right. He was awful.”
Nita was silent, watching.
“He betrayed me. He manipulated me. He murdered my friend.” Kovit squeezed his eyes shut tight for a moment and ran his hands over his face. “But I can’t seem to stop this rose-tinted view of him from creeping back in. I can’t seem to stop feeling shitty for having killed him.”
Nita sat beside him and sighed. “Brains are weird like that. It’s common to gloss over the bad things, or think it wasn’t all that bad after it’s over. It’s not like you can actually go back and look and see what the reality was anymore.”
“Yeah. I guess.” He looked at her, head tilted. “Is there anything you still romanticize that way?”
She went to shake her head, but paused, thinking. Her conversation with Andrej had brought a lot of ugly questions into her mind, and the one she’d avoided facing was what all of this said about her father.
Her father. Who loved her. Who cared for her.
Who’d helped her mother murder the head of INHUP. Who’d passed a law to create the DUL. Who Nita hadn’t really, truly seen since she was a child. Who was wholly and completely her mother’s person. And for all that in Nita’s mind he stood up for her, the truth was, he never went against her mother. He was calming and could sometimes mediate. He loved Nita and would do things with her.
But he never stopped her mother from hurting her. He never gainsaid her mother.
He was powerless, and as much as she hated to admit it, she wondered how much of her love for him was real and how much she’d built up in her mind over the years, a lifeline to cling to when things got ugly.
She didn’t say anything, though. If she voiced those concerns, then they’d be real. If she kept them quiet, maybe they would die in the dark. Because her father was dead and gone and never coming back, so even if he hadn’t stood up for her, hadn’t protected her in all the ways she wanted him to, what was the point in dredging it up? He wasn’t there to confront. Wasn’t there to talk to. He was gone, and the truth went with him.
So it was better to just let herself have that rose-tinted view. Whether it was real or not didn’t really matter anymore.
“Nita?” Kovit asked, voice concerned.
“Sorry, lost in thought.” She shook her head. “No. I don’t think I have a rose tinted view of much of anything in my past anymore.”
Kovit lay back on the bed. “You know, the strange thing is, even though I still have all these ugly, awful feelings about what I did, and even though the whole world is hunting me, I feel . . . freer than I ever have before. I don’t think I realized that I was slowly being strangled to death by him, and when I cut him down, I felt like I was breathing for the first time in a long time.”
Nita lay down beside him, and said softly, “Sometimes freedom comes at an ugly price.”
He was silent for a moment before he whispered, “I don’t think this guilt will ever go away. I don’t think I’ll ever not feel awful about killing Henry.”
“But you don’t regret it?”
“No.” He swallowed. “It had to be done.”
“Then it’s okay,” Nita said gently. “If you didn’t feel at all guilty, I’d be a bit worried about you. It’s human to feel terrible about something like that.”
He sighed softly. “I know. I just wanted . . . I made the right decision. I just wish it weren’t so hard. I wish that making the right choice wasn’t so painful. If it’s the right decision, it shouldn’t leave you feeling like shit, you know?”
She smiled bitterly. “If only the world worked like that.”
“If only.” He let out a soft sound, then closed his eyes. “But it’s okay. I’m learning to deal with the guilt. I did something terrible, and it’s okay to feel bad about it without regretting my choices. I will always love Henry, just a little, despite it all, and that’s okay too.”
Nita didn’t know how to respond to that. Kovit had done an awful lot of other terrible things in his life, much worse than killing Henry. But she just squeezed his arm gently, understanding that some crimes might be objectively less terrible but emotionally much more impactful.
There were still plans to be made, set ups to be done