Chapter 97 -
Photos sat on top. Nia picked up the first one with trembling hands.
It was from their third date. Alex had taken her to a carnival that had set up on the outskirts of the city, the kind with rickety rides and overpriced games and questionable food safety standards. They were standing in front of the Ferris wheel, Alex’s arm around her shoulders, both of them grinning at the camera like idiots.
Nia remembered that night. Remembered how Alex had won her a stuffed elephant by throwing darts at balloons. Remembered how they had kissed at the top of the Ferris wheel while the city lights spread out below them like fallen stars. Remembered thinking that maybe, just maybe, she had found something real.
“You looked so happy,” Nia whispered to the photo. To the version of herself that still believed in love and happy endings and men who won you stuffed elephants at carnivals.
She set it aside and picked up the next one. This one was from their six-month anniversary. Dinner at a restaurant that was too expensive for their budget but Alex had insisted because he wanted to celebrate properly. Nia was wearing the blue dress she had bought specifically for that night, the one that made her feel beautiful. Alex was in a button-down shirt that he had borrowed from his roommate because he did not own anything nice enough.
They looked good together in the photo. Happy. Like two people who had found each other in a world that was too big and too lonely and too complicated.
“Who were you?” Nia asked the image of Alex. “Were you already lying to me then? Were you already involved with the Cimmera? With Jordan? Or did that come later?”
The photo did not answer. It just stared back at her with frozen smiles and ignorant joy.
Nia flipped through more photos. Their first Christmas together, both of them wearing ugly sweaters that Isadora had given them as a joke. A lazy Sunday morning with Alex making pancakes in Nia’s tiny kitchen. A concert they had gone to where the band was terrible but they had danced anyway.
So many moments. So many memories of a relationship that she had thought was real.
But which parts had been real? Which smiles were genuine and which were performance? When Alex had said he loved her, had he meant it? Or had he already been planning his exit, already been seeing Jordan behind her back, already been tangled up in things that would eventually get him killed?
“I do not know you,” Nia said to the photos spread around her on the floor. “I thought I did. I thought I knew everything about you. But I did not know anything, did I?”
She picked up another photo. This one was different from the others. It was just Nia, taken by Alex one morning when she had still been half asleep. Her hair was a mess, her face free of makeup, wearing one of Alex’s t-shirts that was three sizes too big. She was smiling at the camera with the kind of unguarded happiness that only came from being completely comfortable with someone.
Nia stared at that version of herself. At the girl who had been so in love, so trusting, so stupidly naïve about what was coming.
“I am sorry,” she whispered to the photo. “I am so sorry for what happened to you. For what I let happen to you.”
The tears came suddenly, without warning. One moment Nia was dry-eyed and numb, and the next she was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. She pressed the photo against her chest, curling around it like she could protect that past version of herself from everything that was coming.
But she could not. That girl was already gone. Had been gone since the moment Alex walked out of her life. Had been erased completely the night Nia was taken from her apartment and dragged into a world she did not understand.
“He is dead,” Nia said through her tears. “Alex is dead and I do not even know how to feel about it.”
She should be sad. She had loved him once, or thought she had. Had built a future in her mind that included him. Had believed that they were building something together.
But she was also angry. Furious at him for lying, for cheating, for getting her involved in his mess. For dying before she could get answers about why he had done any of it.
And underneath the sadness and the anger was something else. Something that felt uncomfortably like relief.
Because if Alex was dead, then he could not hurt her anymore. Could not show up with more lies, more betrayals, more reasons for Nia to question everything she thought she knew about their relationship. He was gone, and with him went all the what-ifs and maybes and possibilities that had been haunting her.
“I loved you,” Nia said to the photos scattered around her. “I loved the person I thought you were. But that person never existed, did they? You were always lying. Always hiding. Always someone else underneath the mask you showed me.”
She grabbed another handful of photos, flipping through them faster now. Each one a memory. Each one a lie. Each one proof that she had been blind to reality because she had wanted so badly to believe that she had found something good.
There were other things in the box too. Movie ticket stubs from films they had seen together. A dried flower from their first Valentine’s Day. A silly love note Alex had left on her bathroom mirror written in lipstick. All these tiny pieces of a relationship that had felt so real at the time.
Nia wanted to burn them. Wanted to take the whole box and everything in it and set it on fire, watch it turn to ash and smoke and nothing.
But she could not make herself do it. Because destroying these things would not change what had happened. Would not bring back the person she had been before all of this started. Would not undo the year she had spent loving someone who was lying to her.