I grab the nearest object—a heavy crystal paperweight—and hurl it at him. He dodges, and it shatters against the bookshelf behind him.
"You monster!" I'm screaming now, tears streaming down my face. "You fucking monster! Everything—everything I built, everything I became, it was all because of you! Because you were too drunk and too stupid and too arrogant to call a fucking cab!"
"I know—"
"My parents blamed Alex!" The realization hits me like a train. "They died thinking their son was the drunk driver who killed himself! They never forgave him, and it wasn't even him!"
Nathan's face crumbles completely. "I know. God, Eve, I know. I wanted to tell them. I tried so many times, but I was a coward—"
"And then you had the audacity—the fucking audacity—to come into my life and act like you were protecting me? Like you had some right to me because of a promise you made at his grave?" I'm shaking so hard I can barely stand. "You don't get to atone for murder and lies by becoming my stalker!"
Nathan's shoulders shake with sobs, but I can't stop. The rage is a living thing inside me, burning through sixteen years of grief in one devastating inferno.
"Get out," I say, my voice deadly quiet now. "Get out of this room. Get out of my sight. I can't—I can't look at you right now."
"Eve, please, just let me—"
"GET OUT!" I scream it so loudly my throat burns.
He flinches like I've hit him, then turns and walks out, closing the door softly behind him.
The moment he's gone, I collapse to the floor, sobbing so hard I think I might shatter. The photo album lies scattered at my feet, images of Alex and Nathan smiling up at me, frozen in a happiness that Nathan destroyed.
He killed Alex. He killed my brother. He let my parents die, thinking it was Alex's fault. And I've been sleeping with him. Loving him. Choosing him.
What does that make me?
I don't know how long I sit there, crying until I have no tears left. Hours, maybe. The sun sets outside the windows, and still I sit in the darkening library, surrounded by the wreckage of everything I thought I knew.
Eventually, the rage begins to ebb, leaving behind something colder. Clearer.
Nathan was seventeen. Stupid and reckless and terrified, yes, but also just a kid who made a terrible, irreversible mistake and then compounded it with another.
Alex tried to stop him. My brother, brave and good, tried to save them both.
And Nathan has carried that guilt for sixteen years. The weight of the lie. The knowledge that my parents died hating their own son for something Nathan did. I saw it in his face, in the way his hands shook, in the raw agony of his confession. That wasn't manipulation. That was genuine, soul-deep remorse.
It doesn't make it right. Nothing makes it right.
But maybe... maybe it makes it understandable.
I pull myself up slowly, my body aching, and retrieve the photo album from the floor. I look at the homecoming photo again—two boys grinning at the camera, unaware that in just months, one of them would be dead and the other would spend his entire life trying to atone.
The pain in Nathan's voice was so genuine, so devastating. This isn't the calculated predator who stalked me. This is Nate—the boy who lost his best friend, panicked, and made a choice he's regretted every day since.
"I've spent sixteen years trying to make it right," his voice echoes in my memory. "Trying to keep the promise I made at hisgrave—to protect you, to give you everything, to make sure you never suffered because of what I took from you."
That's why he did all of this. The stalking, the manipulation, the control. He was trying to atone for the unforgivable.
I close my eyes, feeling the weight of sixteen years of grief pressing down on me.
We're both survivors of that night. Both broken by the same tragedy—him by what he did, me by what was taken from me. Both trying to find meaning in the wreckage.
And I love him. Despite everything. Despite this.
The realization makes me want to scream again, but I'm too exhausted.
I stand on shaking legs and walk to the door. Nathan is sitting on the floor in the hallway, his back against the wall, his face in his hands. He looks up when I open the door, his eyes red and swollen.
