Her tears slowly stopped as her breathing evened out. “I will never apologise for what I did to him. For taking his life. I’d do it all over again. I would do it for you. I don’t care if it means I’ll rot in here. I have no remorse. I feel no regret.” She squeezed Pim’s fingers. “I would kill an army if it meant you were never taken and never had to live the life you did.”
She brought Pim’s fingers to her mouth. “I’m so damn proud of you. So heartbroken that I made it harder on you. I hope one day you can forgive me. I hope one day your father can forgive me. If you never come visit me again, this is enough. I will happily serve my time knowing in some small way, I showed you how much I care. How deeply sorry I am. For everything.”
Pim sniffed, her own tears evaporating into salty tracks, leaving her skin white and limbs shaky. “I do forgive you, Mum.” Her voice was achingly soft. “But after everything...do you forgive me?”
Her mother sucked in a wet sob. “Oh, Min, do you even need to ask?”
Pim collapsed, bending in her chair to fall into her mother’s embrace. The two women clutched each other, and fuck, I couldn’t stay here anymore.
I shouldn’t have witnessed any of this.
I wasn’t worthy after everything I’d demanded of Pim.
I would never be worthy or have enough breath in my body to apologise for being the same as the monsters she’d endured.
Her mother should kill me too for how cruel I’d been. How callous and motherfucking selfish.
I wanted everything about her but not at the expense of her happiness.
Not anymore.
My eyes fell on Pim’s form still wrapped in her mother’s arms.
I can’t do this anymore.
My legs bunched, hurling me upright from my chair.
I had to run.
Before I exploded.
The ticking in my brain was obsessing.
I was regressing.
I would snap soon and take my misery out on the woman I loved.
My legs forgot how to work as I moved on painful instruction to run. As I stepped toward the two on the floor, my eyes locking on the door and escape, Pim’s fingers lashed around my wrist, injecting me with yet more self-loathing.
“Elder?” The way she looked up, glossy-eyed and trusting, hair spilling over her shoulders, and such fucking love glowing, I couldn’t do it.
My voice cracked as I jerked my arm away. “I’m so fucking sorry, Pimlico.”
Her mother jolted at the name. The name I knew I shouldn’t keep calling her. It was a name linked to slavery and pain, but to me, she wasn’t Tasmin.
She was Pim.
She was Mouse.
Once again, hindsight sucker-punched me in the chest.
No wonder she flinched whenever I called her Mouse. No wonder she grew pissy and pained when I demanded she tell me why that nickname affected her so much.
A watch.
A watch from her childhood stolen the night she was murdered.
Goddammit, I’d been such a heartless fool.
With a shaking hand, I bent and cupped her cheek. With tortured lips, I kissed her forehead wishing against hope she could feel my agony through my touch. That she could understand how I wished I could undo who I was, who I’d been to her, and every single way I’d treated her.
How I begged for self-discipline that I’d never touched her. How I wished I could undo the fact I’d manipulated her into talking to me and giving me things she’d wanted to keep private.
Her embrace by the submarine.
Her confession of liking clouds over stars and rain over sun.
How she hated toast—
They were things I hadn’t earned. Things I’d stolen.
I had to get out of there.
Immediately.
I never spoke in my mixed heritage. I chose English over Japanese as a way to honour my father rather than my mother. But in that moment, English seemed woefully unable to convey just how damn sorry I was.
It wasn’t enough.
The English language only had one way of apology.
Japanese had over twenty.
I’d use all of them if it meant the heaviness in my chest would ease.
I would murmur them forever if I could somehow find redemption.
But for now, all I could offer was one.
Kissing her again, I breathed into her hair, “Owabi shimasu.”
The translation: please accept this apology from the bottom of my heart.
“El...” Pim reached for my neck, but I swooped back, bowed low and sweeping to the woman I loved more than anything, then stalked from the room.
I didn’t look back.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Pimlico
WHO KNEW FIFTEEN minutes had the power to completely change a person, a life, a relationship?
Stepping into that room, I knew it would be hard and emotional, but I had no idea I’d run the gauntlet, dredge up every agony, and swim through so many historical and present wounds.
I’d done that.
No one had forced me.
But as I touched my mother after a lifetime of shoulder pats and cool nods instead of hugs and kisses, everything I’d been harbouring, everything I didn’t even know fermented deep inside me, gushed forth in noxious honesty.
I didn’t do it to hurt her.
I didn’t say such things to be spiteful or cruel.
In fact, I’d made a promise not to mention a thing about it.
I just...couldn’t stop.
My childhood desires rose from nowhere, impulses took over, and I spilled things I never dreamed of spilling, especially to a mother who’d killed for me in front of a man who’d killed for me, too.
Two people who’d willingly stolen a life so I might live.
Two people who had a stain upon their souls for eternity.
I owed them more than I could ever repay.
I should protect them from unneeded memories and be ever so grateful.
They didn’t deserve to hear what I’d endured before their sacrifice made my existence better.
That was my cross to bear—they had far too many others and all because of me.
I knew all that.
I hated myself that it hadn’t stopped me.
And bringing forth such evil, spreading its darkness to the people I loved the most, hadn’t made any of it easier.
It didn’t make me better. It didn’t cure me. Purging myself in such a way didn’t release the filth still wriggling deep inside me like a snake I couldn’t catch.
It only made me sad and mad and tired.
So, so tired.
And when Elder murmured Japanese into my hair then bowed as if he was a knight laying his sword at my feet, my heart had fallen upon his blade in terror.
I didn’t understand what he said, but by the anguish on his face, it wasn’t good.
I’d tried to grab him...to ask him to explain...to introduce him to my mother now that dirty laundry had been aired, washed, and hopefully clean enough to fold away, but he’d kissed me and bolted from the room as if he would die if he stayed another moment.
If my heart had impaled itself on the hypothetical sword he’d laid at my feet, then it well and truly ran itself through in misery as the door closed on him, shutting us apart.
My insides curled up as horror splashed through me like sour wine.
What have I done?
How had I forgotten that he was listening too? That everything I’d tried to hide from him just vomited into reality and tarnished everyone in the room.
I wanted to chase after him.
I wanted to console him.
I wanted to erase that crucifixion in his beautiful black eyes.