Chapter 6
1144 Words
Leo was asleep.
Mira had found a room at the end of the hall, quiet, away from the waiting room where Eleanor had sat. She’d carried him there, laid him on a cot, pulled the blanket to his chin. When she came back, she touched my arm and said, “I’ll watch the door.”
Then she was gone.
Raimen stood by the window. The city was dark now, lights scattered across the glass like stars. His hands were in his pockets. He hadn’t moved from that spot since Mira left.
I sat on the edge of the cot where Leo had been. The room smelled like antiseptic and something else—something older, something that had been here before any of us arrived.
The silence stretched between us. Not the heavy silence of the waiting room. Something else. Something that had been building for five years.
I looked at him. He was still looking out the window.
“You should sit,” I said.
“I can’t.”
He’d said that before, hours ago, in the other hallway. Now it sounded different. Now it sounded like the truth.
I didn’t push.
The silence came back. I let it.
I thought about the altar. The way he’d looked at me like he’d never seen me before. The way he’d said the baby wasn’t his. The way his hand had moved before he decided, every time, his body knowing what his mind had forgotten.
I had one question. The one I’d never asked him. Not at the altar. Not at the car window. Not at the mountain house.
Did you know? When you stood there and said you didn’t remember me—did you know you were lying?
I didn’t ask it.
He answered it anyway.
“I started forgetting things when I was twenty-five.”
His voice was low. Flat. Like he was reading from a file.
“I told my mother something was wrong. She sent me to a doctor. Her doctor.” A pause. “I went for years. Every week. I didn’t remember the appointments, but she told me I went.”
He turned from the window. His face was not empty now. It was something else. Something that had been waiting.
“I didn’t know there was anything to remember,” he said. “I thought the gaps were normal. Everyone forgets things. Everyone has nights they can’t quite account for.”
He looked at me. “Until you walked down that aisle. Until you said my name. Until your voice did something to my head that hadn’t happened in five years.”
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
“At the altar, when you said my name, I saw something. Not a memory. A feeling. A room. A dress. The way light fell on someone’s shoulders.” His hands were fists now, pressed against his thighs. “I told myself it was nothing. I told myself you were lying. I told myself what my mother had been telling me for years.”
He stopped.
“Then I saw Leo. His hand on the glass. The way his fingers spread. And I knew. I knew before the DNA test. I knew before the files. I knew before I remembered anything at all.”
The words hung in the air.
“I didn’t know what she had taken from me,” he said. “I knew something was missing. I didn’t know it was you.”
I felt something crack in my chest. Something I’d been holding for five years.
“In the waiting room,” I said. “What did she say to you?”
His jaw tightened.
“She told me the name of the doctor. The one who managed my treatment after—” He stopped. “After I met you. She said he was hers. Had been hers for twenty years.”
He looked at me. His face was white.
“She said she built the walls I’ve been living inside. She said she could build more.”
I sat with the words. The weight of them. What it meant for someone to do that to their own child. What it meant for someone to believe they could.
I thought about the gaps he’d described. The nights he couldn’t account for. The appointments he didn’t remember attending. The woman who had sent him to her doctor, her doctor, her walls, her control.
She had taken five years from Leo.
She had taken my father’s last days.
And she had taken the memory of me from her own son.
“You didn’t forget me,” I said.
It wasn’t a question.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t forget you.”
“She made you forget.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
I looked at his hands. The fists pressing against his thighs. The knuckles white.
I thought about the five years I’d spent believing he chose to forget. That I wasn’t worth remembering. That I had loved someone who looked through me like glass.
He hadn’t chosen. It had been taken.
That didn’t fix five years. It didn’t fix Leo growing up without a father. It didn’t fix the morphine running out or the ten million dollars or the altar.
But it changed the shape of the wound.
I reached out. I didn’t think about it. My hand found his.
He went very still.
I could feel his pulse through his skin. Fast. Unsteady.
I held on.
He didn’t move toward me. He didn’t pull away. He just stood there, his hand in mine, his breath slow and careful, like he was afraid of breaking something.
We stayed like that for a long time.
The door opened.
Leo stood in the doorway, his hair messed from sleep, his eyes half open. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday—from the wedding. His collar was empty where the tie should have been.
He looked at our hands. He looked at our faces.
He didn’t say anything. He just came and sat between us, leaning against Raimen’s arm, and closed his eyes again.
Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Like he had been doing it his whole life.
Raimen didn’t move. He sat very still, the way Leo sat still, the way Arthur Sterling had been still in the photographs Elias kept.
Leo shifted in his sleep, his hand finding Raimen’s, his fingers curling the way Raimen’s curled, the way Arthur’s had curled in the photograph on David Chen’s wall.
I looked at them. The stillness that ran through them, father to son, generation to generation.
I didn’t move either.
Outside, the city kept going. Eleanor was out there somewhere, planning, waiting, building the next wall.
But in this room, for the first time in five years, we were still.
- Writer
