He smiles, the expression not reaching his eyes. “I’d like to help you, but it’s impossible. Mr. Shepherd vacated the penthouse three months ago. He’s left no contact information or forwarding address. There’s nothing we can do.”
My heart sinks at what he tells me, and it doesn’t escape my notice that he’d lived in this place under yet another assumed name.
Three months?
That means Ari left before I saw him last. He’d been gone a full month before he told me the truth of how he knew me.
“Thank you,” I say before rushing off. I don’t want him to see me crying, don’t want anybody to see me shatter.
It happens anyway, the tears falling as I reach the sidewalk, my body shaking as I brace myself against a wall just to hold myself up.
Ari knew he was leaving me.
He’d known the entire time.
Three Months Post Ari
Every day is getting easier. I’m not fracturing anymore when I wake up, even if I’m still fighting in my sleep.
Things have returned to normal for the most part. I still remain conscious of my dreams, still wake up in weird places every so often, still see a shadow hanging over me that will never go away. But the face is gone. The name. The hope that I’d foolishly felt that a hired killer could be the man that would save me.
Normal for me is now the daily routine I go through to get ready for the gallery show coming up. I’ve surrendered myself to the project, using it as a method of stripping myself of a certain demon who ended up being the devil himself.
That’s my theme. The truth about Ari. I never show him as a person. Just a figure with horns that waits for me in secret places, a destroyer of all that is good and pure in the people he runs across.
The photos are turning out wonderfully. But they make me cry when I finish them. Each one is me letting go of him a little more. Each one is a representation of regaining my life and discovering who I am.
Today, I’m in the cemetery where Ari first introduced himself, and after spending an hour at my parents’ graves, I grip my camera in hand, Mad World by Tears for Fears blasting through my earbuds as I brave the chaos I know the mausoleum will create in my heart.
Blowing out a breath, I approach the iron gates and step through, my pace slow as I weave through the rooms, my heart stuttering to a dull thump as I walk up to the stone crypt where he’d first kissed me.
I know the shots I want to take here, and I should have turned around to leave the instant the idea was in my head, but my feet are rooted in that spot, the happy, upbeat song changing to another on my playlist, one that is a cruel trick of the universe to play right now.
I can’t breathe as the first few notes of A Perfect Circle’s Gravity play, the song making me think about everything that’s happened. Everything I’ve lost and have to regain again. I have work to do. I know that. But still, the pain is there. The reminder.
Our entire relationship flashes through my head and I stand here crying while staring at the place it feels like it first began.
I knew better than to come here. Knew better than to add this album to my playlist. But maybe that’s what it takes to get out from beneath a weight that is slowly crushing you.
Maybe you have to tear yourself apart so that when you’re free of it, you begin the process of stitching yourself back together.
It’ll take a lot of thread to mend the damage Ari created. But I can do it.
I have no other choice.
Four Months Post Ari
Green eyes stare over at me, so much hatred behind them that it takes me back to the night Grant almost killed me in our bedroom.
I can feel every slap, every punch, every time he grabbed my hair to jerk me back up so he could hit me again. I can feel my head slamming against the floor, the tightness in my throat every time he made me read another text so he could punish me for it.
Every moment of that night is front and center in my thoughts right now, his lethal stare doing nothing to scare me anymore.