Threads Of Fate (Being Revamped)

Understandings

"Was I horrible to you, Mara?" Edward's voice was quiet — almost too quiet — as though he feared the answer. Then, as if correcting himself, he gave a faint, rueful shake of his head. "I mean... Zenith."

Her brows lifted in surprise. That name — her real name —He felt, rolled off his tongue more easily than the one she had crafted for others. It was absurd, irrational even, yet hearing him say it now carried the gravity of shared history.

Before she could form a response, his hand lifted — hesitant at first, then surer — and brushed a wayward strand of her fiery hair behind her ear. The fountain's soft trickle filled the silence between them, and the wind caught loose strands of red, carrying them like embers past his knuckles.

"Tell me," he said, the faintest smile tugging at his lips, "but please... be gentle."

Her eyes softened. Slowly, she lifted her fingers to his cheek, her touch light and tentative, as though afraid he might pull away. Instead, his eyes closed under her touch, lashes dusting against the dampness on his skin. The fountain mist had begun to cling to his dark lashes and hair, jeweled droplets catching in the moonlight.

"You were perfect, Eddie," she said — and though the words wore a smile, it was tinged with sorrow. "Never, not even in your wildest dreams, should you think that what made me run was your fault."

He opened his eyes then, searching hers, but she looked away for a heartbeat, as if gathering the courage to speak. She stepped back slightly, inhaled deeply, and when she continued, her voice was a fragile thread between them.

"If it were up to me," she murmured, her gaze fixed somewhere just beyond him, "we would have been married. We would have spent our lives together — waking each morning at your side, watching the sun slip in through our windows, kissing you before you even had a chance to yawn yourself awake... reminding you every single day how much I loved you."

Her confession hung there — an image so vivid Edward could almost see it: the warm sheets, the smell of her hair, laughter echoing through quiet mornings. And the truth in her voice gripped him harder than any dagger could.

His throat worked as he swallowed. "Then why—" His voice cracked before he steadied it, the weight of every sleepless night behind the words. "Then why did you leave?"

The question didn't lash out. It didn't accuse. It was quieter, heavier — the voice of a man who had been carrying the fragments of an answer for far too long, and now needed the truth to finally put them down.

"I can't tell you that, Eddie," Zenith's voice trembled with the weight of something she couldn't yet shape into words. Shame lingered in her tone like an aching bruise. Her gaze slid away from him, fixed somewhere over his shoulder where the moonlight fractured into ripples on the surface of the fountain. "Our first meeting... to you, it was simple. To me, it wasn't. I..." She faltered, jaw tightening as if the rest of her confession had lodged itself in her throat.

Edward simply nodded, a sharp movement that was more resignation than understanding. Her hesitation said enough.

For years, he had tortured himself with the same question: Was there something I could have done differently?

Time and again, the memory of her leaving replayed in his mind — anger first, always anger, which he had built into a wall around his heart, a wall he had named "Zenith" and blamed for his fall. But behind that fury, lodged deep and ugly, lived another truth: that perhaps she had left because he wasn't enough. That he had been incapable of keeping a woman like her.

And now, that silent, corrosive doubt had been given new company — the gnawing guilt over Anya. His mistakes had carved scars into his sister's life. He had thought he was saving her. In some ways, perhaps he had only delivered her into another kind of harm.