CHAPTER 22: THE TRUTH HURTS

Richard’s story unfolded like a long exhale he had held for years, a confession threaded with clarity the younger version of him never could have voiced. From the outside, from that high perch of omniscience where truth didn’t hide behind fear, everything he once misunderstood about himself and about Ahce lay painfully, beautifully bare.

I thought I could avoid hurting her if I stayed far from her.

Watching her afar was already enough for me.

She is my light, and always will be.

But I was wrong.

He had thought he was protecting her. That was the lie he fed himself while quietly dismantling everything she tried to build with him.

In his mind, distance equaled sacrifice, control, goodness. If he stepped back, she wouldn’t have to feel the weight of his doubts, his chaos, the shadows he carried from a past he never learned to confront. He believed leaving her space was the noble thing to do.

But it wasn’t noble. It was fear dressed as caution. Richard didn’t push her away to keep her safe. He pushed because he didn’t believe he deserved her in the first place.

I never understood her pain.

I never accepted her love.

I took her for granted.

Ahce had never left out of anger. No. When she finally turned her back on him, she wore a kind of weary acceptance, like someone who had been standing in the rain too long and realized there was no roof coming.

She had poured her tenderness into him until she was empty. The late nights waiting for calls that never came. The quiet forgiveness she handed him again and again, hoping would be the one that softened him. The way she held his dreams above her own because he wouldn’t hold them himself.

She had carried everything, while he guarded nothing but his walls. That was what devastated him the most in the silence that followed her absence. The comprehension arrived slowly, then all at once.

Morning light filtering through his window reminded him of the way she used to whisper good morning. A half-finished cup of coffee became a ghost of conversations they never had. Every small gesture he hadn’t returned echoed louder in her absence.

He realized he’d broken something uncommonly pure, something rare enough that most people never encounter it in a lifetime.

Pain, in its cruel efficiency, carved him open. At first, he drowned in it. Long nights, hollow questions, the ache of memory pressing into his ribs. But suffering has a way of reshaping a man, sanding down the roughness, forcing him to examine the parts of himself he always avoided.

Richard rebuilt himself slowly. Piece by stubborn piece. He learned to trust his own instincts instead of running from them. He learned discipline, steadiness, and responsibility. He found meaning in the quiet instead of letting it suffocate him. Somewhere along the way, the boy who ran from love became a man willing to stand still and face it.

Every time he thought of her, it wasn’t longing that guided him anymore, but a vow. If fate ever let him stand in front of Ahce again, he would show her someone whole, not someone hoping she would glue the fractured pieces back together.

City X became his crucible. College was his proving ground. He let ambition fill the space where self-doubt used to coil. No distractions, he told himself. Especially not love. And yet, no matter how far he traveled, her name followed him like a shadow he didn’t mind casting.

He saw her success unfold from afar. Awards. Articles. Books. Each accomplishment felt like a soft reminder of who she’d always been. Confident. Unstoppable. Brilliant. But instead of feeling small, he felt inspired. She wasn’t a wound anymore, she was a compass.

And then fate, with its smug sense of timing, stepped back into the picture.

December 2025. A brief encounter at an event crowded with strangers. She smiled at him, polite, distant. The kind of smile that said: I remember you, but not the way you hope.

Yet I was nothing more than a stranger.

He froze. Words crumbled before they reached his tongue.

The next time came a year later. A café window. Sunlight crowning her hair. Laughter spilling from her lips in a way that made him realize she had found a life without him. He watched from outside like a man staring at a memory through glass.

He let her go again.

But destiny was relentless.

In 2028, her book signing popped onto his feed like a spark thrown onto dry grass. City X. His city. His territory. His life now intersected hers not by accident, but by design.

Seeing her on that stage felt surreal. She’d grown into herself beautifully, with a confidence that drew people toward her without her even trying. He watched, unseen, but something in her gaze brushed over him, paused, and for the first time in years, the air shifted.

Later, the night unfolded too quickly.

Alcohol loosened boundaries. Stories loosened old knots. The distance between them, carefully maintained for years, dissolved in an instant. She laughed like she used to. He softened like he never allowed himself to.

And somewhere in the hazy warmth of a night that should’ve ended earlier, they crossed a line that had been trembling beneath their feet since the moment fate pushed them back into each other’s orbit.

The marriage papers. Her flushed cheeks. His steady hands masked a storm inside him. The rawness of two people who had once loved each other too deeply stumbled back into that gravity.

Morning peeled away the haze and left only the truth.

They had collided with fate, hard enough to rewrite both their futures with ink neither of them intended to spill.

And then came the question that shook him back to the present, the one that clawed at his chest long after she slipped from his arms weeks later, eyes blank, memories torn away like pages ripped from a book they were meant to write together.

Why did she lose her memories?

From the outside, the answer wasn’t simple. Because sometimes a mind breaks before a heart does. Because trauma, exhaustion, and emotional overload can build like pressure behind a dam until the mind chooses the one escape it has left... forgetting.

Because the past they collided with wasn’t healed, not fully, and the weight of it pressed too hard, too fast. But the deeper truth was harsher.

Her memories didn’t disappear to punish him. They disappeared because fate wasn’t done remaking them, the same way it once remade him. And somewhere in that blank space inside her mind, Richard sensed a new beginning waiting quietly.

One, he wasn’t going to run from this time.