VOWS OF VENGEANCE

CHAPTER 2

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There is a version of me that still exists somewhere, frozen in time, that I try not to visit too often.

She lived in an apartment with too much natural light and not enough furniture, because she spent every spare dollar on canvas and paint instead of the kind of chairs people were supposed to have. She kept fresh flowers on the kitchen table even when money was tight, because she believed — actually believed, with the kind of conviction that embarrasses me now — that beauty was not a luxury but a necessity, that a life without it wasn't a life worth maintaining.

She laughed loudly. I remember that specifically, because I don't anymore. She laughed with her whole chest, the kind of laugh that turned heads in restaurants, and she was never embarrassed by it because it had never once occurred to her that loudness was a vulnerability.

She trusted people.

That was the thing about her — about me, about the girl I used to be — that I find hardest to reconcile with who I became. Not naive, exactly. I want to be precise about this, because precision matters and I have learned to demand it of myself in every other area of my life, so I will demand it here too. I was not naive. I understood, in an abstract way, that people could be cruel, that the world contained danger, that not everyone meant what they said.

I simply believed none of that applied to the people I had chosen to love.

I think that's a different kind of foolishness. The dangerous kind. Naivety can be educated out of a person with enough exposure to the world. What I had was something closer to faith, and faith doesn't bend to evidence the way naivety does. Faith requires betrayal to break it.

I got betrayal in abundance.

But that comes later.

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I met Callum Wright at an art gallery opening eighteen months before everything fell apart.

I was twenty-four. I had two paintings hanging in a group show in a gallery that smelled like good wine and expensive cologne and the particular nervous energy of artists watching strangers look at their work and trying not to watch them watching. I remember standing near my paintings — not directly beside them, because that felt desperate, but close enough to overhear what people said when they thought the artist wasn't listening.

He was looking at the larger of my two pieces when I noticed him.

It was a painting I'd made during a difficult winter — abstract, mostly blues and grays with a single thread of gold running through the composition like something refusing to be extinguished. I'd called it *Still Here.* I'd never told anyone what it actually meant, what winter I'd been surviving when I made it, what the gold thread represented to me even though I couldn't have articulated it cleanly if you'd asked.

He looked at it for a long time. Longer than most people looked at anything in that gallery, where the social currency was moving quickly from piece to piece, offering opinions, being seen having opinions.

Then he turned and found me watching him, and instead of looking embarrassed, he smiled — easy, unguarded, the kind of smile that made you feel like you were the only interesting thing in a room full of interesting things.

*"This one's yours,"* he said. Not a question.

*"How did you know?"*

*"Because you've been standing six feet away from it for twenty minutes pretending to look at the other pieces."*

I remember laughing. I remember being charmed by being caught.

*"What does it mean to you?"* he asked. *"The gold."*

I should have found that question intrusive. I should have deflected the way I deflected every other version of that question that night. Instead I told him — actually told him, a near stranger, something true about a piece I'd never explained to anyone — that the gold was the part of me that survived things. That refused to stop showing up even when everything around it suggested it should.

He listened to all of it. Really listened, the way few people actually do — not waiting for his turn to speak, not formulating his response while I was still talking, just present and attentive in a way that felt, at the time, like the rarest gift anyone had ever given me.

*"I'd like to know more about the parts of you that survive things,"* he said.

I didn't know yet that he was very, very good at saying exactly what a person needed to hear.

I learned.

It took me five years in a cell to fully learn it, but I learned it eventually, the way you learn anything that costs you everything to understand.

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We were together for two years before he proposed.

I want to be honest about this, because honesty is the only thing I have left that feels entirely mine, untouched by what came after: those two years were good. I am not going to pretend otherwise to make my own story cleaner, to make the betrayal land harder by claiming I should have seen it coming from the very beginning. I didn't see it coming. There was very little to see.

He was attentive. He remembered things — small things, the kind of details that prove someone is actually listening rather than performing the appearance of listening. He showed up to every gallery opening, every show, no matter how small, and he stood in the back where artists could see him without it looking like he needed credit for being there.

He told me he loved my mind before he ever mentioned my face, and I believed that meant something, because it had never occurred to me that a man could perform that particular sequence of compliments as deliberately as he might have performed any other seduction.

I think about that a great deal now. How performance and authenticity can look identical from the outside. How the only real difference between a man who loves you and a man who has studied exactly what loving you would look like is something you cannot see until it's far, far too late to matter.

He proposed on a Tuesday. Nothing dramatic, nothing staged for an audience — that was part of what made it feel real, the lack of theater. We were in my apartment, the one with too much light and not enough furniture, and he got down on one knee in the kitchen between the flowers and the unwashed dishes and asked me to marry him with a ring that I later learned, far too late, had been purchased with money that traced back to something I never could have imagined.

I said yes before he finished the sentence.

I remember that. I remember not waiting for the end of the question, because I already knew my answer, because I had known it for months, because I had built an entire future in my head out of a man I thought I understood completely.

I understood almost nothing.

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There is a particular kind of pain in remembering happiness accurately.

It would be easier — I have thought about this many times, sitting in the dark with eleven steps between me and a door I wasn't allowed to open — it would be so much easier if I could simply rewrite those two years. If I could decide, retroactively, that I'd always sensed something was wrong, that some instinct had been whispering warnings I chose to ignore.

But that would be a lie, and I have built the entire architecture of my survival on refusing to lie to myself, even when the truth is the harder thing to carry.

The truth is that I loved him completely. The truth is that the version of me who existed in that apartment with the flowers and the bad furniture was happy in a way I don't know if I will ever be capable of being happy again — not because happiness itself was destroyed, but because that particular kind of happiness required a version of trust I no longer have access to. I gave that trust to one person, entirely, without reservation, and he used it as a door into the rest of my life and then closed that door behind him with me on the wrong side of it.

I think about her sometimes. The girl who laughed with her whole chest. The girl who believed beauty was necessary and trust was simple and the man who looked at her painting for twenty minutes was looking at something true.

She's not dead. I want to be precise about that too, because I think people imagine prison and betrayal kill the person you used to be, and that's not quite accurate. She's not dead.

She's just very, very far underneath everything I built on top of her to survive.

Some days I think I'll never find her again.

Some days — and this is the thought I allow myself least often, the one I keep folded smallest, the one I touch only in the deepest part of the night when the block is finally, briefly still — some days I wonder if there's a version of a future where I don't have to choose between being her and being what I became.

I don't believe in that future yet.

But I haven't entirely stopped wondering about it either.

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