Chapter 118: Love or loyalty II

“At the beginning it wasn’t this,” she said. “I want to be clear about that. At the beginning you were…you were someone who needed someone in their corner. That was all you were to me. You were young, and had been broken by a system that hadn’t bothered to look carefully enough. I had seen that happen before. I understood it and wanted to help.” She paused. “You felt like someone I needed to protect. Like a younger sister. Someone who had been failed by the people who should have been there.”

I listened.

“And then somewhere in the middle of those years…” She stopped. Started again. “It changed. I don’t know when exactly. It wasn’t a moment. It was just…gradual. The way some things are gradual. I looked at you one morning and I understood that what I felt had stopped being protective and had become something else. I didn’t know what to do with that so I didn’t do anything with it.” She looked at the curtain rather than at me. “I told myself it would pass. That it was proximity. That five years in a confined space with one person would produce attachment that wasn’t real.” She shook her head. “But It didn’t pass.”

The room was very quiet.

“I watched you,” she said. “Every day. I watched you carry the anger. I was there for all of it and I told myself that the plan was what I was there for. That when we were done I would tell you. When the mission was finished and we were somewhere else, somewhere free, I would tell you and you would have the choice of what to do with it.” Something moved in her jaw. “That was the plan.”

“Natalie…”

“And then the forest,” she said.

The word sat between us.

“I saw you,” she said quietly. “In the clearing. The night before I came back. I had come back early…you didn’t know that. I came back and the clearing was quiet. I came through the trees and I saw you and Alexa.” She paused. “Together.”

I said nothing.

“I stood in the trees for a long time,” she said. “Longer than I should have. Long enough that I understood what I was looking at and what it meant.” Her voice was very controlled now. The control of someone using everything they had to keep something contained. “And I understood that the plan I had been carrying, the one where I will tell you when the mission was done, had a problem I hadn’t anticipated.”

“Natalie.” My voice came out gentle despite everything. Despite the hospital and Alexa in recovery and the knife and all of it. Because this was still a person in front of me and what she was describing was a pain I understood the shape of. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because we were on a mission,” she said simply. “Because I had brought you into something and you were in the middle of it and telling you in a forest clearing that I was in love with you while Alexa was some feet away was not…” She stopped. “It wasn’t the moment.”

“So you kept it.”

“Yes. I did.” She nodded once. “And I watched you with her. And every day I kept it, it became something I couldn’t keep anymore and then their team came through the trees and you stayed and…” Her voice stopped working for a moment. She waited for it to come back. “You stayed. After everything we had built. After five years of sitting across from each other every single day. You stayed for her.”

I sat with that.

Sat with the full weight of what I had done and what it had felt like from where she was standing. Not the version I had been telling myself, the version where staying was the right thing, the brave thing, and the beginning of something that mattered. The other version. Natalie’s version.

Her standing in the trees watching me choose.

“I would have forgiven you,” she said. “That’s what you need to understand. If you had come to me after. If you had come to me and said Nora I stayed because I couldn’t leave her, I need you to understand, I need you to hear this — I would have heard it. I would have been angry, would have been hurt, would have needed time but I would have come through it.” Her eyes were wet and she was not blinking the wet away because blinking would have required acknowledging it. “But you didn’t come to me. You went with her. You walked out of that clearing and into her world. You signed yourself up for this…” She gestured again, the gesture for everything. “For this life. For an apartment in a city I had to track you to. For a restaurant job. For donating your blood to her…”

“She deserves it,” I said quietly.

She looked at me.

“She deserves every drop,” I said. “I need you to hear that Natalie. Whatever you feel for me. Whatever you have been carrying. Alexa Howthorn is a good person who made a mistake a long time ago and has been trying to make it right, and she deserves every drop of blood I have to give her.”

Natalie’s jaw was tight.

“What you did today,” I said. “What you did to her…” I had to stop because the image was back. But I pushed through it. “That was not justice. That was not the plan we made. That was not anything I agreed to or would have agreed to and you know that.”

“She needed to pay…”

“She has paid,” I said. “In ways you don’t know about. In ways that are between her and me and are done.” I looked at her. “And even if she hadn’t….this is not who you are. Whatever happened in that place, whatever five years of anger built in you, this….” I gestured at the hospital, at everything beyond the curtain. “This is not who Natalie was before.”

A little fracture happened in her face, small and significant.

“You don’t know who I was before,” she said quietly.

“I know who you were to me,” I said. “In those first years. Before the plan took over and became everything. You were someone who saw a person who was broken and decided to be present for them.” I held her eyes. “That person doesn’t go around stabbing people with a knife.”

The silence stretched.

She wiped her face once. Fast. Like something she hadn’t decided to do and was already regretting.

“You’re still not forgiven,” she said. Her voice had shifted again. Back to something more controlled, and forward-pointing. Like she had decided the emotional part of the conversation was over and was moving to the practical. “By the government. By the state. Whatever Alexa withdrew, the case against you is still open. You are still a wanted person.”

“I know,” I said.

“That means you can’t stay,” she said. “Not here. Not in this country for much longer.” She looked at me directly. “And neither can I, potentially. The terms of your release are thin. If the state decides to revisit the case, if something triggers it…”

“That’s my problem to deal with,” I said.

“Or.” She held my eyes. “It doesn’t have to be.”

I went still.

“You should come with me,” she said.

The words sat in the room.

“I have resources,” she said. “More than you know. More than the plan required. I have been building for longer than five years and I have places, money and the means to disappear properly. A beautiful beginning, not this tragic one.” She kept her voice even and her eyes on mine. “A real life. Somewhere new. Somewhere the state and the case and all of it can’t reach us.” She paused. “Come with me Nora.”

I looked at her.

This woman who was there for me every day for the five years I spent in jail. She had been the fixed point of a period of my life that had no other fixed points. She had just told me she loved me, with wet eyes that she wouldn’t acknowledge. She tried to eliminate the person she thought was obstructing her in my life, the woman I loved. And now, she’s asking me to run away with her.

She was looking at me with everything she had. I sat on the narrow bed, the room smelling of antiseptic and the weight of the question pressing down on everything. I opened my mouth and closed it again.

Because the answer was in me. I knew what the answer was.

But the answer was too large for this room tonight.

Natalie was still looking at me, waiting for her answer. And I was torn between choosing myself and running away with Natalie Or staying beside the unconscious woman that was willing to move mountains for me.