I looked at him.
“Your anger is not a burden on us, Mira. It’s not a debt you owe or a punishment you’re inflicting. It is the correct response to what we did.” His voice was stripped to the foundation, formal cadence cracked open.
“We rejected you. We delivered those words knowing they would destroy the one person who trusted us enough to be destroyable. Your anger is the healthiest reaction in this entire situation and I will not allow you to talk yourself out of it because a soldier questioned your commitment.”
My throat closed.
“Giselle sees sacrifice and measures it in logistics. She doesn’t understand that walking back into your father’s compound carrying our children requires a kind of courage that none of us in that camp possess.” His jaw was tight. “She doesn’t see what it costs you because you never let anyone see the cost.”
“Sol...”
“You are not selfish for being angry. You are not cruel for withholding forgiveness. And you are not using us by acceptinghelp from men who owe you more than help will ever repay.” He swallowed. “If you forgive us in a year or in a decade or never, the debt remains ours. Not yours.Neveryours.”
I stared at him through the rain. The scar from his temple to jaw, the set of his mouth. The way his hands hung open at his sides.
“Then why does it feel like I’m the one breaking all of you?”
“Because you care. That’s why.” A pause. “A person who was using us wouldn’t lose sleep over an accusation. Wouldn’t stand in the rain questioning whether her anger was valid or carry guilt for a wound she was right to inflict.”
The anger shifted into a space where it could exist alongside the other truths I’d been avoiding. That I missed them. That the camp felt more alive than the compound ever had. That three hands on my stomach and three kicks answering had rearranged the architecture of my chest in ways I couldn’t undo.
“You rehearsed the rejection,” I said. Not an accusation this time. A need to understand. “How many times?”
His eyes held mine. “Forty-seven.”
“Why that many?”
“Because my hands were shaking too badly to trust the delivery before attempt thirty-one. I broke a mirror after that one.” A breath. “Lucian replaced it without comment.”
“You were shaking.”
“I practiced because if you’d seen my hands trembling, you would have known how much I didn’t want to say the words.You would have fought it. The council would have used your resistance as grounds to classify you as a threat.”
The image restructured everything I’d built the rejection from.
“You could have told me that. Before.”
“Before, you wouldn’t have believed me. You needed to be angry first.” The corner of his mouth shifted. “The anger had to run its course before the truth could land.”
My fingers found the jacket pockets again. My hand closed around a piece of paper I hadn’t put there.
I pulled it out.
A fragment. Singed brown at the edges, barely the size of my palm. The paper was soft from weeks of being handled, creased from being pressed flat against a jacket lining.
My handwriting. Two words in smudged ink.
‘I miss’
My hands trembled.
“Where did you get this?”
“The pine tree. Outside the eastern perimeter. Third night of surveillance.”
The blind spot between the cameras where I sat and burned journals and pretended the act of destroying evidence would destroy the feelings too.
“You were there.”
