Page 119 of The Devil's Canvas

My apartment is still filled with boxes. Lined up just like he left them. Every time I look at them it feels like a joke. Like the universe gift-wrapped his absence just so I could open it again and again.

I talk to him sometimes. I tell him how sorry I am. How I would’ve taken the deal if I’d known. How this kind of loneliness doesn’t feel like heartbreak—it feels like torture. Like something inside me is decaying one memory at a time.

And every day I wonder if he regrets it. If he remembers me at all. If the part of him that loved me is buried somewhere deep in Hell, screaming to come back.

Because I am. And no one is listening.

I don’t hear the knock. Or maybe I do, and I just don’t care. The door creaks open, soft and slow, and I brace for someone I don’t want to see—someone here to tell me to eat, to sleep, to pull myself together.

But the voice is softer than I expected. Familiar in a way that disarms me. “Ophelia,” Rosalind says gently. “It’s just me.”

I don’t turn around. I’m still curled in the corner of my room, knees pulled to my chest.

I hear her walk in, her heels clicking once against the floor before she slips them off without a word. She doesn’t hover, doesn’t ask for permission. She just sits beside me, silent, until it becomes something I can breathe in.

“You weren’t answering,” she finally says. “And I figured… if there was ever a time you shouldn’t be alone, it’s now.”

I want to speak, but my throat burns. I don’t even know what I’d say. So I just whisper the only truth I have left. “I can’t feel him anymore.”

Rosalind doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t try to fix it. She lays her hand over mine, warm and solid. “I know.”

It’s those two words that undo me. “I talk to him,” I admit, the words breaking apart in my mouth. “I tell him I’m sorry. That I would’ve done anything if I’d known. I don’t even know if he’d want to hear it. I just—”

My voice catches. “I just want him back.”

Rosalind nods, still so quiet. There’s no pity in her face. Just grief. Real, quiet, maternal grief—for the daughter she chose, and the man who gave himself up so that daughter could live.

“I know what it’s like to lose someone you love,” she says softly. “And I wish I could say it gets easier. But it doesn’t. It just… changes.”

She squeezes my hand. “You’re not selfish for hurting. You’re not weak for breaking. And you’re not alone.”

I lean my head against her shoulder. My breath shakes, my body aches in places grief has taken root. “I don’t know how to keep going.”

“Don’t try to yet,” she whispers. “Just let yourself feel this. Let it hurt. Let it be messy. I’ll sit with you through every second of it.”

And I do.

I cry until I can’t anymore. Until the pain becomes too heavy for tears and all that’s left is the sound of breathing, hers and mine.

“Rosalind said it’s been four months,” he says gently. “That you haven’t spoken. Or eaten.”

Four months. So that’s how long it’s been. Time stopped mattering, days blended together and folded in on themselves until I forgot how to tell them apart.

I don’t respond. I haven’t in weeks. Maybe longer.

He steps inside, carefully. Like the air might shatter if he moves too fast.

I’m still in the same spot. The corner of the room. Back against the wall, knees hugged to my chest. The boxes around me are untouched, still lined up like soldiers waiting to be dismissed from a war that never ended.

Dominic lowers himself to a crouch. “You don’t have to talk,” he says. “I’ll talk.” And he does.

He talks about Melanie. About regret, guilt, how he’s not sure what he’s mourning anymore—his wife, his marriage, or the man he used to be.

I barely register the words. They drift past me like smoke. Until he says it. “He didn’t trade his soul so you could disappear too.”

That cuts through everything. I look up at him for the first time in months. Really look. And the moment our eyes meet, I know he sees it. What’s left of me… isn’t.

He stands slowly, and his voice drops. “I don’t know how to fix this. But I want to try. For him. For you.”

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