The Woman You Destroyed

Vanessa stood frozen in the doorway of the suite.

Her hair was wet from the rain outside. Her mascara had started to run. The phone in her hand, the phone with the photo of her and Marcus counting cash, was trembling like she was holding a live wire.

"It is you," she whispered again. "You are supposed to be dead."

Seraphina stood very still.

Damien was between them. On his feet now, his whole body tense like he was about to intercept something coming fast.

"Vanessa. Get out."

"No." Vanessa took a step into the room. "No, I want to hear her say it. I want her to say who she is."

"Vanessa, I swear to God."

"Three years, Damien. Three years I have been with you. I built a life with you. And this little rat shows up in a red dress and crawls back into your bed and you are going to what? Leave me for her?"

"I was never yours to leave."

Vanessa laughed. It was not a nice sound.

"Listen to him. Listen to this man who cried in my arms for eight months after she disappeared. Who drank himself unconscious on the anniversary of the divorce every single year. Who told me he was broken and I put him back together." She turned to Seraphina. "And you are going to walk in and pretend you can just take him back?"

Seraphina did not move. She did not speak. She let Vanessa keep digging her own grave.

"Say something," Vanessa shouted. "Say my name. Say it. The way you used to, when you still thought I was your sister."

Seraphina tilted her head.

"You are not my sister."

"We share a father."

"We share DNA. That is not the same thing."

Vanessa's face crumpled. For one half second, Seraphina almost felt something. Then she remembered the helicopter. The movers. The text in the rain. The three years of nightmares. The hours of Luna crying for a father who did not know she existed.

The feeling passed.

"Damien," Vanessa said. "Damien, please. I know I did things. I know. But you loved me too. You have to remember that you loved me too."

"I never said that to you."

"You did."

"I was drunk and you were there. That is not love. That is geography."

Vanessa sobbed. Once. Hard. The phone slipped from her hand and hit the carpet with a soft thud. The screen cracked. Neither of them moved to pick it up.

Seraphina walked forward. Slowly. She stopped a foot away from Vanessa and looked down at her, and for the first time in three years she let her face be the face of the woman Vanessa had tried to bury.

"Look at me," Seraphina said quietly.

Vanessa looked up.

"I want you to remember this moment. I want you to remember the way I am looking at you right now. Because every single night for three years, you have gone to sleep thinking that you won. You got the husband. You got the penthouse. You got to watch the sister you hated die in the rain while wearing my necklace around your neck."

Vanessa's hand went to her throat. Out of habit. The necklace was not there anymore. She had stopped wearing it six months ago, when it started giving her nightmares.

"You did not win, Vanessa," Seraphina said. "You just made me harder to kill."

She turned.

"Damien. Take her out of my suite."

"Aria."

"Out."

Damien moved. He took Vanessa by the elbow, not gently, and walked her to the door. She went without fighting. She looked small suddenly. Smaller than the woman who had burst in three minutes ago. A wet coat and a cracked phone and a life that had just ended.

At the door, she turned back one last time.

"He will hate you when he finds out what you have been doing to him for the past month."

Seraphina smiled.

"He already knows. And he is still here."

The door closed.

She was alone with Damien for the first time in three years.

The silence was the kind that hummed.

He turned. Walked back toward her. Stopped when she held up one hand.

"Do not," she said. "Do not come any closer. I cannot have you close right now. I will say things I do not mean."

"Aria."

"Stop saying my name."

"It is your name."

"It is the name of a girl who died three years ago. She is not me anymore. Do not keep trying to dig her up."

He stopped walking. Put his hands in his pockets. Stood very still.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. I will not say it. Not until you tell me I can."

Her throat closed.

That was the Damien she had married. The one who listened. The one who could hold a room by standing still in it. She had not seen him in so long she had almost convinced herself he had never existed.

"I want you to leave," she said.

"I will leave."

"Now."

"Now." He nodded once. "But I am coming back tomorrow."

"Do not."

"Tomorrow, Aria. And the day after that. And the day after that. Until you decide what you want from me. Whether you want to destroy me or whether you want something else. I will be whatever you need me to be. But I am not running away from this. Not again."

He walked out.

She stood in the middle of the suite with her arms wrapped around herself and listened to the elevator ding in the hallway.

Then she picked up Vanessa's cracked phone off the carpet, opened it, and forwarded the photo to her own number.

Evidence.

Three years of it, in the palm of her hand.