I woke up somewhere that wasn’t mine.
The ceiling was too high, dark beams crossing it in a pattern I didn’t recognise, and the sheets under me smelled like cedar and nothing else, no trace of the washing powder I used at home, no trace of anything lived-in at all. I was wearing one of Damian’s shirts, the soft grey one, buttoned crooked in a way that told me someone else had done it, carefully, without looking at me the wrong way while they did.
I sat up slowly, my head splitting, and understood, piece by piece, exactly where I wasn’t.
The house was enormous and empty in a way that had nothing to do with square footage. Bare stone walls. A staircase that curved down into a hall with no photographs on it, no clutter, no sign that a single ordinary day had ever happened inside it. Through the tall windows I could see nothing but trees, dense and dark, climbing away down a hillside I didn’t recognize, no road, no neighbors, nothing at all to suggest this was a place anyone actually lived rather than a place someone had built, decades ago perhaps, and simply left standing, waiting, the way you’d keep a room ready for a guest who never came.
Damian was on the far side of it, out on a stone terrace visible through the glass, standing with his back to the house, hands in his pockets, still as the trees behind him.
I don’t remember crossing the room. I remember the cold of the terrace stones through my bare feet, and then my fist connecting with his jaw, once, hard enough to hurt my own hand, and he didn’t so much as turn his head with the force of it.
So I hit him again. And again. Both fists now, everywhere I could reach, his chest, his shoulders, the side of his face, sobbing so hard the words barely came out as words at all, and he stood and let me, didn’t step back, didn’t raise a hand to stop me, didn’t do anything at all except absorb it, over and over, like I was hurling handfuls of hail at a cliff that had endured far harsher storms long before I was born and had no intention of yielding to this one.
“You knew.” My voice came out in pieces, nothing joining up right. “You knew what Michael, what he, you held me. You held me while I cried about it. You said, you said I deserved better than, than a man who made me feel like this. And then you.” I couldn’t finish it. I hit him again instead, weaker this time, my hand already aching. “You let me feel it again. You let me stand there. You let her come and tell me and I still, I still, I gave you the, the benefit, I always do that, I always, I give people the benefit of doubt, right up until.” My chest was heaving too hard to get the rest out. “Right up until they make me an idiot for it.”
My fists had gone from hitting to simply gripping the front of his shirt, my whole body shaking too hard to stay upright on its own, and he finally moved, both arms coming around me, not to stop me but to hold me up, to keep me from going down onto the cold stone entirely.
“Let go of me.” I fought him properly now, shoving at his chest, twisting against arms that didn’t so much as loosen. “Let go, don’t touch me, don’t you dare…”
He didn’t let go. He held on through all of it, through every shove and every half-finished, furious sentence, until the fighting wore itself down into something smaller and worse, just crying, just my whole body folded into his because there was nowhere else left for it to go, and only then did he move at all, one hand coming up to press my knuckles, bruised now from his own jaw, gently to his mouth.
He kissed my hand. Then the other one. Then, when I finally lifted my face to look at him, too exhausted to keep fighting, he cupped my jaw and kissed my forehead, my temple, the corner of my mouth, careful, wrecked, his own face open in a way I had never once seen it, five hundred years of composure gone entirely, replaced with something that looked exactly like a man watching the one thing he couldn’t survive losing slip through his hands in real time.
“I know,” he said, very quietly, against my hair. “I know exactly what I did to you last night. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t what it looked like, because it was. I need you to hate me for as long as you need to. I’m not going anywhere while you do it.”
I didn’t hit him again. I didn’t have anything left to hit him with.
“I need to go home,” I said, and my voice came out flat, wrung completely dry. “Noah’s at Priya’s. I need to see my son.”
“Sarah, please, let me explain the rest of it, let me tell you what I am, what this actually means, you deserve to hear all of it before you decide anything—”
“Not today.” I stepped back from him, out of the circle of his arms, and watched something in his face come apart at the distance. “I can’t hold anything else today, Damian. I’m already full to the brim with things I don’t understand.”
He went down on his knees on the cold stone of that terrace, right in front of me, five hundred years of composure gone entirely, and caught both my hands in his before I could pull them away.
“Don’t leave like this,” he said, and his voice cracked on it, actually cracked, in a way I hadn’t heard from him even in the pool block, even with a bottle at Noah’s throat. “I will tell you everything. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever you’re ready to hear it, I’ll get down on the ground and stay there as long as it takes. Just don’t leave thinking I did this because I wanted to. Please, Sarah.”
I looked down at him, at a man who had survived five centuries kneeling on stone for one frightened, furious woman, and felt something in me want to stay and something else, older and more tired, insisting I couldn’t.
“I’m not leaving you,” I said quietly. “I’m going to my son. There’s a difference, even if it doesn’t feel like one to you right now.”
He drove me home himself, silent the whole way, and didn’t come inside.
Noah and I spent that weekend with the curtains drawn and the doors double-locked, and I told him it was because of a possum getting into the roof, a lie so far beneath the real terror sitting in my chest that it almost made me laugh, except I didn’t have a laugh left in me anywhere. I didn’t know what that girl was capable of. I didn’t even know her name yet, only her face, only what she’d screamed at me in the gym doorway. I didn’t know if she’d followed Damian home from that alley, if she knew our address, if she was even still alive after what I’d watched him do to her. I only knew that I couldn’t look at my son’s face without seeing, underneath it, the shape of everything I still didn’t understand about the man who loved us both.