“You said your family wanted revenge. That someone was killed, and I was supposed to be the answer.” My voice is steady, and I’m proud of that. “So what I want to know is: why were you the one who said yes? Out of everyone in your family, why did it have to be you?”
The silence on the other side stretches. I can practically feel him shift his weight on the porch.
My voice sharpens. “No more broad strokes. No more revenge and war and family business. Why you? Why this? Why was proving whatever the hell you wanted to prove worth my life?”
That one must hit. I know it does, because when he speaks again, his voice sounds stripped.
“I was sixteen when I did something stupid.”
I lean my shoulder against the wall beside the entryway and close my eyes, listening.
“It was the kind of stupid that doesn’t just blow up one night and disappear. It sticks. Gets built into the way people look at you. Or maybe just the way you think they do.” He lets out a breath that sounds scraped raw. “After that, I spent years feeling like I was standing outside my own family, trying to earn my way back in.”
I don’t say anything.
On the other side of the door, the porch boards creak.
“So when my father needed someone to handle this, when he looked at me and saidthis matters, I didn’t think. I just said yes. Because for the first time, he was looking at me like I was the son who could actually get it done.”
I press my forehead against the door.
“So my life,” I say carefully, “was worth less to you than a pat on the head from your father.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “That’s exactly what it was. And I will live with that for the rest of my life.”
I breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth. I’m not sure it helps.
“You took one bad thing and let it turn into your whole life,” I say. “Nobody even had to keep punishing you. You were already doing it to yourself.”
He doesn’t answer.
Which, somehow, is answer enough.
I pace two steps into the living room before turning back again.
“You stood in my house and told me I didn’t have to be my family,” I say. “You looked me in the face and said I could choose something different. Meanwhile you were still out here acting like the only way to matter was to do the ugliest thingyourfamily asked of you.”
“Natalia—”
“No.” My voice cracks through the house hard enough to sting my own ears. “You don’t get to turn this into some sad story about how hard your life has been. This is my life. My body. My name in your family’s mouth. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” he says immediately, his voice rough. “I do.”
Silence presses against the door between us.
“When you ask why I said yes,” he says, “that’s the answer. I said yes because I was still stupid enough to think if I proved myself useful in the worst possible way, it would finally make me worth something.”
A sick twist moves through my stomach.
Because that, at least, I understand. The hunger in it. The humiliation of wanting so badly to be chosen that you’ll let yourself be used by the people doing the choosing.
“But then I met you,” he says, voice barely there.
I shut my eyes.
“And all at once I had both things in my hands. The chance I’d been chasing for years, and you. A woman who could’ve learned to be hard a long time ago and somehow didn’t. Who still takes care of people. Who still makes room for people. Who looked ata half-dead stranger on a beach and decided not to leave him there.”
My eyes burn, and I refuse to examine why. I do not need him out there naming the softest parts of me like he still gets to have them.
