“Is there anything else?” he asked.
Elena sat beside him.
I could have softened the story.
I could have protected the image they once had of me.
Instead, I told them everything I could legally reveal: how young I had been, how quickly intelligence became complicity, how their father helped me leave, and how fear had followed me long after the danger ended.
They did see me differently afterward.
That was the consequence I had feared.
But different did not mean without love.
Daniel was angry that I had hidden the truth.
Elena asked questions that made me ashamed.
We argued.
We cried.
Then we kept talking.
Months later, the three of us returned to Saint Aurelia Cathedral for a hearing involving the preservation of its damaged doors.
The church had decided not to restore them exactly as they had been.
The new wood contained a narrow line of darker grain marking where the federal team had broken through.
Elena touched that line with two fingers.
“Everyone thought the doors breaking was the violent part,” she said.
“It wasn’t?” Daniel asked.
She shook her head.
“The violence happened behind locked doors.
This was the moment they opened.”
She slipped one arm through his and the other through mine.
We walked back down the aisle together—not toward Victor, not toward Conrad, and not toward the future they had planned for us.
We walked into the daylight carrying nothing that belonged to them.
