Despite my desire to stay far away from Ambrose, the frigid autumn nights are pushing us closer together. My room feels too cold and empty for me to do anything more than sleep in it, so I’ve been gravitating to the fireplace downstairs, where Ambrose is always sitting in the study or the living room with a book. Sometimes it’s his notebook propped up on his knee as he writes in it, and other times he’s lost in a novel.
I wish I could hate him still. I wish I was full of rage and resentment, but he makes it impossible to hold a grudge. We still haven’t spoken about the kiss or his reaction afterward, but we’ve settled back into some semblance of normalcy. We cook together, watch movies, and prepare for the impending winter. I’ve done more research on my next victims to fulfill my end of the deal, but escaping from here seems less urgent than it did before.
Maybe I’m delusional, but the comfort I feel here is one I’ve never had the privilege of having. Even though Ambrose gets on my every last nerve sometimes, I know I’m safe. He’sproven to me over and over again that not only will he not harm me, but he will care for me when needed. It’s odd feeling a sense of safety with a man who meant to kill me only a few short months ago.
Ambrose has been reading to me by the light of the fire most nights, and it’s a soothing way to escape all of my thoughts for a while. Sometimes it’s poetry, but lately it’s often been chapters fromThe Count of Monte Cristo. It’s a story of love, betrayal, power, and revenge, which makes me wonder if Ambrose chose it for a reason. It’s a littletoofitting for the current situation.
Then again, it seems he chooses every piece of literature he reads to me with intentionality.
One evening, I’m curled up on the couch and watching an old black and white movie flicker across the grainy TV screen, but I can’t focus. I’m too lost in thought as my final meeting with the angels looms over me. It’s only two weeks away.
Despite what they might have promised me and how tempting that offer may be, I’m still not sure I can go through with giving up information about Ambrose to them. I’m not sure why, considering it’s a small piece of information weighted against the idea of me actively withholding the truth from literal angels.
But by now, I’m going to Hell anyway, so I may as well make the most of it, right?
“You remind me of her sometimes,” Ambrose says softly from his place at the other end of the couch.
From the solemn tenderness in his voice, I don’t have to ask who he means. “How so?”
“You’re always stuck in your own head, thinking about much more than you let on but staying quiet unless you feel you have something important to say.”
I shrug. “A lot of people are like that.”
“I’m not done,” he says gently. “There’s a fire inside you that you think you hide so well, but I see it burning anyway. Yet you’ve spent your life tempering that flame to appease everyone else.”
I don’t know what to say. I can only nod. I grew up with parents who never wanted me, so I’d learned to stay quiet and out of the way. When I found Joel, he’d shown me so much positive attention that maybe I mistook it for love. With him, too, I found myself shrinking to fit into his view of what I should be rather than who I wanted to be.
“You’ve spent so long trying to make yourself invisible, but I see you, even when you don’t want me to.Especiallywhen you don’t want me to,” Ambrose says.
I swallow past the knot in my throat and turn my head to face him. The guilt from considering the angels’ offer, of selling him out, sits heavy on my chest when I notice the gentleness in his eyes as he stares right back at me.
It’s the same look he had given me the night he kissed me, but it’s laced with a soft sort of sorrow.
“Is that why you brought me here?” I ask. “Because I remind you of her?” I don’t say the next thought aloud—that I hate the idea of being a replacement for the woman he once loved simply because I resemble her in some ways. That he might have thought he could find a hint of his past love through me rather than caring about me for who I really am.
“No. It’s not something I even realized until very recently.”
“Then why me? Why did you trick me into coming here?”
He takes a deep breath, as if considering his next words carefully. “When I had gone to the city, I was planning on killing a man who I’d seen doing some awful things. But Iwas also wandering, getting my fill of society before going back home. It can get so lonely here sometimes. But I just happened to see you as I was walking down the street, and you sparked my interest.”
“Isparked your interest?” It seems ridiculous that I, of all the people he’d come across in a city, would stand out to him.
“Yes,” he admits. “Not because I wanted to kill you, though. You fascinated me. You were beautiful, but you seemed so intent on making yourself invisible that, ironically, I couldn’t help but notice. I started following you out of mere curiosity, wondering what could drive you to such obvious sorrow. But the more I watched you, the more I started to see the signs that you might end your own life, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
The longer he speaks, the more my heart shatters. Not only because he had to see me at the lowest point in my life, but because he saw the signs when no one else did—not even my own husband.
“I was clinging to such a tiny thread of hope for so long, but it snapped so easily. At the end I started questioning whether or not you were real,” I tell him. “I thought maybe you were some angel of death there to take me away. I guess I wasn’t entirely wrong.” I manage a weak laugh.
“It broke my heart to watch you do that to yourself. I knew it was coming, which is why I used my abilities to sneak into your house the day it happened. Joel didn’t accidentally leave his badge on the counter. I put it there.”
“You didn’t,” I whisper.
He nods. “I did. I had to make a choice in that moment to either take the years of your life that you were throwing away or to give you a fighting chance.”
He saved me. I swallow past the hard knot forming in my throat and manage to whisper, “Thank you.”
There’s a beat of silence before he asks, “Why did you feel like suicide was your only option?”
