Page 31 of To The Final End
He opens the door for me. I walk through.
She looks like me.
That’s the first thing I think, standing over her body. She looks like me, but wrong. Like a photograph that’s been slightly overexposed. The same features, the same hair, the same shape of her face—but something essential missing.
She’s on a stone table. Clean white cloth beneath her. Someone washed the blood off, closed her eyes. But no one touched her beyond that.
They were waiting for me.
I move closer.
Her skin is cold when I touch her face. Of course it is. She’s been dead for a week. But it still shocks me—the absence of warmth, of life, of the fire that burned in her even when that fire was pointed at me.
“Hey,” I whisper.
Stupid. Talking to a corpse. She can’t hear me.
I do it anyway.
“I’m sorry.”
My hands shake as I dip a cloth in the basin someone left on the table. Warm water. Herbs floating in it—lavender, rosemary. Things that smell like peace.
I wash her face. Slowly. Carefully. The same way someone should have washed mine, all those years ago, when I was the one broken and bleeding.
“I’m sorry I didn’t save you sooner. I’m sorry I didn’t see what he was doing to you. I’m sorry you spent five years wearing my face and hating every second of it.”
The water turns pink. There’s still blood in her hair, dried and crusted at her temples. I work it out strand by strand.
“You weren’t evil.” My voice cracks. “I know everyone thinks you were. I know you thought you were. But you weren’t. You were just another girl he stole. Another girl he broke.”
I’ve said versions of this seventeen times this week. Standing over bodies I didn’t know, speaking to families who blamed themselves, trying to find words for grief that doesn’t make sense.
This is the first time I’ve said it and meant it for myself.
I braid her hair the way I braid mine—simple, practical, out of her face. She never wore it like this. She always left it loose, flowing, dramatic. But this feels right.
This feels like giving her back something he took.
“You saved me.” I tie off the braid with a strip of cloth. “At the end. When it mattered. You told them how to bring me back.” My throat tightens. “You didn’t have to do that. You could have let me die and taken everything. But you didn’t.”
I dress her in clean clothes. Simple ones—a soft dress in pale gray, nothing fancy. She would have hated it. She liked bold colors, statement pieces, things that demanded attention.
But I think, underneath all that armor, she wanted to rest.
So I give her rest.
“I forgive you,” I whisper.
The words hang in the cold air.
I don’t know if they’re true. I don’t know if forgiveness works that way—if you can just decide and have it be real. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and hate her again. Maybe I’ll spend years working through what she did to my life, to my men, to me.
But right now, standing over her body with wet hands and a cracked-open chest—
I mean it.
The courtyard is full. I stop dead in the doorway, Riley’s body in my arms, and stare.
