Chapter 14
One year after the trial, I received a final message from Roman.
It came through his lawyer — a single page, handwritten, delivered to my P.O. box. The one I'd set up specifically for legal correspondence.
*Camille,*
*They've put me in solitary after I was found with contraband — blueprints of your apartment building. I want you to know: I wasn't planning anything. I just wanted to see where you lived. Old habits.*
*I think about you. Not the way you'd expect. I think about the mornings — the real parts, the parts that weren't strategy. You humming while you made coffee. The way you'd press your cold feet against my legs in bed. Small things that existed outside of everything else.*
*My lawyer says this is ill-advised to send. But I've never been good at letting things go. You know that better than anyone.*
*I know you'll never believe this, but there were moments when it was real. When I forgot what you were for and just... was with you.*
*Anyway. I hear you're doing well. I'm glad. Truly.*
*Roman.*
I read it once.
Then I burned it on the stove and washed the ashes down the drain — just like the smoothies.
There were no moments when it was real. There was no version of our marriage that existed "outside of everything else." Every morning he hummed along with me, he was calculating my blood levels. Every night his body curled around mine, he was monitoring my warmth, my pulse, the steadiness of my breathing — checking his investment was still viable.
He wanted me to carry doubt forever. A tiny seed of *what if it was partly real* that would grow and twist inside me, keeping me tethered to him even from behind bars.
That was his final extraction — trying to take my certainty. My clean break. My peace.
I wouldn't let him have it.
I picked up my phone and called Margot.
"Hey," she answered. "Good day or bad day?"
"Good day," I said. "Actually good. He sent a letter."
"Ah." She understood immediately. "The 'maybe I loved you' play?"
"Exactly."
"Got one of those too, about three months after he married you. Almost worked."
We laughed — short, bitter, but real.
"Camille?" Margot said.
"Yeah?"
"We're alive. Both of us. That's something he never planned for."
I looked around my apartment. The thrift store piano. The cat Nadia had given me, curled on the windowsill. The medical textbook I was studying — I'd enrolled in pre-med last month. Dr. Chen said the field needed people who understood what it felt like to be on the wrong end of medicine.
Outside my window, the city moved. Strangers walked by, carrying groceries, holding hands, living ordinary lives they didn't have to fight for.
I was building one of those lives. Slowly. Imperfectly. With scars.
"Yeah," I said to Margot. "It really is something."
I hung up, poured myself a cup of tea — just tea, nothing metallic, nothing designed to boost my blood count — and sat in the warmth of a morning that belonged entirely to me.
Roman Hale took three years, a kidney, and almost everything else.
But I was still here. Still breathing. Still mine.
And that was the one thing he could never harvest.
It came through his lawyer — a single page, handwritten, delivered to my P.O. box. The one I'd set up specifically for legal correspondence.
*Camille,*
*They've put me in solitary after I was found with contraband — blueprints of your apartment building. I want you to know: I wasn't planning anything. I just wanted to see where you lived. Old habits.*
*I think about you. Not the way you'd expect. I think about the mornings — the real parts, the parts that weren't strategy. You humming while you made coffee. The way you'd press your cold feet against my legs in bed. Small things that existed outside of everything else.*
*My lawyer says this is ill-advised to send. But I've never been good at letting things go. You know that better than anyone.*
*I know you'll never believe this, but there were moments when it was real. When I forgot what you were for and just... was with you.*
*Anyway. I hear you're doing well. I'm glad. Truly.*
*Roman.*
I read it once.
Then I burned it on the stove and washed the ashes down the drain — just like the smoothies.
There were no moments when it was real. There was no version of our marriage that existed "outside of everything else." Every morning he hummed along with me, he was calculating my blood levels. Every night his body curled around mine, he was monitoring my warmth, my pulse, the steadiness of my breathing — checking his investment was still viable.
He wanted me to carry doubt forever. A tiny seed of *what if it was partly real* that would grow and twist inside me, keeping me tethered to him even from behind bars.
That was his final extraction — trying to take my certainty. My clean break. My peace.
I wouldn't let him have it.
I picked up my phone and called Margot.
"Hey," she answered. "Good day or bad day?"
"Good day," I said. "Actually good. He sent a letter."
"Ah." She understood immediately. "The 'maybe I loved you' play?"
"Exactly."
"Got one of those too, about three months after he married you. Almost worked."
We laughed — short, bitter, but real.
"Camille?" Margot said.
"Yeah?"
"We're alive. Both of us. That's something he never planned for."
I looked around my apartment. The thrift store piano. The cat Nadia had given me, curled on the windowsill. The medical textbook I was studying — I'd enrolled in pre-med last month. Dr. Chen said the field needed people who understood what it felt like to be on the wrong end of medicine.
Outside my window, the city moved. Strangers walked by, carrying groceries, holding hands, living ordinary lives they didn't have to fight for.
I was building one of those lives. Slowly. Imperfectly. With scars.
"Yeah," I said to Margot. "It really is something."
I hung up, poured myself a cup of tea — just tea, nothing metallic, nothing designed to boost my blood count — and sat in the warmth of a morning that belonged entirely to me.
Roman Hale took three years, a kidney, and almost everything else.
But I was still here. Still breathing. Still mine.
And that was the one thing he could never harvest.