The need to move hit hard. I crossed to the window and stood with the rain on the glass and the dark city beyond it, my hands at my sides, my whole body pulled tight with the effort of not breaking something just to hear it shatter.
Behind me, Edwina stayed quiet.
Finally I said, “I never hated you.”
My voice sounded raw enough to bleed.
She did not answer at once. When she did, it was barely above a whisper. “I know that now.”
I closed my eyes. That word ruined me.
She knew it now, five years too late, with our daughter asleep down the hall and everything we had lost still sitting between us. She knew it now, when the truth could no longer protect the younger woman who had stood alone in her apartment while another woman tore through her dignity and used my sins as evidence.
I turned back to her with care, every muscle in me held too tight, because the anger under my skin was looking for somewhere to go.
“She called you a toy,” I said, and the disgust in my voice tasted of acid. “She called you that without knowing who youwere, what you meant to me, or how badly I was losing my mind over you.” I took a step closer. “You were never something I used, Edwina. Never.”
Her eyes shone with the strain of holding too much for too long.
“I know,” she said again.
“That doesn’t fix what she did.”
“No.”
“And it doesn’t fix what I did either.”
Silence moved between us, thick and merciless.
Then she said, “No. It doesn’t.”
I stopped in front of her, close enough to feel the warmth of her in the dim room. The wine, the roses, the tree, the rain on the windows—all of it faded behind what still sat unfinished between us.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“I would have torn the world apart.”
A sad smile touched her mouth. “That was part of the problem, Hayden.”
I nearly laughed, except nothing in me was light enough for it. Instead, I looked at her and let the darkness stay exactly where it was.
Then I said, quieter, “She was wrong about one thing.”
Edwina lifted her gaze fully to mine. “What?”
I leaned down enough for the answer to stay between us.
“I could never hate you enough to use you.”
Edwina held my gaze for a second, and then something in her face changed.
“You didn’t like me either,” she said.
The words were quiet, which made them worse. She looked down at her glass, then back at me, and what I saw in her eyes was not softness. It was truth with all its teeth showing.
“Do you remember our first days at university?” she asked. “You made my days a living hell.”
