Chapter 33: Chapter 32

Everyone assumes that death is an unbearable pain.

A sudden and violent emptiness…a fatality in which everything becomes nothing.

They don’t know how wrong they are.

Death…is nothing like that.

It is perfect peace.

The end of all senses.

The erasure of all thoughts.

I had never considered what it meant to stop existing. But if there was one thing I had learnt…it was that death doesn’t let you go without asking for a compromise.

I had already brushed against death once in that accident, when I was just five years old.

It had let me go, but in exchange it had taken my mom and dad.

It wouldn’t spare me. Not this time.

I was there again, on the other side of the scales to life.

And in the balance was a price I could never pay.

—

There was a piercing sound.

It was the only thing I could make out.

Slowly, out of the nothingness, something else emerged. An aseptic, pungent smell.

As it became more intense, I started to perceive the shape of my body, bit by bit.

I was lying down.

Everything weighed on me so heavily that I felt pinned. To what, I still didn’t know. A few moments later, I realised that something was biting my finger.

I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids were as heavy as boulders.

After many attempts, I managed to summon enough strength to open them.

The light was as sharp and merciless as a blade, piercing my vision.

I clenched my eyes shut again. As soon as I was ready to take on that intensity, all I was able to see was…white.

I focused on my arm, outstretched over an immaculate bedcover. On my index finger there was some sort of little clamp that pinched my fingertip and pulsed with my heartbeat.

The smell of disinfectant was nauseatingly strong. I felt weak and bewildered. I tried to move, but it was impossible.

What was happening?

I made out the shape of a man sitting in a chair next to the wall. I stared at him through my eyelashes, and after a while, found the strength to open my mouth.

‘Norman…’ I breathed raggedly.

It was a barely audible whisper, but Norman jumped. His eyes darted to me and he leapt to his feet, spilling his little plastic cup of coffee on the floor. He rushed towards my bed, tripping over his own feet, and stared at me, his face purple with emotion. The next moment, he turned back towards the doorway.

‘Nurse!’ he shouted. ‘Call the doctor, quick! She’s awake, she’s conscious! And my wife…Anna! Anna, come, she’s awake!’

Hurried footsteps resounded through the air. Suddenly the room was invaded by nurses, but before anything else, the figure of a woman appeared in the doorway. She grabbed on to the door jamb and tears welled up in her eyes.

‘Nica!’

Anna made her way through the people to get to me, gripping on to my bedcovers. Her wide eyes stared feverishly at my face and an inconsolable despair distorted her voice.

‘Oh, thank God, thank God…’ She cupped my head with a shaking hand, as if she was scared of breaking me, and tears gushed down her reddened face.

Despite feeling so slow and sluggish, I realised that I had never seen her look so distressed.

‘Oh, honey,’ she stroked my skin. ‘It’s all okay…’

‘Ma’am, the doctor is on his way,’ a nurse told her, before raising my pillow in a practised motion.

‘Can you hear me, Nica?’ a woman asked me clearly. ‘Can you see me?’

I nodded slowly, and she came around to examine the IV drip and check my vitals.

‘No, no, slowly,’ Anna whispered when I tried to move my left arm.

It was only then that I noticed how much every single movement hurt. An atrocious stabbing pain pierced my chest and something stopped me moving.

A bandage.

My arm was folded against my chest and bandaged up to the shoulder.

‘No, Nica, don’t touch it,’ Anna admonished when I tried to rub my eye, which was burning terribly. ‘A capillary’s burst, your eye’s red…How’s your chest? Does it hurt to breathe? Oh, Doctor Robertson!’

A tall, greying man with a short, well-groomed beard and a snow-white shirt came up to my bed.

‘How long has she been conscious?’

‘A few minutes,’ a nurse replied. ‘Her heartbeat is regular.’

‘Blood pressure?’

‘Systolic and diastolic both normal.’

I didn’t understand a thing. My mind was blank and confused.

‘Hi, Nica,’ the man said, clearly and carefully. ‘My name is Doctor Lance Robertson, I’m a doctor at Saint Mary O’ Valley Hospital and I’m the head of this department. I am now going to check your reactions to stimuli. You might feel a little light-headed and nauseous, but that’s completely normal. Relax, okay?’

The backrest started to lift.

As soon as I felt the weight of my head on my shoulders, an excruciating dizziness made my guts twist. I gagged and folded forwards, but from my empty body all that came out was a burning, hacking cough that made my eyes water.

Anna immediately ran to help me, holding my hair off my face. I gripped the covers as once again, I retched ferociously, my body twisting over itself.

‘It’s all okay…These are normal reactions,’ the doctor reassured me, supporting my shoulders. ‘Don’t be scared. Now, I’m going to sit here…Can you turn towards me without moving your legs?’

I was too dazed to understand what he meant. It was only then that I noticed a strange swelling sensation in my foot. But the doctor had already straightened my chin with his finger.

‘Now, look at my finger.’

He pointed a little light into my eye, but when he switched to the other one, it burned so much I had to squeeze it shut. Doctor Robertson said that it was all okay, and I struggled on with the exercise until he seemed satisfied.

He turned off the little light and leant towards me.

‘How old are you, Nica?’ he asked, looking me in the face.

‘Seventeen,’ I replied quietly.

‘When is your birthday?’

‘April 16th.’

The doctor checked my records, then looked at me again.

‘And this lady,’ he pointed at Anna. ‘Can you tell me who she is?’

‘She…she’s Anna. She’s my mom…well…my future adoptive mom,’ I stammered, and Anna’s eyes brimmed with tenderness. She pushed my hair off my face, stroking my temples as if I was the most fragile and precious thing in all the world.

‘All right. No obvious neurological trauma. She’s well,’ the doctor announced to general relief.

‘What…happened?’ I finally asked.

On some level, I already knew. A violent confusion was raging through my disastrous, beaten-up body. And yet, tears closing my throat, I struggled to recall what had happened. I met Anna’s eyes and absorbed the anguish on her face.

‘The bridge, Nica,’ she helped me remember. ‘The netting broke and you…you fell…into the river…’ she struggled to say, destroyed. ‘Someone saw you, and called an ambulance…We got a call from the hospital…’

‘You’ve cracked two ribs,’ the doctor intervened. ‘And when they found you, your shoulder was dislocated. We’ve put it back in, but you should wear the brace for at least three weeks. You’ve also sprained your ankle,’ he added. ‘Undoubtedly as a consequence of the impact. Considering what you’ve gone through, you’ve got off practically unscathed.’

He hesitated, serious. ‘I don’t think you realise how lucky you are,’ he added, but I was no longer listening.

A feeling of terror gripped me.

‘That boy was with you,’ Anna continued. ‘Lionel…do you remember? He’s here too. It was him who raised the alarm. The police have asked him some questions, but they’d like to know…’

‘Where is he?’

She jumped.

My heart thumped in my throat so violently I felt suffocated.

Seeing me like this, Anna almost broke down.

‘He’s in the waiting room, just outside…’

‘Anna,’ I begged shakily. ‘Where is he?’

‘I told you, just outs—’

‘Where’s Rigel?’

Everyone turned to look at me.

In Anna’s eyes, I saw an indescribable anguish.

Norman squeezed her hand. After what seemed like an endless moment, he gripped the curtain around my bed…and then pulled it aside.

Next to me, the devastated body of a boy was lying immobile.

A violent vertigo came over me, and I gripped the bed railing, trying hard not to fall apart.

It was Rigel.

His face was falling sideways off the pillow. His skin was devoured by bruises and his head was swathed in an excessive number of bandages, from which locks of black hair poked out. His shoulders were held in a single, complicated bandage and two plastic tubes went into his nostrils, supplying oxygen to his lungs. What destroyed me the most was seeing him breathing so slowly that he seemed motionless.

No.

I retched again, my throat tight, ice rushing into my bones.

‘I wish I could say he was as lucky as you were,’ the doctor whispered. ‘But sadly that is not the case. He’s broken two ribs and cracked three others. His collarbone is fractured in several places, and the iliac crest in his pelvis is slightly fractured. But…the problem is his head.

The head trauma caused him to lose enormous amounts of blood. We believe that…’

The doctor was cut off by a nurse calling him from the doorway. He excused himself and walked away, but I didn’t even see him go. My gaze was fixed on Rigel, dripping with a dull devastation that my heart could not bear.

His body…he had protected me with his body…

‘Mr and Mrs Milligan,’ Doctor Robertson called, holding files in his hand. ‘Could you come here for a moment?’

‘What’s happening?’ Anna asked.

He looked at her in a way I couldn’t explain. And she seemed to immediately understand. Instantly, the eyes that I had learnt to love crumbled in desperation.

‘Mr and Mrs Milligan, it’s arrived. The confirmation from Social Services…’

‘No,’ Anna shook her head, pulling away from Norman. ‘Please, no…’

‘This is a private hospital, as you know…And he…’

‘Please,’ Anna begged, tears in her eyes, clinging to his shirt. ‘Don’t transfer him. Please, this is the best hospital in town, you can’t send him away! Please!’

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor replied regretfully. ‘It’s not my decision. We understand that you and your husband are no longer the boy’s legal guardians.’

It took my brain a moment to process that information.

What?

‘I’ll pay for everything!’ Anna feverishly shook her head. ‘We’ll pay for the hospitalisation, the treatment, whatever he needs…Don’t send him away…’

‘Anna…’ I whispered, demolished.

She gripped the doctor’s shirt, begging him. ‘Please…’

‘Anna…what’s he saying?’

She trembled. After a few moments, as if admitting a painful defeat, I saw her slowly lower her head. Then she turned to me.

As soon as I saw her crushed eyes, the abyss inside me deepened.

‘He asked,’ she confessed, with palpable pain. ‘It was what he wanted…he was adamant. Last week…he asked me to call off the adoption process.’ Anna swallowed, slowly shaking her head. ‘We concluded it all these last few days. He…didn’t want to stay here any longer.’

The world had reduced to a suffocating throbbing and I hadn’t even realised. In my heart, a dull emptiness was making everything meaningless.

What was she saying?

It was not possible. Last week we…

An overwhelming sense of foreboding knotted my chest.

Had he asked after we had spent the night together?

‘You’ll never be happy like this.’

No.

No, he had understood, I had explained it to him.

No, we had knocked down the walls between us, and looked inside each other for the first time, and he had understood, he understood…

He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have given up on a family, gone back to being an orphan…

Rigel knew. He knew that those who were sent back were never sent to The Grave. They were considered problematic, and as such were sent far away, to other institutes. And I would never find out where he had gone for confidentiality reasons. I would never find him again.

Why? Why hadn’t he said anything?

‘I thank you for your trust in our hospital,’ Doctor Robertson said to Anna. ‘However, Mr and Mrs Milligan…I have to be honest and tell you that the boy’s condition is critical. The head injury is deep, and Rigel is dangerously close to what is called a Stage Three coma. It’s also known as a deep coma. And at the moment…’ He hesitated, looking for the right words. ‘The likelihood of him waking is slim. Maybe, if it weren’t for his pre-existing condition, the clinical outlook might not have been so serious, but…’

‘Condition?’ I whispered feebly. ‘What condition?’

Anna’s eyes flew open and she turned towards me. But what shocked me most wasn’t her falling silent in a way that was almost like giving up. It was how the doctor looked at me, as if I didn’t even know the boy next to me.

‘Rigel suffers from a rare disorder,’ Doctor Robertson said. ‘A chronic condition that has alleviated over time. It’s a neuropathic disorder that manifests in attacks of pain in the fifth cranial nerve. In particular…the temples and the eyes. Patients are born with it, but over time they learn, in some way or another, to live with it…Unfortunately, there is no cure, but it can be managed with medication, and over time the attacks become less frequent.’

Time was passing, but I no longer existed.

I was no longer there. I was not in that room.

I was outside that reality.

My soul screaming in disbelief, all I could feel was my gaze slowly turning to Anna.

That was all it took. She went to pieces, bursting into tears in front of me.

‘I’m sorry, Nica!’ she sobbed. ‘I’m sorry…He…he didn’t want anyone to know…He made us promise not to tell you…from the first day…he made us swear. Mrs Fridge had informed us, but Rigel made us promise…’ She clenched her eyes shut, sobbing. ‘I couldn’t say no…I couldn’t…I’m sorry.’

No.

A deafening roar was shaking within me.

This wasn’t real.

‘When you found him on the floor that night we were away…I was scared to death…I thought he must have had an attack and fainted…’

No.

‘I spoke to the psychologist about his condition, to help him…He must have told him, and Rigel reacted badly…’

‘No,’ a whisper left my lips. Nausea was pounding in my temples; it was all I could feel.

It wasn’t true. If he was ill, I would have known. I’d known Rigel his whole life. It wasn’t true…

A sudden memory snuck up on me.

Him sitting on the bed. The look he had given me that evening, when he said, ‘Something in me is broken…and won’t ever heal.’

The world exploded. I shattered and every piece of the puzzle finally slotted into place.

The repeated headaches.

Anna’s excessive worry when he had a fever.

The knowing looks they exchanged that I had never understood.

Rigel, on the evening of his birthday, in his bedroom, his fingers gripping his hair and his pupils dilated.

Rigel with his clenched fists, screwing his eyes shut as he backed away from me.

Rigel with his back turned on the landing. His snarl, ‘You want to fix me?’, like an injured beast.

I tried to resist the invasion of memories, to refuse them, push them away, but they clung to my ribs, blurring my vision. With a brutal force, the last piece of the puzzle wedged into my mind.

Rigel at The Grave, when we were children.

Those little white candies that the matron gave only to him.

They weren’t candies.

They were pills.

My throat brutally closed. I hardly heard the doctor as he started to speak again.

‘When patients with prior neurological conditions suffer injuries of this nature, the brain tends to try to protect the whole system. The states of unconsciousness into which they fall, in the majority of cases, degenerate into…irreversible comas.’

‘No,’ I swallowed. My body was shaking violently. Everyone turned towards me.

He had thrown himself off that bridge for me.

To save me.

For me.

‘Nica…’

‘No…’

I doubled over retching again, and this time bile burned my throat, corroding what remained of my body.

Someone came to help me, but jumped when my hands pushed them away.

I was wracked with a mad pain, and lost the last glimmer that anchored me to reality.

‘No!’ I shouted, becoming even more distraught. My eyes were consumed by tears and I lunged towards him, trying to reach him. This couldn’t be the end, we had to stay together. Together, my soul screamed, twisting around on itself. Voices tried to calm me down but the devastation inside me was so violent it blinded me.

‘Nica!’

‘No!’

I pushed Norman’s arms away and threw back the covers. The beeping became alarmingly rapid, my cracked ribs throbbed and the air filled with panicked shouts. They tried to hold me back, but I writhed as much as I could, my screams filling the room.

The bed shook and the metal bars clanged.

I flung my arm out and the needle of the IV drip tore out of my skin with a burning sting as I thrashed, kicked and feverishly clawed at the air, Band-Aids tearing across my vision.

Hands grabbed my wrists, trying to keep me still. In the madness of pain, they became leather belts inside a dark cellar. Terror exploded and I was plunged headlong into my nightmares again.

‘No!’

My back arched.

‘No! No! No!’

I felt a sharp prick in my forearm and gritted my teeth so tightly that the taste of blood filled my mouth.

Darkness swallowed me up.

And in the dark, I dreamt only of black, of a starless sky and wolf eyes that would never open again.

—

‘She’s had a shock. Many patients have breakdowns, it can happen…I know what you saw was upsetting, but you shouldn’t worry. She just needs rest.’

‘You don’t know,’ Anna’s voice was shaking with distress. ‘You don’t know what she’s like. If you knew Nica, you wouldn’t say this is normal.’ With a sob, she added, ‘I’ve never seen her like this.’

Their voices faded, sounding like they were coming from a distant universe.

I sunk once again into a dense, artificial sleep. Time slipped away with me.

When I opened my eyes, I had no idea what time it was.

My head was unspeakably heavy, and a sharp pain was stabbing behind my eyes. I opened my swollen eyelids, and the first thing I noticed was a golden light.

It wasn’t the sun. It was hair.

‘Hey…’ My eyes focused on Adeline. She was squeezing my hand and her lovely lips were ruined from crying. Her hair was in a braid, as she used to wear it when we were at The Grave. I had always loved her because she, unlike me, shone even between those grey walls.

‘How…how are you feeling?’ The distress on her face was evident, but she still sweetly tried to reassure me despite her pain. ‘There’s water, if you want…Can you take a sip?’

I tasted bile in my mouth, but I didn’t move, silent and drained. Adeline pressed her lips together, then tenderly slipped her hand into mine.

‘Here, hold on…’ She reached out towards the bedside table and I noticed a second glass of water next to my bed.

Someone had placed a little dandelion in it.

It was like the ones I had collected as a child, in the yard of the institute. I would blow on them, wishing I could leave and live the fairy tale I had always dreamt of.

I knew it…She had brought it.

Adeline adjusted the backrest so I could drink more easily. She put the glass back on the bedside table, and something in her crumpled to see me so lifeless. She arranged my bedcovers and her gaze fell on my arm, on the scratch that had been left when the IV drip had been torn away. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

‘They wanted to restrain your wrists,’ she whispered. ‘To stop you writhing and hurting yourself…I asked them not to. I know what it evokes for you…Anna was against it too.’

Adeline looked up, her eyes dripping with pain.

‘They’re not going to transfer him.’

She burst into tears, sobbing hoarsely, and hugged me. For the first time ever, for as long as I had desired human affection, I stayed as limp as a doll.

‘I didn’t know either,’ she confessed, holding me so tight it almost hurt. ‘I didn’t know about his illness…believe me…’

Her sobs rattled her breath. I let her tremble against me, scratching and weeping, I let her hurt as she had always let me. And as her body crumbled against my exhausted chest, I wondered how similar our pain was.

‘Nica…there’s something I need to tell you.’

A tear fell from her face, dropping to the floor. The sadness of her words was so intense that I looked up at her.

Adeline took something out of her pocket. Then, with trembling fingers, she placed it on the bed.

Lying crumpled on the bedcovers was my polaroid.

The photo that Billie had taken of me, the one I couldn’t find and was sure I’d lost.

It was there.

‘They found it in his wallet,’ Adeline murmured. ‘In an inside pocket. He always…carried it with him.’

The world crumbled definitively around me.

I felt a truth growing in me that had been kept hidden for a long time.

A truth of secret glances, unsaid words, years of silenced feelings in the deepest depths of the soul.

A truth…that I had never been able to see, but that her heart had guarded silently every single day.

‘It wasn’t me, Nica,’ I heard her say, from a world that was falling apart. ‘At The Grave, when Margaret shut you in the cellar…It wasn’t me who held your hand.’

My face furrowed with tears, the pain shattered me, everything was burning, and I finally understood what I had never before been able to understand.

All those words, and behaviours.

I felt the truth coming into me, becoming part of me, melding with my soul and making all my thorns of regret tremble, one by one.

‘For all this time…For all his life…He has always…always…’

He had always known there was something wrong with him.

He was born knowing it. He had felt it for as long as he could remember. That was how he had justified it to himself that he had been abandoned.

He wasn’t like other people.

He didn’t need to see the matron’s glances, or the way she shook her head when families said they wanted to adopt him. Rigel watched them from the garden, and saw on their faces a pity he had never asked for.

—

‘Well?’

The man shining a light in his eyes did not reply. He tilted back Rigel’s childish face, and he saw sparks exploding.

‘Where did you say he fell?’

‘Down the stairs,’ the matron replied. ‘It was as if he hadn’t even seen them.’

‘It’s because of the illness,’ the doctor pulled his eyelid open, inspecting him. ‘When the pain is very strong, the dilation of his pupils causes disorientation and a sort of hallucination.’

Rigel didn’t understand much of this, but still he didn’t look up. The doctor examined him, and he sensed within his gaze an unbearable knowledge.

‘I think that you should get him an appointment with a child psychologist. His condition is very unique. It’s related to his trauma…’

‘Trauma?’ the matron asked. ‘What trauma?’

The doctor gave her a look halfway between puzzlement and indignation.

‘Mrs Stoker, the boy is showing clear signs of abandonment issues.’

‘That’s not possible,’ the matron hissed in that voice that made the other children cry. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You said yourself that he was abandoned.’

‘He was still in a swaddling blanket! He can’t remember what happened, he was a newborn baby!’

The doctor gave her a stoic look of extreme self-control.

‘He’s perfectly capable of understanding now. Children this young feel the lack and tend to blame themselves, project it onto themselves and think they are responsible for it. It is possible that he has convinced himself that the condition he was born with is the reason that they…’

‘He doesn’t suffer from anything,’ the matron snapped, her eyes full of stubborn anger. ‘I give him everything he needs. Everything.’

Rigel would never forget the doctor’s look. It was the same that he had glimpsed on many other faces. That sympathy made him feel, if it were possible, even more wrong.

‘Look at him…he’s a disaster,’ he heard him murmur. ‘Denying the evidence won’t help him.’

—

The attacks never came in the same way.

Sometimes they just felt like an irritation behind his eyes, other times they were absent for days and then exploded with an unexpected ferocity. Those were the moments he hated the most, because as soon as he started to hope that he had got better, they returned even stronger than before.

And so Rigel would scratch his eyelids, scratch his clothes, grip whatever he was holding until he tore everything to shreds. He would feel his heart racing in his throat with a horrendous, jarring sound, and out of fear that someone could see him, he would flee far away and hide.

Due to his size, he could hide in tiny places like a baby animal. He would squeeze in, because in the darkness he felt the most intensely what he had always been: alone.

Alone, because he hadn’t been enough for his mother, and he never would be enough for anyone else.

It was always the matron who found him.

She would gently pull him out of his hiding places and take him by the hand, not caring about his blood on her fingers.

She would sing him soft songs about the stars, distant, lonely suns, and he would try not to look at her skirt, crumpled by whoever she had punished last.

This was how the disorder grew in him: over time, he learnt love and affection can’t exist, because the stars are alone.

—

He had always been different.

He didn’t work like other people. He didn’t see like other people – he saw her as the wind tousled her long brown hair, he saw bronze wings on her back, fluttering, then fading away, as if they’d never existed.

The doctor had warned him that seeing things that weren’t really there could be a consequence of the pain. He knew this full well, but still Rigel hated this more than any other weakness.

It was as if the illness was making fun of him, and every time the sparks obscured his vision, he saw a radiant smile and grey, warm eyes that would never look at him.

He saw dreams. Illusions.

He saw her.

And maybe he wouldn’t have felt so flawed, deep down, if there was at least one part of him that wasn’t twisted, extreme and wrong.

But as that awkward love grew ever stronger, Rigel stared at the grooves his fingernails left in the earth, crevices dug by a wild beast.

‘It will get better with time,’ the doctor said.

The other children stayed far away from him, they looked at him fearfully, having seen him suddenly scratch at the piano keys and tear the grass from the ground in crazy outbursts.

They didn’t come near him because they were scared of him. But, this suited him. He couldn’t stand their pity. He couldn’t stand those looks they gave him, throwing him into the trashcan of the world. He didn’t need to be reminded of how different he was. Certain condemnations aren’t chosen: they are our silences and the invisible pain of our shortcomings.

But maybe that was his most painful shortcoming: silence. He would not realise this until one summer afternoon, when he stood up on his tiptoes, stretched out his little arm, and was blinded by a stabbing pain before he could reach the glass near the sink in the laundry room.

Pain exploded like a cluster of thorns and he gritted his teeth. The glass shattered in the sink, and all Rigel could do was grip, grip, grip until he felt the shards cutting his skin.

Red droplets marked the porcelain – and Rigel saw flowers of blood and hands of a beast, fingers curled like claws.

‘Who’s there?’ a little voice asked.

He felt his stomach tightening with a burning sensation even before he jumped with surprise. Nica’s footsteps pounded the floorboards and that sensation transformed into a wild terror.

Not her.

Not those eyes.

Even though he had always been the first to push her away, he couldn’t stand the thought of her seeing him for the broken, bloody beast he was.

Maybe because Nica would have pitied him, and found a chink in his armour, and then he wouldn’t have been able to keep her out.

Or maybe because looking in her eyes…was like looking inside himself, and seeing himself for the disaster he knew he was.

‘Peter, is that you?’ she whispered, and Rigel ran away before she could see him.

He hid in the bushes, seeking solitude, but the pain returned and he collapsed on the grass.

He clenched his eyes shut, scratching at the stalks of grass with agitated fingers. He didn’t know how else to relieve the excruciating pain.

‘It will get better with time,’ the doctor had said. And for the first time, his temples still throbbing, Rigel found himself smiling. But it was that bitter, cruel smile, that smile that almost hurt. That smile that had nothing joyous about it, because he knew, deep down, that if it came from within him, it couldn’t be anything but twisted, extreme and wrong.

He wondered if this was how wolves laughed: empty, hissing, tense-jawed.

And yet, despite how hopeless he felt…Rigel couldn’t stop thinking about her.

With her clear gaze and her freckles, Nica pushed back the darkness, found a place between the rot and the ink. Despite everything, she was always smiling, she had a light he would never be able to understand.

‘There’s a fairy tale for everyone,’ he had heard her say once, a daisy in her wind-tousled hair.

Rigel was watching from a distance, as always, because there is nothing so scary, and yet also so attractive, to the dark as light.

Nica, tiny and fragile, had her arm wrapped around a younger child.

‘You’ll see…’ She smiled, her eyes red from crying, but still as hopeful as the dawn. ‘We’ll find ours.’

Rigel wondered whether there could be something, somewhere, for him, too. Something lost in forgotten pages. Something good and kind, that could touch him carefully, without necessarily wanting to fix him.

Watching her, always from too far away, Rigel wondered if, maybe, she was that something.

‘You should tell her,’ a voice whispered one evening.

Rigel had closed the door to the cellar, where Nica, finally, had fallen asleep. He didn’t turn around.

He knew who had discovered him. Those blue eyes followed him everywhere.

Adeline, behind him, clutched the hem of her grey dress before whispering, ‘She thinks it’s me who holds her hand.’

Rigel looked down and thought of Nica, behind that door. She, who loved fairy tales, who dreamt so desperately of living in one.

‘Whatever,’ he replied. ‘Let her think that.’

‘Why?’ Adeline looked at him with a hint of desperation. ‘Why don’t you tell her it’s you?’

Rigel didn’t reply. Then, in silence, he placed his hand on the door. The hand that, only down there, in the darkness of broken dreams, could find the strength to touch her.

‘Because there aren’t any fairy tales where the wolf holds the girl’s hand.’

—

He always hated looking her in the face.

Just as he loved it, every inch of it, with excruciating desperation.

Rigel had tried to weed out that love, he had purged every single petal with hands that had been learning to tear things apart since childhood.

But after one petal, there was another, and then another immediately after, and in that infinite spiral staircase, he plunged so deep into Nica’s eyes that it became impossible to resurface.

He drowned in them. Hope touched his heart.

But he didn’t want to hope. He hated hoping.

Hoping meant deluding himself that one day he would get better, or that the only person who loved him was not a monster who beat the other children until they bled.

No. It wasn’t for him.

He wanted to erase it, push it away, tear it off him.

To free himself from those feelings, because they were twisted, extreme and wrong, just like he was.

But the more time passed, the more Nica burrowed into his heart.

The more the years changed them, the more he scratched at the thorns of that love without end.

And as the days became years, as she continued to smile, Rigel understood that in her sweetness, there was a strength that no one else had.

A strength like no other.

Having a soul like Nica’s meant knowing how harsh the world could be, but deciding, day in day out, to love and to be kind.

Without compromises. Without fear.

Wholeheartedly.

Rigel had never dared to hope.

But he fell desperately in love with her – she who was hope embodied.

—

‘Have you got all your things?’

Rigel turned around.

The woman was standing in the doorway to his room. She had said her name was Anna, but Rigel had hardly listened to what she and her husband had just been saying.

He had seen her throwing a look at the empty bed that used to be Peter’s.

‘When you’re ready…’

‘She’s told you, hasn’t she?’

She lifted her eyes, but his were already there, fixed on her face, inscrutable.

‘About what?’

‘About the illness.’

He saw her stiffen. Anna stared at him wordlessly, maybe surprised that he spoke about it with that cold terseness.

‘Yes…she told us. She said that the attacks have gotten better over time…but she gave us the list of the medicines you take.’

Anna looked at him with a sensitivity that didn’t even touch him.

‘You know…it doesn’t change anything,’ she tried to reassure him, but Rigel knew they had seen the note about him, and that, on the other hand, changed a lot. ‘For me and Norman, it’s…’

‘I have a request.’

Anna blinked, shocked at the interruption.

‘A request?’

‘Yes.’

She must have wondered if he was the same polite and affable young man who, a moment ago, down in the living room, had introduced himself with the most charming of smiles.

She furrowed her brow, uncertain.

‘Okay…’ she murmured.

Rigel turned. Through the dusty window, he saw Nica placing her cardboard box into the trunk of their car below.

‘A request about what?’

‘About a promise.’

—

If you grow up with a wolf’s heart, you learn to recognise sheep.

He had always known, long before Lionel had grabbed Nica in the street and shaken her, trying to get his own way.

As he had thrown him to the ground, he had felt the sadistic satisfaction of inflicting the same physical pain that he had endured his whole life. Lionel’s pathetic anger only fed the darkness within him.

‘You think you’re a hero, do you?’ Lionel had spat. ‘Is that what you think? You think you’re the good guy?’

‘The good guy?’ he’d heard himself whisper. ‘Me…the good guy?’

Rigel had wanted to throw his head back in cruel laughter.

He had wanted to tell him that wolves don’t hope. They have too much rot inside for such a sweet, light emotion.

If it was true that there is a fairy tale for all of us, his had got lost in the silence of a broken boy with muddy hands.

‘Do you want to see inside me? You’d piss yourself before you could take a look.’

He had squashed Lionel’s hand to the ground, savouring his pain.

‘Oh, no, I’ve never been the good guy,’ he’d hissed with a raw sarcasm that came from the soul. ‘You want to see how bad I can be?’

He would happily have shown him, but he’d remembered that Nica was there.

He’d turned, looking for her.

She was watching.

And in those shining eyes, Rigel had failed, yet again, to see himself for the monster he was.

—

There was a suffering worse than the pain attacks.

And she was the only one capable of inflicting it.

‘We’re broken together,’ Nica had whispered. ‘But you don’t let me in, not even for a moment.’

Rigel saw again the broken glass, the cuts on his hands.

He saw the torn-up grass and the blood on his fingers.

He saw himself, so dark and alone, and he couldn’t stand the thought of letting her into that disaster that even he would never be free from. Of seeing her touch that naked, angry part of him, that slaughtered his soul and screamed in pain like a living creature.

So he stayed silent. Again.

And her disappointed look scarred his heart.

He wanted to love her. To be with her. To breathe her in.

But life had only taught him how to scratch and tear.

He would never know how to love tenderly. Even her, who was tenderness incarnate.

And seeing those beautiful eyes fill with tears, Rigel knew that if there was a price to pay, to save her from himself, he would give everything he had. Every single petal, for that love with no end.

—

That moment would have come sooner or later.

Rigel had always known it. But he had been blinded by the hope that he would be able to stay with her forever, that he would no longer be alone. He had found solace in his wishful thinking.

He had seen her lying in his bed, her bare back poking out between the sheets. Then she had opened her hand. Seeing the purple Band-Aid that she had put on his chest, he knew what he had to do.

He clenched his fists and, closing the door behind him, went downstairs with only one aim in mind.

The writhing feeling seized his heart, trying desperately to stop him, but Rigel pushed it back down inside himself with all his remaining strength.

He had looked for his fairy tale, and found it in Nica’s eyes.

He had read it on her skin, in her scent.

He had embedded her in his memories of that night, and now he knew that he would never forget her.

Downstairs, the light in the kitchen was already on, even though it was very early, and everyone else was still asleep. He was certain he knew who he would find there.

Anna was wrapped in her bathrobe and her hair was dishevelled. She was busy making tea, but it didn’t take her long to notice him standing in the doorway.

‘Rigel…’ She put a hand to her heart in surprise. ‘Hi…how are you feeling? It’s very early…I was just about to come up and see how you were doing…’ She gave him a worried look. ‘Are you feeling better?’

He didn’t reply. He stared at Anna with those eyes that would hide no more. Now that he was letting her go, he no longer needed to pretend.

She looked at him, confused.

‘Rigel?’

‘I can’t stay here.’

He spat out those words as if they were venom.

Anna, on the other side of the room, didn’t move.

‘…What?’ was all she managed to whisper after a while. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. I can’t stay here any longer. I have to go.’

He had never found it so difficult to talk. Or so painful. His heart was refusing to leave her.

‘Is this…some sort of joke?’ Anna tried to smile, but all she managed was a pale grimace. ‘Some sort of game I’m not aware of?’

He looked her in the face. He didn’t need to speak. His eyes would express how firm he was in his decision. She had to understand.

Slowly, all traces of colour drained from her face.

‘Rigel…What are you saying?’ Anna looked at him with disconsolate eyes. ‘You can’t be serious, you can’t…’ She clung to his gaze as disappointment flattened her voice. ‘I thought you were doing well here, I thought you were happy…Why are you saying this? Did we do something wrong? Norman and I…’ She paused, before whispering, ‘Is it because of the illness? If…’

‘The illness has nothing to do with it,’ he hissed. It was always a raw nerve. ‘It’s just my decision.’

Anna looked at him, anguished, and Rigel held her gaze with all the resolve he had.

‘Ask to cancel the adoption.’

‘No…You can’t be serious…’

‘I’ve never been more serious in my life. Ask. Today.’

Anna shook her head. Her eyes shone with a maternal obstinacy he had never seen before.

‘You think they’ll accept it just like that? Without any justification? This is serious. It doesn’t work like that, they’ll want specific reasons…’

He interrupted her.

‘There’s the note.’

Confusion crept over her face.

‘The note?’ she repeated, but Rigel knew that she knew what he was talking about. That indelible clause in the Foster Care Placement Order, made just for him.

‘The note about me. If my attacks interfere with family harmony and degenerate into violent episodes, the adoption process can be suspended.’

‘That note is an aberration!’ Anna burst out. ‘I have no intention of using it! That line about violent episodes refers to the adoptive family, and you’ve never hurt any of us! The illness isn’t an easy way out, if anything it’s a reason for you to stay here!’

‘Oh, come on,’ he spat back with a sarcastic smile. ‘You’ve always only wanted me because I remind you of your son.’

Anna stiffened.

‘That’s not true.’

‘Yes, it is. Isn’t that what you thought when you saw me there, playing the piano? Don’t pretend it’s not the case. You were never there for me.’

‘You don’t…’

‘I’m not Alan,’ he hissed, making her jump. ‘I never have been. And I never will be.’

There he went again. Looking in those drained eyes, Rigel got yet more confirmation that there was nothing he could do better than lash out and hurt others.

For a moment, all Anna could do was absorb the harshness of his words. When she looked down again, he was certain he saw her hands shaking.

‘You’ve never been his replacement. Never. We’ve grown fond of you…for who you are. Because of who you are.’ Her lips twisted into a bitter smile as she shook her head. ‘I would like to think…that you’ve grown fond of us too.’

He didn’t reply. The truth was that he had realised he could either love desperately, or feel nothing at all, and in the abyss between those extremes, there was no room for fondness.

The matron’s fondness for him had made him reject any feelings of attachment that might spontaneously sprout within him.

‘I can’t do that. Even if it’s what you want…I can’t send you back there.’ Anna looked up, her eyes wounded but bright. ‘How can you want to go back there? To that horrible place…No,’ she cut him off before he could interrupt her. ‘You think I haven’t grasped what sort of a place it is? Do you really need to leave here that badly?’

Rigel clenched his fists. The writhing feeling was twisting through him, tearing and scratching, its screams a desperate condemnation.

‘There must be some other way. Whatever it is, together, we can find a solution, we can…’

‘I’m in love with her.’

Rigel would always remember how that confession had burned. It was so private that he hadn’t even voiced it to himself, and saying it aloud in front of someone else was intolerable.

His words resounded through the glacial silence.

‘In love with her,’ he spat through gritted teeth, ‘to the bone.’

He felt Anna’s gaze on him, and he didn’t need to meet her eyes to know that they were frozen with disbelief. Rigel dug his fingernails into his palms and lifted two deep, knowing eyes to her face.

‘You get it now? I will never see her as a sister.’

There was nothing Anna could do, nothing but stare at him as if she was seeing him for the first time.

Rigel let her.

‘This isn’t the right place for me. As long as I stay…she will never truly be happy.’

As he lowered his face, thinking of her smiling at him with that Band-Aid on her chest, Rigel realised once and for all that if there was a finale, for those like him…it had been within him since the very beginning.

‘The stars are alone,’ the matron had told him once. ‘Like you. They’re distant, some of them have already gone out. The stars are alone, but they never stop shining, even when you can’t see them.’

Rigel had understood it then, in that moment when Nica traced constellations on his chest.

He had understood, after having watched her sleep all night long, never closing his eyes for an instant.

He had understood that somewhere, deep in his heart, she would always be with him.

‘You are not alone.’ Nica had said, ‘I’ll always…carry you with me.’

Because the stars are alone, but they never stop shining, even when you can’t see them.

Rigel knew that he would always shine for her, even if he could no longer see her.

She was his star, she had always been the most precious thing his gaze had ever touched.

He would look at her from his cracked heart, and would know that wherever she was, Nica was happy. With a real family, the fairy tale she had always wanted.

‘She deserves…everything you can give her.’

—

‘Rigel…do you want to tell me what’s going on?’

He would never forget her eyes. Nica’s eyes, where he had lost himself when he was just a boy.

Rigel had looked into those Tearsmith eyes and known, again, that he couldn’t lie to her.

‘What’s happening is that I’m leaving you,’ he would have said, if he wasn’t the way he was. ‘For the first time since you took everything from me, I’m letting you go.’

But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Not even at the end.

So he did the only thing he had never allowed himself to do.

He lowered all defences.

He looked at her, and that burning love gushed from his eyes like a river bursting its banks.

She had gasped, unable to understand, and he burned her into his memory all over again, every last bit of her.

‘Rigel…’

He couldn’t have anticipated what happened next.

He couldn’t have known that they would never get home, that those unsaid words would stay stuck in him like his last regrets.

He would always remember the frozen scream in her eyes.

He would never forget the terror he felt at that moment, his heart thudding to his throat. The netting giving way and Nica falling backwards.

Rigel lunged forwards and adrenaline dilated his pupils. Nica’s hair spread out behind her and he saw her moth wings unfurling in the sunset, an angel about to take flight.

Another of his hallucinations. The last.

Rigel grabbed her. Moving his body beneath hers was instinctive, born from the need he had always had to protect her. Even from himself.

He felt the writhing. He screamed, thrashed, clutched her feverishly to himself. He felt himself closing around her like a flower, his thorns standing up all together to protect her from the impact.

And before he even realised it was the end, Rigel heard those words bursting from his mouth, the redemption of his whole existence.

‘I love you.’

Nica was trembling in his arms, like a butterfly held for too long.

And as that whisper left him, for the first and last time in his life, Rigel felt…peace.

An eternal, sweet relief, the almost exhausting abandon he had always fought against.

He would never be alone.

No.

Because Nica was within him. With her innocent eyes and heartbreaking smile…She, who would never leave him, who would always be an eternal star in his heart.

And as the world tore away the last page of this story without an end, Rigel buried his face in her neck, just like a wolf, and held her to him with everything he had.

With all his strength and all his breath.

With every word unsaid, and every crumb of regret.

With all of his petals.

And all of his thorns.

With everything he had…for that love without end.

‘Farewell,’ the robin said to the snow, Loving it for the last time.

‘I was cold, but you tried to cover me, And now you’ve got into my heart.’

—

Which piece of your heart would you choose?

You can only live with one, because the other will inevitably die.

Which piece would you choose?

‘You,’ Rigel would reply, eyes closed.

Always, and no matter what, ‘I would have chosen you.’