A breath passed between us.
“Why?”
That question had lived between us for years.I knew it the moment she said it. The room seemed to narrow around the word. The rain against the windows faded into the background, and every buried thing inside me shifted as if some locked door had finally been hit hard enough to crack.
I had hated her because I wanted her. I had punished her because seeing her again dragged the past into the present so violently that I could not separate blame from grief, desire from resentment, or memory from revenge.Because she had looked at me with those same eyes and remembered nothing.
The answer rose in me with the violence of a wound opening. I crossed the distance before either of us could speak again, my hand closing around the back of her neck as I dragged her mouth to mine with every ugly truth I had kept buried for years. The kiss was rough, breathless, full of anger and grief, a punishment we both felt for surviving a story neither of us had fully understood. It tasted of rain I still remembered, of years I had lost to her absence, of every night I had carried her face in my head while she lived without knowing mine.
She gasped against my mouth, shocked beneath the force of it. I felt the tremor move through her before I tore myself away just enough to speak.
“Because you didn’t fucking remember me,” I said, my voice raw enough to shake. “My little Flare.”
The words hit her hard. Her eyes widened, and the color drained from her face as if the floor had shifted beneath her. For one brutal second, she only stared at me, and I understood at once that she had never followed our ruin back to the place where it had truly started.
“What?” she whispered.
Then, with more confusion, “What do you mean?”
This time, I told her. I stepped back far enough to look at her properly, forcing the words through my throat instead of letting another kiss do the damage for me. Some truths deserved language, no matter how much they fucking hurt.
“Do you remember your accident eight years ago?” I asked.
Her expression shifted at once, confusion giving way to the first faint pull of memory. She did not understand yet, but some part of her had recognized the edge of what I was talking about.
“The chain crash,” I said. “It was raining. Cars kept folding into each other, people were screaming, and you were trapped in your car.” My jaw tightened. “Igot you out.”
She stared at me as if she had forgotten how to breathe. I kept going because stopping now would have meant choking on it.
“You were bleeding, half-conscious, scared out of your mind, and I saw you. I went to you. I pulled you out and stayed with you until I knew you were alive.” My voice roughened, turning harsher than I wanted it to. “And while I was saving you, my sister and her fiancé were in that same fucking accident.”
The room went still.
Edwina’s hand rose to her mouth. Her wine was forgotten now, her face emptied by horror.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Do you understand that? I didn’t know they were there. I should have been with them. I should have found them first. I should have—” I choked on the words and dragged a hand through my hair, forcing the rest out before it killed me. “By the time I learned they had been in the same crash, they were already gone.”
A small sound left her, broken and barely there.
I looked at her and let her see all of it. There was no use hiding it anymore. Years had passed, and we had made a ruin of each other in the dark.
“I searched for you afterward,” I said. “I wanted to know who you were. I wanted the name of the girl I had pulled from that wreck because the second I saw you, even with blood on your face and fear in your eyes, I could not look away.” My mouth twisted. “You were terrified, and you were fucking beautiful, and I did not know what the hell had pulled me to you, baby. I only knew it had.”
Her eyes filled, but I did not stop.
“Then my sister was dead. Her fiancé was dead. Alessia was still there, still part of a life I never fucking wanted, and everything inside me started rotting around the same truth.” I took a breath that did nothing to calm me. “The girl I couldn’t forget was also the girl I saw every time I remembered what I had lost.”
Edwina shook her head, tears gathering now. “Hayden…”
“No,” I said, though my voice cracked around it. “Let me say it.”
She went quiet.
“When I saw you again at the café, I wasn’t sure it was you. I thought maybe my mind was fucking with me, maybe grief had finally made a fool of me. But then I saw you at the university, and I was sure.”
Pain crossed her face.
“That fucked me up,” I said. “More than I knew what to do with. Wanting you came back with the grief, and resentment came with it. I blamed you for surviving when they didn’t, even though some part of me knew how sick that was. So I made you pay for pain that was never yours to carry.”
