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much if they hadn’t kept me alive for the past year and a half.  It was like a surgeon who saved your life and then told you to kick puppies.  How do you tear apart somebody who’s already so distraught?  I glanced around awkwardly, maybe for some tissues.
    “I’m sorry for everything that happened.  Everything that happened to you, Christabelle.  Everything between Nick and I that makes it worse for you.”
    “What do you care what hurts me?” I asked.
    “Because I don’t want you to hate me!” Harper blurted out between sobs.  She struggled to calm herself before continuing.  “The way he talks about you, the way he always did talk about you, like you’re some mythical heroine from local legend.  I’ve heard so much, and the way he spoke… I wanted to know that person too.  I wanted her to like me, I wanted her to know I love Nick more than I thought I could love anything and I was keeping him safe, keeping him in my heart always.  I wanted her to know I was holding his hand and making him laugh when he was sad.”
    Harper’s words were rushing out faster and faster between hitching breaths.  I clenched my jaws against my own sobs that wanted to come out, even enlisting the help of my hand to hold my mouth shut, or hide it at least.  I blinked as rapidly as I could to disperse the tears before they fell, but I didn’t know if that was a battle I could win.
    “And now you’re here, and you must hate me,” she finished.
    I was shaking with the effort of holding it all in, I looked away for a second and closed my eyes.  Somehow, the pressure needle inside me went back down to the edge of the red zone and I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.
    “How did you even meet him?” I asked.
    Harper took her own deep breath and told me a story that started with a crazed stalker, a cup of acid, and a Marine I knew that became her hero.  She was a master storyteller, it had to be said.  I would have given anything for her to have a different tale to tell other than the one where she and Nick fell in love, but I was engrossed anyway.
    My heart sank with every passing moment.  Every time she mentioned Nick, her eyes lit up with some unquenchable fire, and it felt like a pair of scissors were cutting my ties to him.  The notion was especially strong when she talked about her own ordeal.
    “Walter had this dagger, a replica of one I used in a movie, and it was pressed right against me, right here.” Harper pointed at her stomach, just under her ribcage.  “He said that if he did it quick, right into the heart, it wasn’t supposed to hurt.  I was out of ideas, out of hope, out of time.  I was saying goodbye to everybody I loved in my mind, hoping I could make it through everybody before I was dead.  Then there was this huge crash , footsteps, another crash, and pieces of the door were flying everywhere.”
    I leaned forward despite myself, desperate to hear how it ended even though it hurt so much.
    “It wasn’t a S.W.A.T. team, it was Nick.  He smashed Walter against the wall and made him drop the knife before they both went to the ground.  He didn’t see that Walter had a gun and it was so loud when it went off.”
    Harper squeezed her eyes shut and fresh tears rolled down her face at the memory.
    “Nick choked Walter unconscious, but Nick was bleeding out so quickly.  He just sort of s-slumped over on top of him and lay there.  I was tied up, I couldn’t help him .  I thought I was watching him die right in front of me.”
    “But he was OK in the end,” I said, barely loud enough to be heard.
    I wanted to run to Nick, to tell him how sorry I was for the other day.  The poor man seemed to have been through war after war, overseas and at home.  I wanted to run to him and give him the peace he deserved.
    But he wasn’t mine to run to.  Not anymore.  He belonged to this girl in front of me.
    “Yeah, he’s amazing,” said Harper.
    “So you love him.  And he loves