A long time later, I saw Sebastian again at his funeral.
The call came from a funeral planner.
“Ms. Carter, Mr. Donovan asked us to notify you that his funeral will be held in three days.”
I thought it was just another sick trick to force me to meet him.
I hung up immediately.
Seconds later, they called Ethan instead. He put the phone on speaker and held my hand as the planner explained that Sebastian had left behind a video.
He specifically asked that I not be shown directly.
Ethan looked at me. “Do you want to watch it?”
I nodded.
There was no gore in the video.
Just Sebastian standing alone by the sea, his back to the camera.
The world around him looked huge.
He looked very small.
After a long silence, he finally spoke, voice rough and exhausted.
“That lunatic Lily will never appear in front of Natalie again. Everyone who hurt her has been dealt with. No one will make her sad again.”
Another long silence.
Then a bitter laugh.
“She had a hard life. Even after coming to America with me, she only got a few years of peace. What I owe her in this life… I can’t repay.”
He turned then, eyes empty as dead water.
He looked into the camera and said to Ethan, word by word, “Take good care of her. And if you ever hurt her, I won’t let you go. Not even as a ghost.”
The video ended abruptly.
But in the silence after, I seemed to hear the rest of what he hadn’t said aloud.
I know I was never worthy of being loved.
In the end, I decided to go.
Not because I still cared.
I just wanted to see what kind of game he was trying to play this time.
But when I walked into the funeral hall, all the suspicion in me vanished.
His black-and-white portrait was set under white flowers.
He looked young in it.
Confident.
Alive.
Then I saw him in the coffin.
And froze.
His face was peaceful.
But his left sleeve was empty.
A lawyer standing nearby lowered his voice and told me, “Mr. Donovan cut off that arm himself. He said it was the arm he used to drag you across the floor. He said he didn’t deserve to keep it.”
My head rang.
Suddenly, I remembered all those recent times I had found him at a distance.
Never close.
Never touching.
Always staying about half a step too far away.
When I had tea, he sat quietly in the corner.
When I shopped, he followed from a distance.
Even when I went to appointments, I would sometimes spot him outside, just waiting.
I had only felt annoyance.
Until the day I exploded and told him, “I will never forgive you for sleeping with another woman. I will never forgive you for killing my child. I don’t want to see you again.”
He had looked shattered.
But still smiled.
“As long as I can see you from far away, that’s enough.”
In anger, I had spat, “Then go die, Sebastian. When I loved you with everything I had, you treated it like garbage. Now you act like you can’t live without me? It’s disgusting.”
Then I had said the cruelest thing of all.
“If nothing unexpected happens, we’ll only see each other again at each other’s funerals.”
He had stood there for a long time.
Then quietly said, “Okay.”
I hadn’t known then that on the day he heard Lily confess the truth, he had already begun unraveling everything.
I learned later that he had Lily taken away.
He had wanted me to see her punishment, then feared it would stain me further if I did. He made her suffer until there was almost nothing left of her. Then he ended it.
He had also searched for me after I disappeared.
At first he thought I would come back on my own, the way I always had before.
One month.
Two months.
Three months.
I never returned.
He began losing his mind.
During that time, Lily forged his signature and stole huge sums from the company. She thought she could cry and smile her way out of it like before. Instead, Sebastian prepared to send her to prison.
Desperate, she finally told him the truth.
The child she had used to trap him wasn’t even his.
And the baby I had carried back then had been his all along.
He sent Lily away.
He sent the other child to an orphanage.
Then he turned the whole country upside down looking for me.
People claimed they saw me jump into the sea.
Some even said a body had been recovered.
He searched anyway.
Day and night.
Until someone finally told him an Asian man had rescued a woman that night.
And that thread, tiny as it was, was what kept him alive long enough to find me again.
Three years later, when he did, he saw me with Ethan.
Saw that I was loved.
Saw that I had built something new.
He had wanted to give up.
But then he saw my pregnancy.
And jealousy, regret, and obsession dragged him back to me one last time.
Then he learned the truth about the child we had lost.
And that was the end of whatever hope he had left.
The day after Lily died, Sebastian transferred everything he owned into my name.
Then he cut off the arm that had dragged me.
Then he recorded that video for Ethan.
Then he walked into the sea.
The fishermen who found him said his body was already stiff.
But in his hand, clenched so tightly even death couldn’t pry it open, was a photograph.
The lawyer handed it to me.
I looked down.
And for a moment, time collapsed.
It was a candid shot from my first year in America.
I was tugging on Sebastian’s hand, begging him to buy me ice cream. It had been that time of the month, and he usually never let me eat cold things. I had pleaded and pouted and laughed and made ridiculous faces until he finally gave in.
In the photo, I was kissing his cheek in triumph.
I looked bright.
He looked helpless and handsome.
Sunlight poured over both of us.
We looked like a painting of happiness.
But the person in that photograph was gone.
And the girl in it was gone too.
The dead do not come back.
And the living do not turn around.
I folded the photo slowly and placed it back in his still hand.
Then I turned and left the funeral home.
Outside, Ethan was waiting for me.
The moment he saw me, his expression softened. He wrapped his coat around my shoulders and helped me into the car like I was something precious.
I lowered my head and rested a hand on my belly.
Inside me, life moved quietly forward.
Beside me was the man who had pulled me back from death, who knew my scars without forcing me to display them, who loved me without asking me to bleed for it.
I looked out the window as the funeral home disappeared behind us.
At last, I understood something simple.
Not everyone you love is your home.
Not everyone who saves you keeps saving you.
And not everyone who loses you deserves to find you again.
Sebastian had once been the whole world to me.
Now he was only a name buried in the past.
Ahead of me was my husband.
My child.
My family.
My future.
And this time, I didn’t look back.