Chapter 14
Nathan asked for exile.
I refused.
Not because I wanted him close.
Because leaving was too easy.
“You want to disappear somewhere and tell yourself distance is punishment.”
He stared at me.
“What do you want?”
“Truth.”
“I gave it.”
“Some.”
He looked tired.
Good.
“For the next year, you hold no crew. No captain pin. No private men. You work under Rafe where every order comes from someone you once considered beneath you.”
Nathan’s mouth tightened.
“You want to humiliate me.”
“No.”
I looked toward Maya.
“You humiliated yourself.”
That distinction mattered.
He accepted it.
Not gracefully.
But he accepted it.
Then he asked if he could speak to Maya.
I looked at her.
Her choice.
She nodded.
Nathan stood several feet away.
“I heard you the second night.”
Maya’s face tightened.
“I know.”
“No. I mean…”
He swallowed.
“You were asking for water.”
I felt anger return.
Nathan kept going.
“I had a bottle in my hand.”
Maya stared.
“I stood outside the door for maybe a minute.”
“Why didn’t you give it to me?”
He looked toward the floor.
“Because Evelyn said if I opened the shed, Caleb would choose you over me forever.”
Maya was quiet.
Then she asked:
“And you believed that was something being done to you?”
Nathan closed his eyes.
“Yes.”
There it was.
The ugliest truth.
He had watched suffering and interpreted compassion as theft.
Maya nodded slowly.
“I don’t forgive you.”
“I know.”
“But I want you to remember that minute.”
He looked at her.
“Why?”
“Because every time you start telling yourself your mother made you do it, remember the bottle was in your hand.”
Nathan’s face broke.
Not dramatically.
Just enough.
He nodded.
Then left.
I watched him go.
Maya leaned against me.
“You okay?”
I almost laughed.
She had survived the shed and still asked me.
“No.”
She nodded.
“Me neither.”
That was better than pretending.
May you like
We stood there together without fixing anything.
For once, no one in my family renamed pain before it had finished being pain.
