Page 69 of Beautiful Ruins
Her silence told me she understood the weight of that.Her hand moved to my face, steady and warm.
“Raze, it wasn’t your fault.Sometimes, you just can’t fight fate.”
I held her gaze.
“I know that,” I said.“Up here.”I tapped my temple lightly.“But in here?”I pressed my fist to my chest.“It doesn’t care about logic.It only knows that I told my pregnant wife to wait in a car that exploded.”
Something inside my chest had calcified that day.Grief had turned into function.Function into purpose.And purpose into something colder.
Her thumb brushed lightly over the edge of a scar.
“Is that why…” She hesitated.“Is that why you’re so involved with explosives?”
A faint, humorless smile touched my mouth.
“Yes.”
She waited.
“When something takes everything from you,” I breathed, “you either let it own you… or you need to understand it.”
Her brows pulled together.
“I learned it,” I continued.“I studied it.I dismantled it.I rebuilt it.I studied every variable until I understood-literally-what made a bomb tick.”
Her fingers resumed tracing patterns.
“Explosions are chaos,” she whispered.
“They don’t have to be,” I clarified.
She looked at me.
“There’s a formula,” I explained.“A ratio.Pressure, ignition, environment.When you understand it, it stops being random.”
“You can control it,” she murmured.“Is that what you like?”
“Yes.”
Her gaze softened.
“You couldn’t control what happened to them.”
“No.”
“But you can control it now.”
“Yes.”
The silence settled in around us.
Her fingers drifted up my chest, across my collarbone, over the ink that marked dates only I understood.
“You loved her.”
“Yes.”
The confession didn’t hurt the way it used to.It ached.But it didn’t fracture me.
