My hands were shaking. The journal trembled in my grip, and I couldn’t make it stop. Around me, the bakery kept moving,voices, footsteps, the hiss of the espresso machine, but it all sounded like it was coming from underwater. Distant. Wrong.
She killed him.
I tried to think back to where I had been when I heard. George’s Retirement Party. What had I been told? The details felt slippery now, like trying to hold water. I remembered the call. Remembered someone telling me Titan was dead. Who the fuck had it been? The clubhouse was in chaos. Blood everywhere. The club was locking down, investigating, looking for whoever did it.
I’d believed it. Everyone did. Why wouldn’t we? Titan had enemies. The club had enemies. It made sense.
Except it hadn’t been enemies.
It had been Christina.
Sweet, quiet Christina, who’d looked at me like I hung the moon. Who’d smiled soft and careful, who’d held our daughter and sang to her, who’d let me believe she was just a woman trying to survive in a world too rough for her.
She’d walked into Titan’s bedroom and murdered him in cold blood.
The rage hit so hard I couldn’t breathe.
That story had made sense. It fit.
But it was bullshit.
I wanted to put my fist through the table.
Across the bakery, Trudy was at the counter with Pati, boxing up something for a customer. But her eyes kept flicking toward me. She knew. Maybe not the details, but she knew something was wrong. I could see it in the way her shoulders had gone tight, the way her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes when she handed over the box.
I looked back down at the journal.
I’m sorry, Stephen.
Sorry.
She was sorry.
Like that fixed it. Like an apology scrawled in a journal I wouldn’t read until years after she died, maybe never, could undo years of lies and betrayal.
I’d mourned her. When Grace told me she had died, I’d mourned her. Grieved the woman I’d loved, the mother of my daughter, the life we could’ve had if things had been different.
But I hadn’t known her at all.
The woman I’d loved didn’t exist. Or maybe she had, once, but she’d died long before her body did. She’d said as much herself.
But that woman died long before Titan did.
I wanted to scream. Wanted to throw the journal across the room, watch it hit the wall and fall apart. Wanted to rage at someone, anyone, but they were all dead. Titan. Steele. Stone. George. William. Caroline.
Christina.
All of them gone, and I was left holding their secrets like they were mine to carry.
The worst part, the part that made my chest feel like it was caving in, was that I understood.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to be furious, self-righteous, justified in my anger. But underneath the rage was something uglier: comprehension.
If someone had told me the only way to save Grace was to kill a man, I would’ve done it. No hesitation. No moral crisis. I would’ve pulled the trigger or swung the blade or done whatever needed doing, and I would’ve lived with it after.
So how could I hate Christina for doing the same thing?
My only regret was, I hadn’t thought of it myself, hadn’t thought of doing it sooner.
