Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 73 of 115

The two cups sat full on the shelf for a week. Eduardo did not touch them. He worked the house each day and left the cups alone. Then Kiersten came back the next morning, before he expected her. She stood in the doorway and looked at him. Her face was not soft. She had come for answers, not tea. "I need to understand something," she said. "Back then, I showed you my pain. I said, look what you did to me. And you called me the demon. You told me I was the one who needed to repent." Eduardo felt the old heat rise. The urge to say she was twisting the memory. To make himself the one who suffered. He breathed and let it go. "I remember," he said. "You asked me to see your hurt. I turned it into your sin instead of mine." "You said sorry a hundred times," Kiersten said. "Sorry never meant anything. You said it and then you hurt me again the same day." "I know," Eduardo said. He did not reach for an excuse. "I used the word to close the subject. Not to change. I made you the problem so I never had to look at me." Kiersten crossed the room. She touched the cracked wall by the door, the same wall she had touched before. She looked at the sagging boards, the patched window, the whole battered house he had spent a year mending. "You called me the demon," she said again, quieter now. "When all I did was ask you to look at what you broke." Eduardo stood still. He did not defend himself. He did not point at the repairs. "I called you that because seeing your pain meant seeing myself," he said. "I could not stand it. So I put the name on you." Kiersten was quiet a long time. She had come braced for the turn, for him to flip it back on her. It did not come. She let out a slow breath. She picked up one of the full cups from the shelf. "That's the answer I needed," she said. "Not sorry. That." She drank from the cup. Then she set it down, empty. She looked around the rooms once more, slow, the way a person looks at a place they are deciding about. "I'm not saying yes to the house," she said. "Not today. But I stopped waiting for you to blame me. That's done." Eduardo nodded. "On your time," he said. "Not mine." Kiersten went to the door. She stopped there. "I'll come Friday," she said. "To read the ledgers. Same as always." She stepped out into the light. Eduardo looked at the shelf. One cup empty, one still full. The house was no longer only his. It was not hers yet. But she had drunk from it once, on her own terms. That was the first thing she had ever taken from him without being asked to prove she deserved it.