“Then,” I murmured, “we’ll see if she still hates me enough to walk away again.”
Because this time I wasn’t the one planning to disappear.
The line went quiet for a moment after my last words. Elias knew when not to push. He had watched the last eight years of my life unfold in ways no one else really understood, and he had been there so long that he knew certain subjects still carried edges that could cut.
“You know,” he said slowly, “none of this would have happened if you had just told her the truth back then.”
“I fucking know,” I snapped. “Damn it, Elias, I know. I couldn’t do it.”
I broke the engagement with Alessia two weeks after Edwina left. I ended it directly, with nothing pretty wrapped around the truth, because there was no soft way to escape something I had never chosen.
My family reacted exactly as expected. Outrage, accusations, my father’s voice cutting through all of it and lodging somewhere in my head where it still echoed years later. Elias had been there that night, watching the whole thing fall apart across a dining room table full of people who believed my life belonged to them before it ever belonged to me.
“You embarrassed both families,” my father said.
“I don’t care.”
“You humiliated Alessia.”
“I never asked for that engagement.”
“You agreed to it.”
“I tolerated it.”
The difference mattered to me. Apparently it didn’t matter to anyone else in the room. My mother tried a different approach.
“Your sister would have wanted this marriage to continue.”
That sentence nearly made me lose whatever restraint I had left.
Because my sister had nothing to do with the engagement. Her death had simply made it convenient. After the accident that killed her and her fiancé, the families had decided that another union between us would somehow maintain the balance that tragedy had disrupted.
It had never been love, only an arrangement, an obligation, a duty dressed up as tradition. And for a while I played along with it. Because grief makes people do strange things. Because when you lose family in a single moment, you stop arguing about decisions that seem insignificant compared to the silence left behind.
But then Edwina walked into my life. And suddenly the future everyone else had designed for me felt like a cage.
“I never wanted Alessia,” I said to Elias now.
“I know.”
“She was a responsibility. A deal between families.”
“That’s how those things usually work.”
I leaned forward slightly, staring at the city lights outside the window.
“But after Edwina left…” I continued slowly, “…I realized something.”
“What?”
“That I had just lost the only woman I ever actually loved.” The words felt heavier now than they had five years ago. “And there was no fucking way I was going to marry someone else after that.”
Elias sighed softly on the other end of the line. “You really blew up your entire life over her.”
“I didn’t blow it up.”
“You walked away from it.”
