Page 30 of Where Light Cannot Follow

"Unforgiveness. It will block you from moving forward. I've witnessed this before."

A laugh tears out of me. It’s ugly, uncontrolled, nothing like the measured chuckle I've perfected for boardrooms and cocktail parties. Something about racing through the most painful moments of my life in rapid succession has ripped an old, bruised scab off me, and now I'm weeping fresh blood and pain. "Are you telling me to forgive that bastard?" I point behind us, toward the space where my father had stood. "After everything you just witnessed?"

"Monsters aren't monsters when they're born." His voice is gentle, unhurried. “And I’m actually asking you to forgive yourself for trusting him.”

I scoff, but gather myself. I am not twenty-eight and senseless anymore. I'm a man of hard choices and security I crafted by my own hands. "You sound like some cheap armchair therapist. You don't know the number of people that man harmed.”

"I don't doubt it.” Virgil's gaze holds mine, patient as stone. "I wonder, though, why he did so? Why do you think men treat those they see as beneath them without dignity?"

A memory slices through my mind unbidden. Ms. Hernandez's crumpling face as I intoned, Do you want to explain why you've wasted ten minutes of my time? The way she'd flinched when I said perhaps her mother would die. The way I hadn't cared.

The bell ringer in the cold, her smile dying as I lectured her about personal responsibility.

Matthew's voice, broken and begging: I want you. That's all I've ever wanted.

My own voice, cold as the December air: The problem is, I've always wanted more.

I meet Virgil's soft, judgmentless gaze. Something in my chest cracks. Not breaks, not yet, but fractures along a fault line I didn't know existed.

"I don't know," I whisper.

A click echoes into the silence.

The door swings open.

13

VIRGIL

Dante gulps in air as we emerge onto the bog once more, gasping like a fish too long from water. His chest rises and falls with a rhythm his body remembers, even though his lungs are only figments shaped by emotion.

"Here," I say. "Follow me."

He does so without protest or question. We turn a corner, slightly off the path, to where an ancient bench sits half-swallowed by rotted vines and dead flowers. It's one of the many oddities I've discovered in my explorations through the centuries—remnants of other souls' imaginings, perhaps, or simply the detritus that accumulates in a place built from grief.

"Sit."

Dante follows my command without so much as a glance at the seat. He doesn't worry over his expensive clothing or his dignity. He folds into the furniture, shoulders collapsing inward.

I lower myself beside him, careful to ensure we don't touch at any point. My lack of physical presence, my inability to offer even the simple comfort of a hand on his shoulder, would only unsettle him further.

I've witnessed hundreds of genesis events from souls I've guided through the bog. They're part of the reason I must, at times, retreat into solitude. Absorbing the secret shames, the darkest moments, the worst choices of a person's life alongside them, feeling each pain fresh as they relive it, is like approaching a blade and running until it pierces through me. Then withdrawing. Then running again.

But this was different. Painful in the manner of brushing against stinging nettle with the burn only intensifying, continuing to bloom, and ache long after contact. I cannot decide if it's the content of his genesis that has affected me so, or simply the fact that such events happened to him. I find myself wishing I could have witnessed a different Michael Dante. One who had only ever been loved, accepted, embraced. Of course, ironically, I would never have met such a man. He wouldn't be here. It's the pain that traps us in this place, after all.

"I had a love in my mortal lifetime as well," I say, addressing the sagging tree before us rather than Dante. I suspect he won't respond well to being studied too directly at present.

Frogs croak their endless chorus. A wind presses the branches of the dying tree downward in a slow bow. Small insects skate across the water's surface near our shoes—my white sneakers untouched, his leather ones caked with mud.

"Did you see him again here?"

I chuckle softly. "Musa never came here. It is perhaps the one true mercy I've received in all my miseries since."

This draws him out of himself. He shifts toward me, almost close enough to touch, and carefully I slide farther away. He registers this with a frown but doesn't comment. It isn't distance I wish to create for my own comfort, but for his. He scrapes a hand back through his dark hair, ruffling it from its usual severity.

"Not everyone comes here?"

"Not those who lived free from most loops. This place—hell—does not exist, Dante."