Her mouth tightened. “I said I didn’t want to.”
My chest ached. “Then why did you?”
The question tore out of me before I could stop it, raw and childlike and humiliating in its need.
“What was wrong with me?” I demanded. “Why wasn’t I enough?”
Micah stiffened beside me, his arm tightening, but I couldn’t stop now. Years of questions I’d never let myself ask surged up all at once.
“I was good,” I said, my voice breaking. “I was quiet. I was easy. I would’ve been anything you needed me to be.”
Victoria flinched.
“I was not well,” she said sharply. “I was dangerous.”
I shook my head. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is,” she snapped back, then stopped herself. Her voice softened, just a fraction. “I wasn’t stable. I was paranoid. Angry. I trusted the wrong people. I was in deep with things I couldn’t walk away from.”
Byron nodded slowly. “She was afraid she’d ruin you.”
Silence fell.
The wind whipped across the sandbar, the lantern flickering wildly.
“You loved him,” I said suddenly, looking between them.
Victoria’s breath caught.
Byron’s gaze dropped.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Victoria laughed softly, bitter and nostalgic all at once. “I did.”
Her eyes lingered on Byron in a way that felt intimate, unguarded. “He was … different back then. Before all the walls.”
Byron stepped closer without seeming to realize it. “You were brilliant. Terrifying. Magnetic.”
She scoffed, but her hand lifted—just for a second—brushing his wrist. The touch was brief, charged with history.
Micah shifted, tension rolling off him, but he didn’t interrupt.
Neither did I.
Because I could see it now. The ghost of something real between them. Something that hadn’t died so much as hardened into something ugly.
Victoria pulled her hand back, straightening. The softness vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“I didn’t give you up because I didn’t want you,” she said, turning back to me, her voice sharp again. “I gave you up because I loved you enough not to keep you.”
The words sliced deep.
“And look at you,” she continued coldly. “Safe. Loved. Soft.”
Something in her eyes hardened. “You should be grateful.”
Grateful.
