Page 94 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

“You don’t love me.” I held her stare without flinching. “Your words are a transaction. You offer them and withdraw them based on your whims. You use them to control me, not to comfort me.” I took a step back. “I don’t want them anymore.”

She searched my face, and whatever she found there—a resolve she had never seen in me before—made her lean forward with sudden urgency. “You’re not thinking clearly—”

“You should have left my wife alone.” The accusation came out low and lethal. “You should have rejected her offer. You should have come to me. You were free to demand whatever you wanted from me. Free to use me. But not her. Never her.”

I stared at the face I had once desperately wanted to see me as a son. “The debt is cleared. My wife paid it for me. She wanted you out of my life, and she made it happen. She paid a price she never owed to buy me the peace I had been too weak to demand for myself.”

I straightened. “And I will not let her sacrifice be in vain.”

She shot to her feet. “I will never approach her again—”

“You shouldn’t have approached her in the first place.” I stepped closer, closing the distance between us. “But you did. And you want to know why?” I held her furious gaze, my voice dropping to a lethal calm. “It was because you couldn’t stand that someone in this world saw me and chose to stay. You couldn’t bear that someone was loving me unconditionally. You were enraged that I had found a love that was real, while the man you wanted most in this world never truly chose you.”

The slap cracked across the room, the sharp report cutting through the silence. My head jerked to the side.

I exhaled, a long breath spilling from my lungs as years of pressure finally began to lift.

For the first time, I felt free.

In all the years I lived with her, through every outburst and every vicious tirade, she had never once hit me. During the worst of it, when her words cut deeper than any blow could have, I used to wish she would.

A bruise would heal. A scar would remain. At least then, I would have proof. Something tangible I could point to and say, See? This is how much it hurt.

But her words left nothing behind that anyone could see. They sank beneath my skin and festered there, invisible and poisonous. There was no wound to bandage, no mark to trace, nothing I could show anyone.

They always, always hurt more.

I turned my face back to her, the sting on my cheek serving as a badge of honor.

Her eyes were wide, fixed on her own hand as if it had betrayed her.

“I have ensured there is enough money in your accounts to last a lifetime.” Her gaze snapped to mine as I spoke. “I haven’t touched a cent of the inheritance your parents left me. It’s all yours. I never deserved it.”

She opened her mouth, a protest forming, but I cut her off.

“You don’t need me in your life,” I stated with absolute finality. “And I no longer want you in mine.”

It’s over.

It’s finally over.

I would have let her use me for the rest of my days if she’d wanted. But I couldn’t, not after learning what Alessia had done.

She knew my history with my mother. She understood where my guilt and sense of obligation came from. But she never lectured me. She never tried to reason with me about how toxic it was or how much it was draining from me.

She simply saw the problem and found a way to solve it. She removed the threat from my life without asking anything in return.

I could not dishonor an act of protection that profound by willingly stepping back into the cage I had spent years trying to escape.

“Never come near me or my wife again.” I let the cold promise of that threat hang in the air between us. Then I turned and walked out.

I never wanted to come back to this house, and now I never would.

I had one more mess to clean up.

One more parasite to get rid of.

Time to deal with the cockroach.