Page 42 of These Tears

Elias has gone quiet.

I curse myself for saying it aloud. Hate myself more for feeling every word of it.

‘What really happened with your fiancé, Leah?’ he murmurs.

The weight of the past settles over me until my lids grow too heavy to keep open. I focus on my breathing before the black spots start blooming behind my closed eyes. My tongue won’t work. My hands won’t unclench.

I’ve been holding out on him almost as much as he has been holding out on me. Secrets can go on for only so long before they burn through whatever keeps them alive.

I decide to say it aloud. ‘I told you. He slept with another woman.’

My voice sounds too small. I hate how little it resembles me.

When my eyes open, I focus on the paint peeling from the base of the wall. Because if I look at him…

‘While I was picking out wedding invitations, her message came up on his phone. She wrote she was waiting for him in a hotel. He’d told me he was going to play darts with his friends.’

I still don’t dare look at him. That disgusting emptiness I’ve spent months avoiding opens in the pit of my stomach and spreads outwards until my fists start cramping against the table’s surface.

‘There are rotten people in this world.’

The moment he says it, my gaze snaps to his.

The words should feel comforting. But they stab into a soft part of me instead.

Perhaps because rotten is too easy a word when it comes from a man chained to the floor for supposedly killing his father.

I raise my chin a small fraction. ‘Is that what Arthur was, too? Rotten?’

His face empties – a sudden, terrible blankness that makes the room lose what little colour it holds.

Then his face turns towards the steel around his wrists. His shoulders draw tighter as if whatever has climbed into his body has found all the sore spots and he is now trying to contain the bleed.

I wait one beat.

Then another.

‘My father,’ he says at last, voice low and scraped clean of softness, ‘was one of the rottenest men that ever walked this world.’

My throat closes, but I don’t make a single motion.

His eyes trace the wretched memory along the links. ‘He came at me that night the way he always did. Words first. Threats after. Same filth, same promises, same performance.’ His jaw ticks once. ‘Spouting things about her. Me. That he would make us both pay for—’ He swallows the rest. Lets a breath erase what has festered in his lungs. The presence of the nameless woman fills the space until I have to shift in my chair to rid myself of the sensation. ‘He came at me. Except that time… I was tired. I was…’ He shuts his eyes tight for a brief moment. ‘I was properly tired. He opened his mouth to continue his tirade, and I just… stopped caring what happened next.’

The chain rattles softly as his fingers curl.

‘He kept talking. I stood up.’ Elias’ eyes lift to mine. His voice is too flat for the violence behind the words. ‘I put my hand around his throat and squeezed until he no longer could.’

‘You told the police that?’

His silence answers for him.

I remember what Cromwell had told me, then. A hand around his father’s throat doesn’t explain a face destroyed beyond recognition. There is something missing between those two truths, and Elias knows exactly what it is.

‘His face was caved in when they found him.’

He narrows his gaze at me.

My gut clenches.