Page 69 of This Haunted Heart

“You locked away the room with the black door, and you came for me,” she said, swiping at her eyes. “Because you still blame me fully. Even for the things that wicked man was responsible for. He was horrid and he let you think he killed me. You came to settle the score. I know that the ring I stole was precious to you and—”

“You took more than that from me!”

“A few dollars—”

“And myheart,” I growled, clutching at my breast. “You ripped it right out of my chest!”

“Your haunted heart was never stolen,” she said, voice wobbly and hollow with threatening tears. “You gave me that willingly and took mine in return!”

“When did all of it stop being real for you?” My voice went cold and hard, and my hands balled into fists. Anger was a much sturdier emotion, a thing I could grab at that hurt so much less than the ugly monster still trying to tear at the organ in my chest. “That’s what I still don’t understand.”

She blinked at me, and her jaw set. “I beg your pardon?”

“When did I become a mark to you? A thing to trick and toy with until you had what you wanted so you could run away?”

Her next breath was a shallow rasp. “How dare you say that to me!”

“I want to know!”

“Fuck what you want to know! Howdareyou! All we endured together,” she said, doe eyes glistening with welling tears, “all that pain and torment . . . I protected you. I cared for you. Ilovedyou! I love you still! I couldn’t stop loving you even if I wanted to. I was never pretending with you. One night, I did a stupid, impulsive, selfish thing. A dreadful thingthat I willloatheuntil I breathe my last. Twenty years you searched for me? Well, for twenty years I’ve carried the shame of that terrible night on my back. It will remain there with me, weighing me down until it finally wins and crushes the life out of me. Is that what you want to hear?”

“The last twenty years were your choice!” I flung at her.

“I know!” she screamed in my face, her hands in fists. “And they were the wrong choice! The wretched one, the worst one! The one that I can’t ever get away from. Can’t run fast enough from. Nothing I do, it doesn’t matter. I won’t ever escape it.”

“When are you going to stop running?” I begged her.

She wrung her hands in her dress, creasing the fabric. “When are you going to stop blaming me and finally,finally, blame the monster who raised you for all of it?”

“I murdered that monster, Rynn!” I rumbled. “I choked the life out of him, I blamed him so.”

“Then why can’t we blame him forallof it?” she shouted. “That’s what I mean! Let all the blame die with him. Instead, you insist on burdening me and Martha and Gertrude and Boren! Everyone but yourself.”

I shoved my hands into my pockets, unsure what to do with them. My heart had cracked open, and I couldn’t stop any of the words from coming out now. “You left me with no warning to face the consequences of what you’d done alone. Youleftme when one single word from you could have spared me two decades of grief-stricken torment without you.”

“Stop it!” She pressed her palms to her ears. “Just stop! I don’t need your help to feel more wretched than I already do!”

“Only you could have spared me from the most devastating loss of my life, but you lacked the care for even the smallestgesture. My ring, sent back to me in an envelope. That’s all it would have taken!”

“I didn’t know you thought I was dead! And I didn’t know that monster was gone!” she cried. “I didn’t dare come back for you even in my weakest moments when I desperately wanted to because I was certain doing so would . . .”

“Would what?” I demanded.

“I knew you would punish me, and I knew I would deserve it . . .” She licked her lips. “Sometimes I’m certain you want me to love you still.”

“I do,” I breathed, my anger cooling like a hot coal dropped in a bank of snow. “I will always want that.”

“Then sometimes I think you just want to ruin me. You want to break my heart and carry the shattered remains around in your pocket. It feels like you want me to let you punish me forevermore.”

“I want that, too,” I confessed.

She hung her head, and her black curls curtained her face. “But you can’t have both, Loch! You just can’t. Eventually—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head because I already knew what she was going to say.

“Eventually,” she pressed, catching my sleeve and fisting her fingers into it, “you have to forgive me. You have to let what happened go.”

“You mean I have to letyougo. You want me to watch you run away from me again. I’ve already endured the loss of you, Rynn. It destroyed me. There’s hardly anything left. I won’t survive more of that.”

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