The Revenge

The Echoes of Regret

Let me ask you something.

What would you do if you had to lose the one person who knew you completely? Not the version of you that showed up to class on time and laughed at the right moments — but the real one. The one underneath.

My name is Jasmine Herrera. And today is the day Alex walks out of prison.

Today is the day two years of waiting becomes something I can no longer prepare for.

Jasmine — morning

I woke at 6:47, eight minutes before my alarm. I lay still, phone face-down on the mattress, and watched the light shift across the ceiling. I already knew the date. I just wasn't ready to confirm it.

Riley knocked at eight.

"Ready?" she asked when I opened the door. She looked me over with those sharp, honest eyes of hers. "Never mind. Let's go."

I grabbed my bag and followed her out without a word. Outside, the city was doing what it always does — indifferent, bright, moving. Strangers with coffee. Pigeons. A bus hissing to a stop. The world had no idea what day this was, and the world was fine.

Alex was being released this morning after two years. Two years that were, in every way that mattered, my fault.

I keep returning to the last moment I saw him — the courthouse steps, his hands cuffed in front of him, two officers at his sides. He didn't shout. He didn't fight. He just turned and looked at me, and in a voice so quiet I almost didn't catch it, he said:

"I'll find you, Jas. When I get out — I'll find you."

People who are truly serious don't raise their voices. I've always known that. I just never thought I'd be the one on the receiving end of it.

•

We'd grown up three houses apart — him at fourteen, me at sixteen, a fact that had made us something like inevitable. As children, we raced to the corner of the street and argued over who'd won. As teenagers, we argued over everything else. He was the only person I've ever known who could sit beside me in complete silence and make it feel like enough. No performance, no filling the air. Just presence.

He had a way of seeing through things — through moods, through excuses, through the careful face I showed the rest of the world. I used to find it annoying. Now I'd give almost anything to have someone look at me that way again.

I sent him to prison.

And no one knows the full story. Not Riley. Not any of my other friends. And I intend to keep it that way — not to protect myself, though it does that too, but because the truth is something I'm still not sure, I've earned the right to say out loud.

•

Mark was waiting for us in the university hallway, holding two coffees like a peace offering.

"How are you doing?" he asked. Mark had never learned the art of small talk, which was one of the things I loved about him.

"Fine."

"You're lying."

"I know."

He handed me a coffee and let the subject drop. Riley launched into a story about Barcelona — a lost suitcase, a hostel mix-up, a street performer who'd stolen her sunglasses and somehow made it charming. I laughed at the right moments. She knew I was only half-present, and she kept talking anyway. That's what Riley does. She fills the silence until you're ready to come back.

Then Richard Coleman walked in, and the room rearranged itself around him.

That's the only way I know how to describe it. He didn't announce himself — he never needed to. He was the kind of person who moved through spaces as though they had been built for him, and perhaps in his world they had been. Wealthy, composed, unhurried. Handsome in a way that he'd clearly been told about too many times.

He passed our table without stopping.

"Jasmine," he said. Just my name. That tone — light, almost casual, with something deliberate underneath it, like a blade resting flat against your palm.

"Richard," I replied, without looking up.

He leaned down, close enough that only I could hear: "You know what day it is."

Not a question. He didn't want an answer. He wanted to see what the words did to my face.

I picked up my coffee and drank. My hands were steady. I'm still proud of that.

Jasmine — that evening

Riley convinced me to go to the party. I said no, then no again, then once more with feeling, and somehow still ended up in the back of Mark's car watching the Coleman house rise out of the dark at the end of the street — all lit windows and bass-heavy music and the particular atmosphere of people trying very hard to feel something.

Two hours, I told myself. Then I'm leaving.

Inside, I found a corner near the window and decided that if I was going to be here, I'd be a spectator. Observe, don't engage. I was good at that.

Richard found me half an hour in.

He didn't pretend to be passing by. He just sat down, signaled a server without looking at him, and placed one of the two drinks in front of me.

"I'm not negotiating," he said. "It's a drink."

I studied him for a moment. He was hard to read, which was itself a kind of warning — the moments he seemed almost reasonable were precisely the moments I should have been most careful of.

"Why?" I asked.

He looked at his glass. "Because I knew Alex. Not the way you did. But I knew him." A pause. "And I know what today is for you."

I hadn't expected that. I didn't entirely trust it. But I picked up the drink.

•

I'm not certain how we ended up talking about art — it might have been the alcohol, or the fact that I was tired of guarding every word, or simply that I wanted, for one hour, to be a person who wasn't carrying all of this. Richard knew things I hadn't expected him to know: a gallery in the West Village, a Hungarian painter from the 1920s whose work I'd written a paper on. He spoke carefully, without performing. I let my attention settle.

Which is how I made the mistake of following him upstairs.

"There's a piece up here," he'd said. "From that period. I think you'd want to see it."

I should have said no. I knew I should have said no.

I didn't.

•

The bedroom was dim and still. The painting hung on the far wall — large, black and white, a figure seated with its head bowed, something grief-struck and dignified about it. I crossed the room and stood in front of it, and for a moment I forgot everything else.

"You like it," Richard said.

"Yes." I leaned closer. "There's something unresolved about him. Like he's waiting for something he's not sure will come."

Silence.

Then: "Jas."

His voice had changed. I turned.

He was too close. I recognised the shift immediately — the way the room contracted, the way his attention narrowed. I had seen this before, years ago, and I had spent a long time trying to forget it.

"I came to see the painting," I said. Clearly. Evenly.

"I know you did."

"Richard." I held his gaze. "Step back."

He didn't.

He raised one hand and placed it flat against the wall beside my head, and something cold moved through me — not fear, exactly, but its older, quieter cousin. Recognition.

"I'm going to say this once." My voice didn't waver. I made sure of it. "Move. Now."

Something shifted in his expression — a flicker of something I might have called surprise if I'd been feeling generous. He wasn't accustomed to that particular register. Most people, I suspected, didn't use it with him.

He opened his mouth. And the door opened.

•

I hadn't heard footsteps. I didn't know how long it had been unlocked, or who had opened it, or what they had seen.

I only know that when I looked toward the doorway, my chest stopped.

He was taller than I remembered. Broader through the shoulders, something harder in the set of his jaw. He stood absolutely still in the frame of the door, and his eyes — those familiar, impossible eyes — moved from me to Richard, and then back to me.

And in them there was nothing I recognised. Nothing of the boy who had raced me to the corner. Nothing of the person who had sat beside me in silence and made it feel like enough.

"Alex," I breathed.

He looked at me for a long moment. Long enough that I thought — hoped, dreaded — that he might speak.

Then he turned, and walked away.

"Alex—"

The door swung shut behind him. Softly. No slam, no drama. Just the quiet click of a latch finding its place.

He always knew how to make silence say the most.

I just forgot, for two years, that I was the reason he'd had to learn.