That night three years ago, after I had crawled all the way to the door through my own blood, Sebastian had come back.
He had dragged me back into that apartment like I was nothing.
Like I was roadkill.
He rained words down on me while I lay broken on the floor.
“Do I not have the right to choose someone else?” he demanded. “Am I supposed to be tied to damaged goods like you for the rest of my life?”
Damaged goods.
I heard every word.
He stood over me with disgust in his eyes.
“You think I didn’t visit you in prison because I was busy? I just didn’t want to see you. You never had parents, no family, no background, and it shows. You really don’t know how to read a room.”
Before, if anyone had dared say something like that to me, I would have clawed flesh off their bones.
But then?
I only stared at him.
Because the man in front of me was a stranger.
And inside my chest, something had already gone completely empty.
He told me he had planned to dump me before I ever came to America.
That I had chased after him without being invited.
That those two years I served for him didn’t mean he owed me his whole life.
“That’s what you are, Natalie. A parasite I can’t shake off.”
Physical pain was nothing next to that.
So all those years together had meant nothing?
So me going to prison for him had only become leverage in his eyes?
After he slammed the door and left, I got up slowly and staggered out of the apartment.
Ahead of me was the ocean.
Black.
Endless.
I had never known what it felt like to be held by parents.
When the seawater closed over my head, I didn’t feel cold.
Only relief.
Before I lost consciousness, I dreamed.
I dreamed of the orphanage.
Of snatching half a dirty bun from older kids and shoving it into Sebastian’s hands with my broken front teeth flashing. “Eat. You eat.”
I dreamed of the director pinning Sebastian down, tearing at his school uniform while Sebastian lay there pale and silent with despair in his eyes.
I dreamed of myself carrying that heavy porcelain teapot into the office, smiling sweetly, thanking the director for “taking care of us,” and then smashing it over his skull.
I had torn at his pants, trying to destroy the thing he used to hurt Sebastian.
Sebastian had been the one to stop me.
We hadn’t escaped because he took me with him.
I had followed him.
I only wanted to walk with him a little farther.
But when he turned around and saw my tear-filled eyes, he sighed and said, helplessly, “Fine. Come on, then.”
I had mistaken that for acceptance.
For being chosen.
Maybe he had been right about one thing.
A girl like me really had never learned how to read what wasn’t being said.
When I woke up in the hospital, I learned I hadn’t died.
A man named Ethan Shaw had pulled me out of the sea.
He had seen me walking toward the water late at night and thought I looked wrong. He had planned to call the police.
Before he could, I disappeared into the waves.
He went in after me.
Nearly died himself doing it.
Because of seaweed.
Because I fought him.
Because I didn’t want to live.
I heard him through the crack in the hospital door afterward, speaking softly to his parents.
“She may have gone through something bad. Don’t ask questions around her.”
His mother said at once, “Why would we? None of it would be her fault.”
That was the first warmth that touched my frozen heart after everything.
The Shaws took me in.
Back in the States, Ethan’s father arranged a job for me at the company so I could rebuild myself. A year and a half ago, Ethan confessed that he wanted to date me with marriage in mind. He told me calmly that he had never seen me as a sister, no matter how many people joked otherwise.
This serious, steady man got jealous more easily than anyone I had ever known.
Slowly, inside the simple daily kindness of that family, I learned how to be loved without begging for it.
Half a year ago, I walked down the aisle with Ethan waiting for me at the end, his whole face lit up just because I was there.
That was when I finally understood.
I deserved a home too.