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I nodded but didn’t look at him, not wanting to look away from her.
“I’m afraid you’ll disappear,” I whisper.
“I won’t. Not ever again,” she said.
I pulled away from her and then sat, staring, so many emotions surging through me I could barely process them.
“There’s so much I want to say,” she said, looking afraid in a way that surprised me.
“Then say it,” I said.
“I love you,” she said.
I didn’t respond, not sure what to say, not sure what I even wanted to say.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she added quickly. “And I don’t expect anything from you. I know this is hard, and I know that you have your own family now. I don’t want anything from you, Amethyst. I just wanted to look at you. Hug you. Anything else is entirely up to you.”
Part of me wondered if that was a ploy.
My emotions were swirling, a complete and total mess, but one thing was very clear.
I knew that if she had come in with an agenda, if she had demanded things of me, I could retreat into anger, push her away, and feel okay about it.
But this…
“Are you trying to play me?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I told you what I was here for. You don’t even owe me that.”
I looked at her, suddenly on alert.
“How could you leave me with him?” I asked, my voice cracking over my words.
“I didn’t want to,” she said.
“Then what happened?”
“He drugged me. Faked my death. Left me in that awful place to punish me,” she said, retelling the story Davit had already shared.
“And you miraculously found an escape decades later,” I said.
“There was nothing miraculous about it. That was a solid decade of planning and getting my ducks in a row.”
“And not just to see me?” I said, speaking something that I had suspected.
Because after what had happened with Crystal, I knew that love could move mountains.
Knew that the promise of revenge could too.
“Seeing you was the primary reason,” she said.
“What were the others?” I asked.
She shifted where she sat and met my eyes. “To make sure that I was standing over him when he took his last breath.”
She said the words with a conviction that I had seldom seen but felt so deeply.
Said the words in a way that made me believe her.
I stood and checked my watch. “I’ll make lunch. Then we can catch up,” I said.
