Page 282 of These Tears

This part wasn’t supposed to be written, but I feel it needs to be:

My family offered me a picture of you accepted among them, wearing the gákti that was made for my mother, and you becoming mine.

I wanted that picture badly enough to ignore what it required from you.

I should have refused the moment I suspected what they were planning. I knew enough to deflect them and to warn you, and I chose not to. Because I wanted it. Selfishly.

Outside the tent, I almost asked you to go through with it.

Then I remembered what I had done to you. And what I had to offer. What waits beyond.

No clean name. No safe life. A house at the edge of the world. A future measured in escape routes, traps, and loaded weapons.

I would not put a ring on your hand like another chain.

So I give it to you wrapped in cloth inside this envelope. It belonged to my mother before Arthur. Keep it if you can forgive me. Wear it only if your answer to the question I failed to ask is yes. I will not ask you to make that promise in my absence.

I am sorry for the taking.

I am not sorry for loving you.

If I do not return, do not make a prison out of waiting. Let them care for you. Let Conall tell you the truth.

Live, Leah.

Make art. Make trouble. Grow old enough to become more terrifying than you are.

And if you remember me, remember me as I was with you after you set me free. Not the man who showed you how cold winter can be, or the one you first knew in chains.

Remember the man who sat still beneath your lens and believed, for one second, that even monsters could be seen without being condemned for what had made them that way.

‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’

—Kierkegaard

Forever yours,

Elias.

The page blurs. I drag in a breath, but it hooks halfway and tears my soul into shreds.

The ring lies in my palm – a narrow band of silver, etched with a braided pattern worn almost smooth by his mother, and with a bright rock in its centre. With his question burning straight through it. Straight through the bone. Straight through my chest.

A sound comes out of me. Smaller than a sob but way uglier, drawn out of a place I had kept locked since the first time I looked at his ruin and made it my own.

My fingers close around the ring so tightly the edge bites into my skin, and I bend over the table as if my body can fold itself around the hole inside me.

His words roll in my head and splinter in my lungs.

Brute’s nose bumps my ankle. Menace presses his head hard against my shin and remains there. His brother licks once at my clenched hand. As if they can see the fragments coming off me and are trying to put them back.

The contact drags me back into the room. Back to the apples and plums scattered across the table. Back to the ring cutting into my palm. The cabin he built around me like a shelter and a sentence in one.

Elias had brought me here and taught me how to live in this place where not even clouds can find me. He gave me guard dogs. He gave me access to his family.

So I could survive.

Without him.