Chapter 59 The Final Thread

Chapter 59 The Final Thread

I don’t even remember how I made it back inside. One moment I was on the grass, drowning in my own tears, and the next I was stumbling through the hallway with my heart beating like I was being chased. Maybe I was. Maybe grief was chasing me. Or fate. Or whatever this twisted destiny Nina had carved out for me was.

By the time I reached her study, my chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself. I didn’t even knock—my hand just flew to the doorknob and shoved the door open like I had forgotten what respect meant.

Nina barely lifted her eyes from her computer. “I see you’ve decided to throw your manners out the window,” she said, voice dipped in mock amusement. “Why are you back here? Shouldn’t you be prepping to disappear from our lives?”

I stood there, hunched over, trying to swallow air like it was thick mud. My breathing was loud, embarrassing, jagged. I tried to hold myself together—tried not to show how completely destroyed I was. But she saw it anyway. She always saw everything.

She didn’t even blink. She just kept typing, tapping away like she was God deciding lives with the quick click of her fingers.

When I finally got my breathing under control, I lifted my chin and forced my voice to work.

“I… I have one condition,” I said.

That made her pause.

Slowly—painfully slowly—Nina leaned back in her chair and tilted her head at me, almost studying me like some strange, pathetic insect that had crawled back to her feet.

“A condition?” she scoffed. “And what might that be?”

My heartbeat was still frantic, but I pushed past it. I had to. I didn’t have anything left except this one thing.

“Let Kevin’s father go,” I said. “Grant him his freedom after he’s treated properly. And let him return to Kevin. That’s my condition. If you do that, then I’ll leave. I’ll disappear like you want. I’ll never come back.”

Nina stared at me.

Then she laughed.

A sharp, ugly, hysterical laugh that made my skin crawl.

“Why in the world would you do that for Kevin,” she said between her laughter, “when he has already decided to abandon you? You were so sure he’d sacrifice for you, weren’t you?”

Her words were knives. Each one hit its exact target.

I swallowed the lump burning the back of my throat. “It doesn’t matter,” I whispered. “He’s suffered enough already. He’s sacrificed enough for his father. So I’m proposing that you let his father go, and I will keep my end of the deal.”

She stopped laughing. Her eyes hardened.

“And why should I do that?” she asked slowly. “I’ve already given you enough benefits in exchange for your disappearance.”

“I know,” I murmured. My fingers tightened around the hem of my shirt. “But this time… it’s different.”

And it was. Because this time I wasn’t bargaining for myself—I was bargaining for the tiny heartbeat inside me. The one secret that could destroy everything if Nina ever found out. I felt a protective instinct surge through me so strongly it almost hurt.

Nina narrowed her eyes. “How so?”

This was it. The moment she would understand exactly the kind of deal I was offering—a deal only someone with nothing left would make.

I took a deep breath, steadying myself. “You wouldn’t have to worry about how long I stay hidden,” I said, voice trembling despite my attempt to remain firm.

Nina’s brows rose.

She knew.
She understood immediately.
She wasn’t stupid—far from it.

She knew exactly what I was implying.

That if she granted Kevin’s father freedom,
I would stay hidden for longer.
Long enough that no one—not even Kevin—would ever find me.
Long enough for her to erase me so completely I might as well never have existed.

Her lips curled slowly into a cold, victorious smile.

“So, what do you say?”

I don’t know how long I stood there after asking her the question. My voice was still quivering faintly in my throat when the words left my lips—so what do you say?—and yet Nina didn’t blink, didn’t soften, didn’t even pretend to consider the humanity of what I was asking. She simply tapped her nails on the glossy surface of her desk with this bored, rhythmic click that matched the jumpy beat of my own pulse.

“In that case,” she said, almost lazily, “I also have a condition.”

I felt my shoulders stiffen. A condition? My stomach dropped so abruptly it hurt. What more could she possibly want when she had already demanded something so brutal from me—the one thing that would break Kevin’s heart if he ever found out? What more could she take when I was already willingly carving myself out of their lives and preparing to become invisible?

But Nina always found more. It was a talent of hers.

I tried to keep my face blank, but my fingers curled against my palm. “And what might that be?”

She gave me this slow smile that wasn’t a smile at all—more like a knife slightly lifted from a table. “Your shares. I want you to surrender your shares from the company.”

For a moment, I actually forgot how to breathe. The word slipped out of me without my permission, sharp and horrified. “What?”

Nina shrugged with a kind of practiced elegance, as if she’d been waiting hours to drop this bomb. “A difficult thing to do, isn’t it?” She snickered, low and mocking. “That’s how difficult it is to grant his father freedom. My agreement and relationship with Kevin’s family runs deeper than anything I care to explain.”

I closed my eyes because the room suddenly felt too bright, too sharp around the edges. It wasn’t like I needed the shares to survive—I wasn’t losing my livelihood. But Nina knew exactly what those shares represented. They were the last tangible tie I had left to this family, the last piece of security, the last piece of acknowledgment that I belonged to something.

And she wanted them stripped clean.

For a brief moment, I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to slam my palms onto her polished desk and demand she drop the vile satisfaction glinting in her eyes. But wanting and doing were worlds apart, and I’d already decided that none of this could be about me anymore.

If surrendering them meant Kevin’s father could be freed… if it meant Kevin wouldn’t carry that guilt forever… then so be it. I could lose everything else. I had already begun losing him.

My throat was dry when I whispered, “I’ll do it.”

Nina’s scoff was like a slap, a tiny sound dripping with pleasure she didn’t bother hiding. She tried to mask the displeasure beneath, but I saw it. She hadn’t expected me to agree so easily. She wanted me to break, to bargain, to fight. Instead, I folded, because love can make you bend in the ugliest ways.

She reached for an envelope and pulled out the documents, sliding them across the desk with a push that felt almost theatrical. “Then… sign this.”

My hands trembled slightly as I picked up the papers. The text blurred for a second—not because it was complicated, but because tears were beginning to sting the backs of my eyes again. I skimmed through the legal terms, the transfer clauses, the surrendering statements, but it all felt distant.

My pen hovered above the first signature space for a long, tight heartbeat before I finally pressed it down. And then again. And again. Signing away piece after piece of myself. My name looked foreign by the time I reached the last page.

“There you go…” I murmured, sliding the stack back across her desk.

Nina flipped through it without even pretending to respect the weight of what I had just done. She scanned the pages with this bored half-frown, like she was checking for typos on a grocery list—not reviewing the remnants of someone’s life.

“I’ll need a copy,” I said quietly. My voice sounded thin, worn, like it had been dragged across gravel.

She raised an eyebrow as if she was annoyed I was still standing in her presence. But she reached into her drawer, pressed a button that hummed with the soft sound of a scanner, and eventually handed me a set of copies—my signatures staring back at me with cold permanence.

Nina finally lifted her gaze and eyed me without a trace of softness. “Goodbye, Abby.”

It was dismissive. Final. A nail hammered into the coffin she’d spent years crafting for me.

I didn’t trust myself to say anything back. If I opened my mouth, I wasn’t sure if words or a sob would come out. So I simply turned, clutching the documents as though they were burning through my skin, and walked out of her study with my dignity trailing somewhere behind me.

I could feel her gaze on my back until the door shut, and then it was just me—standing alone in the hallway with everything inside me hollowed out and rearranged.

I didn’t cry. Not yet. My body was too busy trying to hold itself together long enough to make it out of the house.

But the moment I stepped away from her door, I felt the silence cling to me like cold air, and something in me whispered that I had just made a decision I would never be able to undo.

And somehow… that hurt less than the thought of Kevin never seeing his father again.