Each passing day presses down on me more and more.
Then, a strange, deep melancholy takes over. I lie in bed sometimes all day, feeling weak and awful. My body feels different, itchy, as if something physical is changing inside me. I do not understand where it’s coming from, but it all boils down to one thing.
I cannot take this anymore.
The emptiness. The suspension. The absence ofhim.
Yes. Fuck it.
Let us say it out loud.
It reaches me slowly, painfully, but it reaches me.
With Eliano, I truly had a chance. I liked him a lot, and I was so attracted to him. Those are two foundation stones you can actually build something on. Am I really this angry at him for taking revenge away from me, or is this about something else?
There’s this small empty space, a pause in me…
Something in me gives up.
And then it almost literally smashes into me, like a battering ram, breaking through denial, fog, pretense, and self-deception.
The truth about my ‘escape’.
I remember the three hours I spent in that tree, frozen in that strange paralysis, and I finally allow myself to understand what I refused to see back then.
I could not force myself to go after Tanner because that treacherous part of me had already fixed its gaze on a future, a possible one, the future I could have had with Eliano.
And I did not want to turn back and look at the past I had with Senu. Yeah, by staying on this tree I betrayed my brother for my new, sexy Italian beau.
That decision was alreadymadethere, in the swamps, deep inside me.
The rest of my mind just had not caught up yet, still fixated on that damn plan. But the truth is, I had alreadyerasedthat plan back then.
Sabotaged it.
So the person I was most furious with wasmyself.
Bashir and Evan are right. If you look at the essence of Eliano’s actions, the core of it all, he did not want anything bad for me.
He wanted me to be safe. He wanted us to be together. And I threw in his face how much I hated him, which was so fucking far from the truth.
???
As the third week comes to an end, I catch myself browsing the internet more and more often, typing in different phrases, trying to lead myself to Eliano’s blog.
The thing is, I can’t remember the name of it.
When I check the browser, I see that Eliano had set it to delete history and cookies after every reset, probably to keep himself safe from anyone watching because of the Beta Activation program.
That means I don’t know the exact address. I also don’t have his phone number. Hard to believe, but he never gave it to me. There was no reason to. No one on the island has phones with reception, me included.
So there’s only one shot. I need to find his blog and see if there’s a contact tab, something that might point me to his social media so I can try to reach him.
Eventually, I manage to track down a few blogs with a lot of info about the Ferro family. I know Eliano ran one where he shared plenty of news about his relatives, with thinly veiled hints about their shady business.
The real lead comes when I spot a post on one of those blogs about Beta Activation, a post Eliano had mentioned to me before.
The blog is calledThe Truth Only I Know, and as I scroll through the entries, they’re mostly about the Ferro family and some high-profile criminal cases, except for the most recent one. Everything fits.
