Chapter 19 "As Long as They're Alive, We'll Come Back"

Chapter 19 "As Long as They're Alive, We'll Come Back"
“How did you know?” Chloe asked, a hint of surprise in her voice as she paused her scrubbing.
“Your age, your physical condition, and the way you were talking to him just now,” Michael replied coldly, looking down at his clasped hands.
“Oh.”
“What did he say to you?” Michael asked. He had seen them in the stairwell through the glass, but he hadn’t heard a word.
“Nothing much. Just catching up,” Chloe answered quietly, vigorously rubbing the floor to get the grease out of the wood grain.
Michael watched her for a long moment. “Do you think I’m being too harsh on him?”
“No,” Chloe replied without hesitating. “If you haven’t lived through someone else’s suffering, you have no right to tell them when to forgive.”
Michael let out a short, hollow laugh. “But you feel sorry for him, don’t you?”
“From my perspective, yes. I think he’s pitiful.” Chloe nodded.
“After vanishing without a trace for twenty-three years and abandoning your families, you actually have the nerve to feel pity for others?” Michael’s voice cracked like a whip. “Doesn’t that make us—the ones who were left behind to deal with the wreckage—more pitiful than you?”
Chloe tossed her soiled paper towels into the trash can and stood up, meeting his furious gaze dead-on. “I won’t argue with you about who suffered more. But if you’re calling this abandonment, I need to set the record straight. Do you think leaving our families was a choice? No one wanted to abandon anyone!”
“It wasn’t a choice, but it’s still the result!” Michael stood up, bracing his hands on the desk, glaring at her fiercely. “You left us here for twenty-three years! You left us to search, to wait, to slowly go insane! We suffered through pure agony! What right do you have to come waltzing back in here, demanding our forgiveness? Demanding our acceptance? How dare you commit such an unimaginable cruelty and then act innocent, pretending everything can just go back to the way it was?”
“We didn’t do it on purpose!” Chloe protested, her chest heaving.
“You didn’t mean to kill them, but they’re still dead!” Michael shot back, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly cold register. “Time has passed, but the pain hasn’t lessened. It’s all still right here. So when we finally accepted that you were dead and buried… wouldn’t it have been better if you had just stayed that way? Why come back?”
Chloe stared at him.
The sheer, venomous brutality of his words struck her like a physical blow, leaving her completely speechless.
After a long, agonizing silence, she whispered, “Because the people we love are still here. And as long as they live, we’ll always try to come back to them.”
“You might still be alive,” Michael said softly, his eyes dead. “But some of the people you loved are long gone.”
Chloe froze.
The thought of her parents’ empty graves slammed into her mind, and her eyes instantly flooded with heat. She clenched her fists so tightly her nails dug into her palms, completely unable to utter a single word in her defense.
Michael turned his head away, effectively ending the conversation.
Silence fell over the office once more.
Blinking back her tears, Chloe crouched down, gave the floor one last desperate wipe, and practically fled the room.
Now, only Michael remained.
He stared blankly at his computer monitor, his thoughts dragging him violently back to the past.
He had only been eight years old when George disappeared. That winter had been unusually brutal, with blizzards raging for days. But Michael hadn’t cared. He used to sneak out to skate on the frozen community pond and build snowmen. Whenever he came home freezing, his grandmother would immediately soak his hands and feet in warm water, terrified he would catch a chill.
And then, his father vanished.
The rumors started almost immediately. Some said George was a trafficker who had sold an entire van full of people. Others said he had driven them off a cliff. The relatives of the missing passengers kept coming to their door—some demanding compensation, some lashing out violently, others taking advantage of the chaos to steal whatever they could carry.
Within six months, the house had been stripped bare. His mother had abandoned him to marry another man.
After that, it was just him and his grandmother, relying on each other for survival. The frail woman had dragged him to food banks and taken on grueling odd jobs to keep them fed. They struggled through years of absolute misery before she finally passed away.
When he was a child, Michael had wished countless times for his father to return—to drive away the angry mobs, to reclaim their stolen belongings, to take his sick grandmother to a real hospital.
Later, he had just wished for the police to find a body, so that he and his grandmother wouldn’t have to bear the stigma of being the family of a mass murderer.
As he grew older, he left that city, abandoned his old name, and killed every last expectation he had of George Harris. He convinced himself he had never had a father. He no longer needed protection. He had grown ruthless enough to protect himself; no one dared to cross him now.
He had long since outgrown the need for a father.
And yet, today, his father had actually returned.
When George had walked into the office, carrying a lunchbox, looking at him with those sad, pathetic eyes, Michael had felt a rage so pure it nearly blinded him. If he’d had a knife in his hand, he felt he could have lunged across the desk and used his father’s blood to wash away all the humiliation and agony he and his grandmother had endured.
But he hadn’t. He had simply swatted the man’s hand away.
Michael lifted his head, forcing back the burning moisture in his eyes. He took a deep, shuddering breath.
I will never forgive him, he thought. Not in this lifetime.

Out in the bullpen, Chloe sat frozen at her workstation, her emotions violently churning.
Ever since she woke up in this era, Nathan had shown her nothing but deep concern, steady patience, and lingering longing.
But what about resentment?
Had Nathan ever hated her with the same suffocating intensity that Michael harbored toward George? What dark, ugly emotions had festered inside him during those twenty-three years whenever he thought of her?
Chloe desperately wanted to know, but she was terrified to ask.
She feared hearing words of love, because she couldn’t bear the guilt. But she dreaded hearing words of resentment even more. The emotions tangled between them were too volatile, too dangerous to poke at. She was terrified that if she pushed too hard, she might lose control entirely, destroy his new family, and desperately try to drag him back to her.
At six o’clock sharp, Chloe checked the time. Not a single person in the office had moved.
She leaned over to Joshua’s cubicle. “Isn’t it six o’clock? Why isn’t anyone leaving?”
“Just because it’s six doesn’t mean we leave. Our agency thrives on ‘wolf culture,’” Joshua replied without taking his eyes off his screen.
“Wolf culture?” Chloe guessed. “You mean everyone has to work themselves to the bone until they die?”
“Exactly. Getting the hang of it?” Joshua sighed.
After spending the day with her, he had realized that despite her age on paper, Chloe was shockingly naive about modern corporate life. He decided to throw her a bone. “At a startup like ours, if you don’t work unpaid overtime, management thinks you aren’t producing enough. If you aren’t producing enough, they think you lack commitment. And if you lack commitment, you’re not far from being ‘optimized out.’”
“Oh!” Chloe nodded slowly. “So bosses just like seeing people chained to their desks suffering. Good to know that part never changes.”
She sat back down. A minute later, she leaned over again. “But I don’t actually have anything to do right now. Am I just supposed to sit here?”
“Can’t you just pretend to be busy?” Joshua asked, his patience wearing thin.
“Pretend to be busy?” Chloe looked around the office. Her colleagues were furiously typing, frowning deeply at their screens, or aggressively highlighting documents.
Was that what she was supposed to do?
She wanted to ask for clarification, but she didn’t want to look stupid again. Joshua told her to pretend, so that was exactly what she was going to do!
Ten minutes later, Michael walked out of his office.
He stopped at Chloe’s cubicle. She was sitting completely rigid, staring blankly at her computer screen, her hands hovering above the keyboard without pressing a single key.
He stared at her. “What on earth are you doing?”
Chloe jumped, spinning around in her chair. “Pretending to be busy!”
Michael looked thoroughly, deeply confused.
“Joshua told me to do it!” Chloe immediately ratted him out, pointing a finger at the next cubicle.
Joshua froze, his head slowly rising over the partition, staring at Chloe in absolute betrayal.
Michael shot Joshua a dead-eyed glare, then looked back at Chloe. For a split second, a tiny, involuntary hint of amusement tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Go home, Chloe. Stop pretending to work.”
“Okay!” Chloe replied cheerfully.
She didn’t understand why, but Michael definitely seemed less homicidal than he had an hour ago. She quickly grabbed her bag, shoved her notebook inside, and dashed toward the elevators.
Michael arrived at the elevator bank a few seconds later.
They stood stiffly on opposite sides of the polished metal doors, making absolutely no eye contact. When the elevator pinged, they stepped inside one after the other.
As the car descended from the fourth floor, the silence was agonizing. Michael radiated a gloomy, unapproachable aura that made her nerves physically clench. She held her breath the entire ride down.
When the doors finally slid open on the ground floor, Chloe stepped out briskly into the massive, echoing lobby.
She looked up.
Nathan was sitting exactly where she had left him that morning.
Seeing him sitting there—calm, steady, and brilliant—Chloe felt her heart violently seize. He seemed to be glowing in the dim evening light, completely untouched by the chaos of the world around him.