She Came Back Knowing Everything, So I Chased Her novel · Chapter 3 of 3
Chapter 3: The Fault With His Name On It
In the records hall, Passion makes Jamison prove his change is real, and he tears up the dismissal order he signed, confessing his regret; she refuses to comfort him and instead tells him to follow her through the inner door.
Passion's eyes opened on the truck's cold ceiling, and the first thing she registered was the absence of his hand.
He had withdrawn it before she woke. Before the finish had fully passed through her. That was deliberate, and she knew it.
Her body was still warm in the places he had touched her. The places he had stopped himself from touching her. She sat up slowly, and the cold air bit through the torn fabric of her blouse.
Jamison was on the other side of the bench, his back to her, his hands resting on his knees. He did not turn around.
'There's a button missing,' he said.
His voice was low and rough, like he had been holding it in.
She looked down. The third button of her blouse was gone, and the fabric gaped open over the curve of her breast. She could not remember when it had torn.
She could remember his fingers there, though. She could remember the sound he made when she caught his wrist.
'It's fine,' she said. 'I'll manage.'
He did not argue. He did not offer to help. He just sat there, giving her space, and that was the thing that made her hands shake as she fastened the remaining buttons.
One of them would have to speak. She knew it would not be her.
She finished dressing and pushed the truck door open, stepping out into the pre-dawn snow. The records hall stood across the lot, its windows dark, its doors closed against the cold.
Jamison followed her without a word. She could feel him behind her, that unnatural stillness of his, the weight of his attention on the back of her neck.
Inside, the hall was colder than the truck had been. She found the light switch and the fluorescents flickered on, humming overhead. The records room door was unlocked, and she walked through it like she had been there a hundred times.
She had not. She had only heard about it.
He watched her move through the room, past the long tables and the filing cabinets, and she could feel him cataloging her, reading her body language, trying to find the shape of what she wanted.
He was good at that. He had always been good at that.
'You wanted proof,' he said finally. 'So ask.'
She turned to face him. 'Proof of what?'
'That this is not hunger wearing a kinder voice.'
She almost smiled. It was a dry, bitter thing. 'You think tearing up a piece of paper proves that?'
The order was still in his jacket. She had seen it there, folded, when he reached past her for the door.
He pulled it out now. He held it between two fingers, and she saw her own name on the top line, typed neat and cold.
'This is the order I signed,' he said. 'The one that would have had you dismissed while you were away. Delivered without warning.'
She had known. She had known since the moment she saw the folder in the truck, and she had not let herself feel it. Now she let it land, and it landed like a stone in her chest.
'You signed it,' she said.
'Yes.'
'You remember signing it.'
'I remember everything.' He looked at her then, and his dark eyes held something raw and unguarded. 'I have regretted it every day since.'
She waited for him to say more. To explain, to justify, to give her the speech she had heard a hundred times from men who wanted her to absolve them.
He did not.
'The fault was entirely mine,' he said. 'There is no version of this where you earned it.'
He tore the order in half. The sound was loud in the quiet room, and he did not stop there. He tore it again, and again, until the pieces were too small to read.
She watched him do it, and she felt nothing. That was the part that scared her. She should have felt relief, or anger, or something.
She felt only the cold.
'You want me to forgive you,' she said.
'No.' He shook his head, and the word came out flat and final. 'I want you to believe me.'
'Why?'
'Because it's true.'
She looked at the torn pieces of paper on the table between them. Her name, scattered across the surface in fragments. A signature she could not see anymore.
Four years alone.
She had carried that weight for so long it had become a part of her, and now he was standing here, telling her he had carried it too. That he had been carrying it every day since.
It would have been easy to believe him. That was the trap. It would have been so easy to let herself fall into the version of this where he was a good man who had made a mistake, and she was the woman who understood, and they could both walk away clean.
She was not going to give him that.
'You tore it up,' she said. 'That's a start.'
He waited. He was so still, watching her with that intensity that made the room feel smaller.
'But it doesn't prove anything,' she said. 'It just proves you know how to make a gesture.'
'What would prove it?'
She looked at him for a long moment. At the way he stood, his weight balanced, his hands open at his sides. At the thing in his eyes that looked almost like hope.
He had never looked at her like that before. Not once, in all the time she had known him.
That was the thing that made her decide.
She gathered the torn pieces of the order into her palm. They were light, insubstantial, already curling at the edges from the heat of her hand.
She placed them on the table, one by one, until they formed a small pile in the center.
'If you mean to prove it,' she said, 'come where I tell you.'
She did not wait for his answer. She turned and walked to the inner door, the one she had noticed when they first came in, the one with the old lock and the dust on the handle.
She opened it.
The darkness beyond was complete, and cold air spilled out of it like breath from a mouth.
She stepped through, and she did not look back to see if he was following.
She knew he would.
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