Chapter 30: War in the Living room

“Say it.”

My voice was low, sharp, and stripped of all the softness I used to speak to him with. My hand was still on his arm, but it didn’t feel like comfort. It felt like a demand.

“Say you don’t believe her.”

Gabriel’s jaw tightened. He wanted to—God, he wanted to—but the words stuck in his throat like glass. Because if he said them, if he dismissed Emily completely, he had to admit something worse: that the gaps in his memory made him blind. And blind men made mistakes.

My nails dug into his sleeve. “You can’t even say it.” My laugh was brittle, bitter. “After everything, after us, after what we’ve built—you can’t even give me that.”

My eyes glistened, but no tears fell. I was too furious for tears now.

Gabriel forced himself to meet my gaze, even as guilt coiled like a noose around his neck. “Eve, I’m trying. I’m trying to make sense of what’s real.”

“What’s real?” My voice cracked. I snatched the papers from his hand and slammed them down on the table. “This is not real. She’s not real. We are.”

The words we cut through him like lightning.

He wanted to believe it. He wanted to reach for me, anchor himself in that certainty. But Emily’s voice still echoed—pleading, fragile, convincing in its vulnerability. You always come back to me.

“I don’t remember,” he said finally, the words tasting like failure.

I flinched.

He hated himself for it.

My hands trembled as I shoved the papers back toward him. “Then remember this—if you keep hesitating, if you keep letting her wedge herself between us, she will win. She will destroy everything. And I won’t let that happen, Gabriel. Not to me. Not to our daughter.”

My voice broke on the last word. And it gutted him, because it was the truth he couldn’t afford to forget.

—

Gabriel stared at me, my words still ringing in the air like the toll of a bell he couldn’t silence. Not to our daughter.

Our son. The one unshakeable truth.

And in my eyes, he saw it—the fire, the desperation, the woman who had held his life together when everything else had fractured. I wasn’t lying. I couldn’t be.

But then Emily’s voice wormed through his mind again, fragile and pleading, the way she’d sounded on the phone. He hated it, hated that he could still hear Emily when I was standing right here, bleeding out my truth in front of him.

His chest felt tight, like the walls were closing in.

My voice softened, but only slightly. “Gabriel… look at me. Choose us. Choose your family.”

His lips parted. He was right there, teetering, the decision trembling on the edge of his tongue.

And then—

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The sound was sharp and deliberate. Not frantic. Not uncertain.

I froze. My fingers slowly slid from his arm.

Gabriel’s head turned toward the door, dread sliding into his stomach like ice water.

Another knock. Louder this time.

“Who is it?” My voice cracked. I already knew.

Gabriel didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

Because on the other side of that door, a voice rose—clear, sweet, carrying just enough tremor to sound like innocence.

“Gabriel? It’s me. Emily.”

The silence that followed was a scream.

My face was drained of colour. Gabriel’s pulse pounded in his ears.

And with that one knock, that one voice—everything they’d just fought for threatened to shatter.

—

The doorknob turned before either of us could move.

My breath hitched. “She has a key?”

Gabriel’s stomach dropped. His security, his control—compromised. How many doors had he left unlocked while his memory left him half a man?

The door swung open, and Emily stepped inside like she belonged there. Her hair gleamed under the light, her blouse was pressed to perfection, but her eyes—those eyes glistened with manufactured fragility.

She stopped in the entryway, gaze flicking from Gabriel to me, then to the folder still open on the table.

“Oh,” she said softly, her voice trembling just enough to draw sympathy. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You didn’t interrupt,” I spat, stepping forward. “You broke into our home.”

Emily clutched her bag to her chest, shoulders folding as if she were the wounded party. “I just… I was worried. You didn’t answer my messages, Gabriel. And after everything, I thought maybe—” Her voice cracked. “Maybe you needed me.”

Gabriel’s fists clenched. Her words burrowed in, scratching at the raw places his amnesia left behind.

“Leave,” I hissed, my hand cutting through the air like a blade. “Now.”

Emily’s gaze slid to me, calm, deliberate. “You don’t speak for him. Not when you’re the one trying to erase me.”

The room tightened, the three of us orbiting around the invisible battlefield.

Gabriel’s chest ached with the weight of their stares—my blazing fury and Emily’s quiet devastation. Two women, two truths, tearing him in opposite directions.

He opened his mouth, but no sound came. Because for the first time since the crash, he realised something terrifying:

No matter what he said next, one of them would break.

Emily moved further inside, her heels clicking softly against the polished wood. She didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t need it. She set her bag neatly on the console table as though she were the hostess, not the intruder.

My voice cut like broken glass. “Get. Out.”

Emily tilted her head, eyes shining with false innocence. “Is that really what you want, Eve? For me to leave Gabriel alone—again?”

Gabriel flinched at the word again. A shard of memory threatened to cut through the fog, jagged and unwelcome.

I stepped closer, my body trembling but my voice steady. “Yes. Because he’s mine. He always has been. And no matter how many games you play, you’ll never take that away.”

Emily laughed—soft, disbelieving, cruel. “Mine, yours… Do you hear yourself? He’s not a trophy, Eve. He’s a man. A man who came to me because you weren’t enough.”

My hand shot up before she even realised it, pointing at Emily, my voice raw. “Don’t you dare rewrite history. You preyed on him. You slithered into his weakness. And now you stand here, in my house, pretending you’re the victim?”

Gabriel raised his hands, as if to stop a fire already burning. “Enough—”

But Emily stepped into his space, closer than I could stand to watch. Her hand brushed his sleeve, light as a whisper. “You don’t have to hide it, Gabriel. I know you felt it. Even if you don’t remember it now.”

My lunged forward, ripping Emily’s hand away from him. “Touch him again, and I swear—”

Emily’s smile didn’t falter. She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a poisonous murmur only I could hear. “You can’t fight me forever. He chose me once. He’ll choose me again.”

Gabriel froze between us, chest heaving, his eyes bouncing from one woman to the other like the walls of his life were closing in.

My voice broke the silence, sharp as a blade. “Then let him choose. Right now.”

The words hung in the air, heavy and irreversible.