Chapter 98: THEY BOTH PAID FOR EVERY SINGLE CRIME THEY’VE COMMITTED

Chapter 99

Lumi

I want to tell him.

That’s the only thought that’s stayed whole in my head since the moment I opened my eyes in this bed.

Everything else comes apart if I hold it too long... words slide sideways before I can catch them, thoughts start in the middle and never find their beginning.

But that one thought stays solid. I want to tell him. I have wanted to tell him since the first second I saw his face leaning over mine, and every single day since, it has sat lodged behind my teeth like a stone I can’t spit out.

My mouth won’t obey me. I open it and my jaw shakes and the air comes out wrong, shaped like nothing, and I watch Ren’s face fall every time he realizes, again, that nothing coherent is coming.

He never looks away from me when it happens. That’s the thing that undoes me most. He just waits, patient in a way I don’t deserve, while I fail at the one thing I need more than anything else in the world to succeed at.

Until now. Because I didn’t know why but I went back to the smell of that house that almost took my life.

I went back to the sound of the floorboard behind me, the one I’d forgotten could still creak after all these years, and the half second before I turned around when I still believed, stupidly, that I was alone.

I see him again every time I close my eyes. Not the way I remembered him for years, blurred at the edges the way old grief blurs a face until you can’t be sure anymore what was real and what you built out of missing someone.

Sharp now. Too sharp. Coat still dripping rain, older, but with that same stillness I used to mistake, as a little girl, for calm.

"Dad." I’d called him.

I still don’t know why I did. Some reflex buried so deep in me that even everything he’d done couldn’t dig it out.

The word came up out of some old, wounded part of myself before the rest of me had a say in it, and the second it left my mouth I wanted to claw it back out of the air, because he never earned it. Not one day of it.

He didn’t even flinch at the sound of it. That’s what I keep returning to, lying here, replaying it over and over the way you press on a bruise to make sure it still hurts.

He looked at me like I was the one standing somewhere I had no right to stand. Like the house was his and I was the trespasser. Like I owed him something for existing at all.

I used to build a version of that reunion in my head, back before I stopped letting myself hope for one at all.

In that version he cried. In that version he fell apart with everything he owed me, and I got to decide, generously, whether or not to forgive him.

I never once imagined a version where I would be the one standing there small and apologizing for taking up space in a room that used to be ours.

I wanted to tell Ren how it felt, being looked at that way by the one person who was supposed to have looked at me that way least of all.

I wanted to tell him what it does to a person, finding out the parent who vanished didn’t vanish because he had to.

He vanished because he chose to, and came back only when there was something left worth coming back for.

He told me I ruined him.

He said it so plainly, like it was simple arithmetic and I was slow for not having worked it out myself years ago.

He married my mother for what she had. He planned to take it and go, cleanly, before a child ever entered into the math of it.

And then I did, and he stayed only because leaving too soon would have drawn questions he couldn’t afford, and every month I grew inside her was a month he resented me for existing before I’d even drawn a single breath.

I wanted to tell Ren that. I used to think it was grief that kept me away. I know now it was instinct.

Some part of me always understood there was something waiting in that house that hadn’t finished with me yet.

He believed I took what rightfully belonged to him. My mother’s hard-earned money.

My mother had signed everything into his name the way he’d always intended.

But then, at the last moment, she pulled it back and put it into mine instead.

I didn’t know the story until he told it to me himself, standing in that dust-choked hallway, spitting it at me like an accusation instead of the one decent thing she ever did in the years I watched her come apart.

I think about her differently now, replaying his words. All those nights I resented her for the bottle in her hand, for the way she’d stopped seeing me some days entirely, looking straight through me at whatever door she was still waiting on.

I never once considered that somewhere in the wreckage of herself, drowning as she was, she’d still found one clear thought to hold onto.

Protect Lumi. Keep this one thing out of his hands, whatever it costs. It cost her everything. I understand that now in a way I never let myself understand it while she was alive to hear me say it.

He said he’d been waiting. Years, watching from wherever he’d disappeared to, watching me build something out of the wreckage he left behind, waiting for the moment he could walk back in and take what he still believed, in some twisted way, belonged to him.

He watched me suffer from a distance without lifting a single finger to help.

I wanted Ren to know Callum found him first. That the two of them sat somewhere and traded their separate furies.

One wanted me broken, the other wanted what I’d built, and they decided between them that I was worth more to them dead than alive.

I wanted him to know that the two men who claimed, at different points in my life, to love me, sat across a table from each other and agreed I was an obstacle to be removed rather than a person.

I wanted to tell him about the knife. How cold it felt against my throat, colder than anything I have ever felt in my life, colder than the years of silence that came before it.

I wanted to tell him I didn’t write that letter. I wrote it because he said Theo’s name. Because he said the names that meant the world to me.

Because he said Neve’s and his name, softly, like he was doing me a kindness by telling me exactly who he’d hurt first if I refused.

I remembered my hand shaking so badly the pen kept slipping, and him watching me struggle with something close to boredom, like even my terror was an inconvenience to him.

I wanted to tell him I drank it myself. Nobody forced my hand around that bottle.

I made that choice with my own fingers, because it was the only choice left on the table that kept the people I loved breathing, and I would make it again, exactly the same way, a hundred times over, if it meant Theo never had to lose his mother the way I lost mine.

I have thought of that decision over more times than I can count, lying here with nothing but my own thoughts for company. I would do it again.

Ren was watching me, the way he always watches me, like if he looks hard enough he can read it straight off my face without needing my voice at all.

Maybe he already has, some of it. I saw it happen some minutes ago, the moment the word finally cracked loose from somewhere deep in my chest.

I saw his face when he understood. I saw the exact second the horror settled into him, the question forming behind his eyes before he even asked it out loud, careful, like he was afraid of breaking something by saying it wrong.

I didn’t shake my head.

I couldn’t give him the rest yet. Not yet. My mouth still won’t hold that much. But I held his gaze, and I let the stillness answer for me, and somewhere behind my ribs, underneath all the things I still can’t say, I made myself a promise instead.

I will tell him everything.

I don’t care how many months it takes me to build the words back one broken syllable at a time.

I don’t care if I have to write it instead, my right hand curled useless in my lap while I fight my left hand into learning a language it was never meant to carry alone, one shaking letter at a time until the sentences finally make sense on the page even if they still won’t come out of my mouth.

He deserves the whole truth, every ugly piece of it, the money and the knife and the two men who tried to murder me by framing it like a suicide.

He deserves to know exactly who is still out there, walking free, believing he got away clean.

And I’ll make sure they both paid for every single crime they’ve committed. Every single one of them.