being here anymore. Because somewhere along the way, I’d stopped hating myself quite as much.
And if I let myself think too hard about why, I knew exactly whose fault that was.
After getting home, taking a quick nap, and leaving Cora in the safety of her house, I was walking into the office. I’d already clued Oscar and a few of the other guys in on what happenedin London and the progress I’d made whilst I wasn’t playing shadow, but we needed a proper meeting.
