---- Chapter 12 Julian Gallegos POV: "Insane?" Helena laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. "You want to talk about insane, Julian? Let's talk about the last two months." She stood up, her body trembling with a rage that matched my own. "You don't remember, do you? You don't remember calling my name in your sleep every night? You don't remember holding me and telling me you'd waited your whole life for me?" She ripped open the collar of her blouse, revealing the faint marks of my kisses on her skin. "Does this look insane to you?" She grabbed her phone, her thumbs flying across the screen, and shoved it in my face. It was a photo of us, in bed, tangled together, sleeping. Another one of her kissing my cheek, my arm wrapped around her. | looked at the pictures, at the man who wore my face but was a complete stranger to me, and felt nothing but a profound self-loathing. "That wasn't me," | said, my voice hollow. "It was you!" she shrieked. "And | have more to prove it!" Her hand went to her stomach. "I'm pregnant, Julian. And it's yours." The room went silent. | stared at her, at the triumphant, ---- desperate look in her eyes. A child. A child conceived from a lie, from a hollowed-out version of myself. "Get rid of it," | said, the words falling from my lips like chips of ice. Her face went slack with shock. "What?" "| said, get rid of it," | repeated, my voice devoid of any emotion. "I'll pay for everything. But | will not have a child with you | had to get out of there. | had to get back. Back to the cliffs. Back to where she... | couldn't even think the word. | had to see for myself. "You can't just leave me!" she cried, grabbing my arm as | tried to get out of bed. "I'm carrying your baby! | gave up everything for you!" "You gave up nothing," | snarled, ripping my arm from her grasp. "You are a parasite. You saw an opportunity and you took it. You fed a sick man lies until he believed them." "He needed those lies!" she screamed, tears of rage streaming down her face. "He was drowning, and | saved him! And so did you! Don't you dare pretend you're a saint in all this. You want to know who killed your precious Khloe? You did." My blood ran cold. "You did it," she repeated, her voice dropping to a venomous ---- whisper. "You broke her. You humiliated her. You had her brother killed. You had her legs broken. You stole her voice. You pushed her over the edge, piece by painful piece. You were the one holding the knife, Julian. | just twisted it for you." Every word was a nail being hammered into my coffin. She was right. | was the monster. "She signed the divorce papers, you know," Helena continued, her voice dripping with cruel satisfaction. She pulled a folded document from her purse and threw it on the bed. My divorce agreement with Khloe. "She wanted to be free of you. She signed her name and then she jumped. She chose death over another second with you." | stared at the papers, at Khloe' s elegant, familiar signature at the bottom. The finality of it, the undeniable proof of her last wish, shattered the last of my denial. She was gone. She was really, truly gone. And | had killed her. A sound tore from my chest, a sound of such agony and despair that it barely sounded human. | clutched my head, the pain of my restored memories and the fresh agony of this revelation converging into an unbearable torment. | finally understood. | had been given back my soul only to realize | had used my own hands to destroy it. | collapsed back onto the bed, the sobs wracking my body, a broken man weeping for a love he had murdered. For weeks, | was a ghost. | locked myself away, drinking until ---- | couldn't feel anything, the signed divorce papers always within my sight, a constant, torturous reminder. | forced Helena to have the abortion. | couldn't stand the sight of her, of what she represented. | kept her a prisoner in the villa, a living embodiment of my sin. Sometimes, in a drunken, grief- stricken rage, | would make her say Khloe's name, over and over, as if the sound of it could somehow bring her back. My assistant, Mark, watched me with pity. He knew how much | had loved Khloe before the accident. He was the only one who saw the depth of my self-destruction. One evening, he found me staring at a news feed on a tablet, endlessly scrolling through old photos of Khloe. "Sir," he said gently. "Maybe you should stop." "| can't," | whispered He sighed and was about to leave when he stopped, his eyes fixed on the screen over my shoulder. It was a live news report about a humanitarian crisis in the war-torn nation of Al -Tharbia. The camera panned across a chaotic field hospital, filled with doctors and aid workers. "My God," Mark breathed, grabbing the tablet from me. He zoomed in on the background of the shot. There, for just a second, was the back of a woman with familiar, dark, wavy hair. She was wearing scrubs, her face turned away from the camera, but there was something about the way she moved, the set of her shoulders... ---- It was her. It was Khloe.