It Begins With Us

10.

Alba:

"I've told you everything that's happened between Ryle and I." I say to him, and he nods his head. "So, please. Tell me what's wrong with Ryle."

"This is going to get me into so much trouble." He sighs half heartedly.

"Please." I repeat, my heart clenched taut, like the sing go a bow, ready to snap.

"I'm going to start off by clarifying something. Ryle was married once, and his wife left him because he doesn't have a solid control over his rage." He says leaning forward. "He's gotten physical with her."

It snapped.

"But hear me out, there's much more to this than you'd think." He holds ups hand and his eyes demand that I force myself to focus, to listen.

I nod and he takes a deep breath.

"When Ryle was little, he and his brother Emerson were playing in their parents' room. They were only little, so they didn't understand how dangerous a gun could be." He stops and my heart drops devastatingly fast.

"No." I whisper, a hand over my mouth.

"Ryle pulled the trigger."

"No."

"It ended Emerson's life, and ruined Ryle's."

"Oh god."

I cover my face with my hands and he sighs.

"I know, it's really bad. Since then Ryle's had too many problems to count, resentment towards his parents, guilt and longing for Emerson." He rubs his face and leans back. "As he grew older, he developed trust issues that kept him from settling down properly. But then he met Lily and fell in love, they promised each other a forever. But life don't always go as planned."

"Lily wasn't over her past boyfriend, Atlas, yet she still went ahead and married Ryle. She kept various momentums from him and of him. A diary, to be more specific, with multiple entries about him. Let's just say, she integrated his memories pretty deeply into their daily lives.  Personally, I would consider that flat out cheating, if my wife did that to me I'd be broken. And sure enough," he meets my gaze full of pain and desperation, "when Ryle found out, he was too."

'This is a mess, it's making me tired just hearing about it.'

"Ryle had made Lily promise that if he ever became angry, she'd walk away, give him space to be by himself and cool down. Aware that he loses himself in his rage, aware that he blacks out and does things he'll regret later he made that a priority. But she broke that promise, she let his trust down. He blacked out, she never left, and they both got burned. After a handful of times of trial and error, Lily backed out I think the fact that she'd found Atlas again was an obvious contributor to that decision."

"That's way more than I ever expected." I mumble from under my hands and he takes a deep breath. "What happened next?"

"Ryle let her be, left her alone like she wanted. She lived with Atlas for a while, then less then a year later Ryle saw Lily, and she was as pregnant as can be."

I groan and he laughs.

"Yeah, me too. They had a baby girl, and they named her Emerson."