Page 40 of Light As A Feather
“I didn’t want to leave, but Ihadto. Don’t you know that? It was the only way to protect you.” Taking a deep breath, I attempt to steady myself as the echoes of that bleak time awaken inside me. “He wasn’t willing to wait for me to die, not with our love on full display in front of him. It was driving him mad with jealousy—it was driving me mad.” Tapping my forehead, I try to calm some of the chaos that’s been unleashed as I go back down this path, but even stimming doesn’t help as I feel myself becoming untethered from this moment and thrust back into that time where I felt I was being ripped in two. “He wasalwaysthere. Always whispering in my ear. Always plotting, always scheming.”
“Sol…” He reaches for me, but I shake my head and tuck my arms across my waist. I could beg him to just let me finish, but instead, I rush the words out, hoping to get ahead of whatever questions or reassurances he might try to interrupt with.
“It became too much, all the poison he was feeding me, all the threats he was more than ready to act on. He suffocated me to the point that I had no choice but to either crumble under the weight or do the only thing I could think of that would save at least one of us.”
“And that was leaving?”
“Yes.” The singular word is as desperate as I felt that night I snuck away.
“I wish you’d told me all of this before you ran.”
“I didn’t run.” The defensiveness in my voice is brittle.
“Didn’t you? You flew right away, Nightingale.”
“Like I said, there was no other way.”
“Wasn’t there?” A few beats pass as he chews the inside of his cheek, heavily debating what he wants to say. “Whydidn’t you tell me?” His own frustration matches mine, cutting recklessly into the tension mounting between us.
In that grating static, there’s a truth that I haven’t been ready to admit and Hawthorne isn’t ready to accept, and yet it grows louder and louder as we go around and around. Any moment, it’ll break free and drown everything else out.
“Why didn’t you notice?” I explode under the weight I’ve placed on myself for so many years. Putrid tears I’ve been holding back burn acid-like as they finally break free. “Why couldn’t you see what he was doing to me?”
Hawthorne staggers back. There’s the fine torment of betrayal and failure painted in the pained expression on his face. “I didnt?—”
“I know,” I can’t help but say, because I know that he wouldn’t have let me suffer alone if he knew of the torture I was enduring all that time. But I can’t help how the question is always there in the back of my mind.
“I should have known, but I didn’t.” His confusion matches mine. “How did I not know?”
I shrug because it’s all I have. I’ve asked myself a million times. I have no answer. In my most tormented moments, caught up in the fumes of Ivan’s disdain for him, I told myself that maybe he did and he didn’t care. But that reasoning never stuck, because of course he did. I know without a doubt that he would have intervened if he knew. But why didn’t he know?How is that possiblewhen he straddles the line between the living and the dead?
“I’m so fucking sorry.” He drops his head in his hands, shame darkening his usually bright aura. “Fuck. How could I have missed it?”
“I don’t understand it either.”
“That fucking coward.” Anger darkens his tone, but it’s not directed at me. “I don’t know how he did it, but he must have hidden himself from me or something…”
“But don’t you just see everything. Living and dead? Isn’t it just all around you?”
“Technically, yes. But also no. Could I theoretically do that, yeah, but it’d be hella overwhelming. And my willingness to see is only part of the equation. Whether we see the dead has a lot to do with their own intentions. And someone who’s been dead as long as Ivan, he has more control than I even fully understand.”
“I didn’t realize it was so complicated,” I admit, shocked that I’m the one who’s learning from him now. I might have had a head start, but his submersion into this world, by no choice of his own, has reversed our roles. “Regardless of how it works, that wasn’t fair of me. None of the blame is on you. I shouldn’t have said that, it’s just something that used to creep in the back of my mind when I was feeling helpless.”
“As if I wasn’t already thinking it,” he sighs.
“The how and why doesn’t really matter. What happened is in the past.”
“Like hell it doesn’t matter. Before I end that piece of shit, I fully intend to extort whatever little value he has to offer.”
“Good luck with that.” I don’t mean it condescendingly, but I know Ivan. I would consider myself the most stubborn person I know, and even he has me beat. And worse, he’s spiteful to the core.
“You keep underestimating me, Sol. I suppose I can’t blame you. But once you meet the rest of Veiled Coast, once you see what we do, you’ll realize just how far I’ve come from back then.” He huffs a laugh, and it startles me, such a simple thing that he gives life to despite the heaviness surrounding us. “I used to be so afraid, so uncertain. But now, this feels like it was always supposed to be part of my life. As if I was the one born with this gift and not the other way around.”
My face twists with confusion. When I left, Hawthorne hated the existence he’d been forced into by Ivan. He’d felt trapped andoverwhelmed by the new world around him. Could so much have really changed in those years apart?
“I know you think that you’re responsible for ruining my life. I can’t say that things wouldn’t be easier, more peaceful, if I’d never died. But I’ve come to accept it, embrace it. I don’t begrudge you for it, so I need you to stop punishing yourself if we’re ever going to move forward with our lives. Can you do that?”
“What about everything I just told you? What about me ushering him into our lives and letting him come between us? You can’t tell me that doesn’t change anything.”
