Page 114 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

“Do not play with me,” he said.

“I’m not playing with you,” she responded. She sounded exasperated. He couldn’t know for sure. He couldn’t see her.

“I will not heal,” he said.

“You just thought that it wasn’t an option for you to remain like this.”

“But I will. Because this is what it was like for my sister. I’m certain. She slipped into darkness. Alone. And here I am, doomed to a life of darkness, and I will not even be granted the release of death to soften this.”

“Is that what you think? You think that death would be a release?”

“From this? What is the point of any of it. Perhaps this is what I have been avoiding all this time. To defeat my father is to defeat myself. Everything that I have done, everything is to try and avenge the death of my sister. But the truth is, in order to fully avenge her, I must take myself down as well. And now the world has done it for me.”

“Stop it,” she said. He could not see what she did, but he heard a clattering. “You are... You are offensive. Do you think that you’re being punished? You think that this accident was some sort of light brought upon you. You didn’t die when your brain swelled up, maybe you could be grateful for that.”

“I find it difficult to be grateful,” he said.

“Clearly,” she said. “Clearly you find it difficult to be grateful. But I find myself sorely lacking in sympathy for you. Let me ask you this question. Do you think that my mother deserved cancer?”

He frowned. “No. What does your mother have to do with this?”

“Your logic indicates that you think that people are struck down because they deserve it. You were spared. Perhaps you can focus on the fact that you didn’t die. Maybe you can figure out all the ways in which you deserve to live.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I have dedicated my life to avenging my sister’s death.”

“So you’ve said.” He heard her voice soften slightly. She sat down. At least, he was fairly certain he recognized the sound of her sitting. “Tell me. From the beginning. Tell me how all of this was supposed to avenge her.”

He stared at nothing. He had no other choice. He was enveloped in darkness. He felt the wall that he had built up inside of himself erode, crumble. And all of the acrid, toxic emotions that he had been holding at bay for all these years poured out. Poured forth.

“I needed to do everything in my power to be different from him. Not simply to make myself a better person, I’m beyond redemption, and I am aware of that. I decided to prove to him that everything he had done was pointless. That allowing his daughter to die, alienating his son, and turning his wife into a ghost of a human being, all of those things were unnecessary to his success. I set out to do that by being the antithesis of everything that he was.”

“And that’s why your reputation for treating women well, for being good, that’s why that reputation matters. Not because you have an investment in being good.”

“I am not good. Have you not paid attention to anything that I’ve said? I am beyond help.”

“All right. What else then? What else have you done to try and avenge your sister.”

“All of this. Everything that I am. I intended to destroy his empire. Eclipse it with my own. I intended to... To be something he never could be. Which was loved by the public. Not because I... Not because I deserved it, not because I even wanted it. Because he said it couldn’t be done, and what better way to win, than by beating him while not playing his game at all?”

“Right. So, with this headline, you understand that everything you are is called into question.”

“I am aware,” he snarled.

“I’m not sure that it’s fixable.”

She might as well have dropped a boulder on his chest. He felt as if it had caved in. “And what is the point of anything?”

“You’re going to have to figure that out. I can’t tell you what the point of your life is. But you’re going to have to ask yourself a very serious question. What if you can’t win?”

“That isn’t an option,” he said, rejecting it instantly.

“I’m sorry, you can sit here and tell me that you deserve to be blinded for the rest of your life, deserve this accident, but you cannot take on board the fact that you might fail at your mission.”

“No,” he said. “It is my purpose.”

“It’s not your purpose. It is somebody else’s purpose. You don’t have a purpose. The only thing that you do is react. To the death of your sister, to the bastard behavior of your father. That’s it. To the headlines the paparazzi print about you, to all of these things. You shape your life around them.”

“You know nothing,” he said, wanting to turn and face her, not entirely certain where she was. “You know nothing. You are a child. You lost someone, and for that I am sorry. But it is nothing compared to what I went through.”