Page 55 of Antihero
“You once told me that I didn’t believe I deserved happiness. But you’re the same. Do you really think you deserve to die?”
Charlotte sighs, staring outwards again. “It’s not up for me to decide what I deserve anymore. But if the Wraith comes for me, which I think you know they will, I won’t fight it.”
“Charlotte…”
“Tristan,” she says back, surprising me with my real name. “It’s been too late for me for a long time. But you can still leave. You’ve found your missing pieces now.”
I laugh bitterly. “You’re notstilltrying to be my psychiatrist?”
Charlotte presses on, her tears forgotten. “Let me. Tell me why you started killing.”
My eyes narrow. “If you know who I am, you know that, too.”
“Say it out loud.”
I sigh through my nose. After everything Charlotte just told me, after all her patience with my recalcitrant ass these past months, I suppose I owe her an answer. Even if it’s just to satisfy her professional curiosity. “I started hunting murderers because I thought one had killed my sister.”
“But she was a killer, too.”
“Yes.” The word catches in my throat. I know what Charlotte is waiting for. “I had to kill her.”
“Did you? Have to?”
I open my mouth to sayno, then close it again. I’d always thought it was a choice I’d made, to end her the way I did. That I could’ve chosen otherwise and been a better man for it.
“What else do you think you could’ve done?” Charlotte asks insistently.
“I could’ve…” I trail off, then conclude weakly, “Let her kill the woman who was helping me, while I and the man who loved her watched.” As I say it, I see how improbable that option sounds. What if I had done that? What might that’ve birthed? More hatred, endless regret. Dirk would have cut me into little pieces on his way to killing Cassandra, probably in just the way I would have if she’d not been my sister. In the end, I’d have let him kill me just to be free of the self-loathing.
“I could’ve let her keep doing what she was doing.”
But I couldn’t have. Charlotte smiles softly. She knows this. “You, being who you became, and her being who she was, that wasn’t really a choice, was it? You did the only thing you could have.”
I feel a little dizzy, like something kept behind walls in my mind is suddenly releasing. I feel heavy in my chair. But no tears fall. Because this feeling isn’t grief. I’ve had enough of grief. This is… realisation. Truth.
“Tristan,” Charlotte says, “Now you see, you do deserve happiness. It can be something, or someone, who reminds you how to live again. But in the end, it has to be you choosing to live, with or without them.”
Would I go on? Without Paige? Yes, I now think I’d still leave this island and Tregam, try to carve out a life for myself, not divorced from my past but at least free from it. But I want more than anything to do it with her instead. For whatever time we could possibly have.
Charlotte, watching me, smiles. “I think you’ve already chosen.”
***
Wraith
I heard him.
I didn’t say it back. I wanted to, so much that my chest constricts just thinking about it. How I could’ve opened my eyes, kissed him, said sorry for the terrible things I said. And then told him I loved him too.
But that wouldn’t be fair.
“Paige? Do you understand what I’m saying?” The soft voice brings me back. Colour has drained from the small, sterile room. Probably from me, too. Dr Goodry is peering at me. That look—concern, yes, and… pity.
My mouth forms the words, ones I knew I’d say someday. They come out clear, even. “I’m sick. It’s happened.”
The pity is outracing the concern now. “I’m afraid so.” His hand, brown and wrinkled, pats the back of mine. I barely feel it. “We can fight it. Youcanbeat it…”
“They’re low, though, aren’t they? The odds.”
