Page 159 of The Ache That Stayed

Because for the first time in seventeen years, I wasn’t holding it alone.

CHAPTER 43

Roxanne

Healing doesn’t happen all at once. For some, it takes months. For others, years. And some people spend a lifetime learning how to live around what was done to them without ever escaping it.

I didn’t know which one I would be. All I knew was that a hollow ache had settled behind my ribs.

Maybe that was what death did. Not just to the ones who didn’t come back. But to the ones left behind with it. Because something had ended in that warehouse, and I didn’t know what to call it yet—whether it was him, or me, or something in between—but I felt it, heavy and irreversible.

I’d learned how to survive Darius. Not by fighting. By dividing. I became different things for different people—the version that laughed, the one that obeyed, the one that loved. And the version no one ever saw.

I told myself it hadn’t happened. That if I buried it deep enough, it would stop existing. It worked, until it didn’t.

I had thought ending him would feel like closure, relief, an end to a suffering that had followed me longer than I wanted to admit. I had imagined there would be a shift, a release, some sense of finality that would tell me it was over.

Maybe I told myself I was the hero. The saviour. The one who finally stood up for the twelve-year-old version of me that never got the chance. I killed the thing that had preyed on me and called it justice. I told myself the violence would make me safe. That it would keep Kyra safe—my family safe.

But it didn’t feel like safety. Because violence doesn’t undo violence. It just changes who carries it afterwards.

When I stabbed him, there was no relief. No sense of balance. No moment where I felt like I had taken anything back. There was only absence. A strange, weightless emptiness settled inside me, as though a piece of me had been carved away and left unfinished. And beneath it was a harder truth. I had changed in that warehouse. I just didn’t understand how.

I didn’t ask about Santino. I couldn’t. Because if someone told me he was dead, I didn’t know if I would survive hearing it. And if they told me he wasn’t—if he had lived—I didn’t know what I would do with that either. Either truth felt unbearable in its own way, so I stayed where I was, suspended between both, letting the unknown exist because it hurt less than certainty.

Days passed. I think. Time didn’t feel linear anymore. It stretched and folded into itself until morning and night lost meaning, until the only thing I recognised was the hollow that had settled inside me—a heaviness that never seemed to lift.

My mother moved around me carefully, as though she understood without asking that whatever I was holding together would fall apart if she pressed too hard. She didn’t ask questions or force conversation. She just stayed, filling the house with normalcy I couldn’t quite step back into.

And I let her. Because it was easier than explaining the emptiness inside me.

By late afternoon, I found myself on the terrace, staring down at the familiar chaos of the street below—people walking in slow circles, children chasing each other between trees, dogs tugging at their leashes, life moving the way it always had.

It felt distant. Like I was watching a normalcy I no longer belonged to.

That was when I heard the door open.

At first, I didn’t think anything of it. The house wasn’t empty, and people came and went without announcement. But the weight of it felt different. Measured footsteps followed. Familiar in a way that made my heart skip a beat.

For a second, I thought I imagined it. Because that was what my mind had been doing lately—filling silence with things that weren’t there, letting me believe in hope for a moment, before taking it away again.

He was there. Standing at the entrance. For a moment, everything in me went quiet. I didn’t move. My body understood before my mind did, going still in a way that felt instinctive, as though it was bracing for an impact.

He looked the same—calm, controlled, with piercing green eyes that stalled my breath. And somehow, nothing felt the same anymore.

Marcello.

There had been a time—not even that long ago—when I would have crossed the distance between us without thinking, when my body would have moved without hesitation, closing the space between us as though distance had never mattered.

This time, I didn’t move. I stayed where I was, my hands still at my sides, my feet rooted to the ground in a way that felt unfamiliar and wrong all at once. And for the first time—I didn’t go to him. The distance between us felt unfamiliar even though it wasn’t much.

A shadow crossed his face. Almost imperceptible. He stepped forward, but I didn’t move. And somehow, that said everything.

“Marcello, I meant to—” The words died when his hand came up.

His hands cupped my cheek, firm but careful, grounding me before I could unravel any further. The contact wasn’t hesitant—it never was with him—but there was restraint in it this time. A control that hadn’t been there before.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.