“I’ve waited all this time for you,” she said, her voice flat. “Right, come on then. ”
I stood in the doorway of the flat, my bag heavy on my shoulder, and I couldn’t meet her eyes. I knew what I’d done.
I knew who I was to her. “Please, I was out of order before,” I started. “I should never have said that. You don’t know me at all, except that I’m the stupidest woman on the planet because I betrayed one of the best men ever for one of the worst.
”
She didn’t flinch. She just looked at me like I was a stain she couldn’t scrub off. We stood in that cramped living room, the air thick with everything unsaid. I tried to explain, to dig myself out of the hole I’d been digging for months.
I was in love once. That much was true. But I’d thrown it away on a man who didn’t deserve the dirt under my shoes. “Why did you do that if you loved me?
” she asked, her voice cutting through my rambling. I swallowed. “Maybe deep down, I felt like I didn’t deserve you. ”
She shook her head slowly, like she’d heard it all before.
Because she had. Every lie, every excuse, every time I promised it would be different. It never was. I kept talking, trying to find some crack in her armor.
I told her I regretted things. Not all of it, just some. She called me out on that too. “I don’t know what to do with this,” I said, holding out two hot pots I’d bought, trying to soften the edge between us.
She didn’t take them. She just stared at the takeaway in my hands like it was another insult. The anger was simmering just below the surface. She told me I was sick.
That everything I touched, I destroyed. I wanted to argue, but the truth had a way of sticking to my skin. “You’re not worth it,” she said. Those words landed harder than any punch.
I stood there, silent for the first time since I’d walked in, because she was right. I wasn’t worth it. Not to her. Not to anyone.
She told me to get out of town and never come back. I said I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, but she wasn’t having it. “Do you ever listen to the words that come out of your mouth? ”
I didn’t have an answer.
So I just stood there in the middle of her flat, holding two hot pots that were going cold, wondering how I’d become the villain in my own story. I saw the way she looked at me when I talked about Tom, the man I’d run over, the man I’d left bleeding on the road. She said it was a start that I wanted to go check on him. But the words hung differently in the air.
She went with me. We walked to the hospital in silence, the city noise filling the space between us. There I was, back at the place where it all started. I told her I still loved him, in a way.
She asked why I’d hurt him if I loved him, and I told her the truth. “Maybe I felt like I didn’t deserve him. ”
She looked at me, and for a second, I thought I saw something soften behind her eyes. But it passed.
We stood outside his room, and I couldn’t make myself walk in. Not because I was afraid of him, but because I was afraid of what I’d see in his face. I was afraid of what I’d done. She went in without me.
I stayed in the corridor, leaning against the wall, feeling the weight of every choice I’d made. When she came out, her face was unreadable. We didn’t talk about it. We just walked back to the flat, and the silence was louder than any argument.
That night, she told me again she didn’t want any trouble. I promised her there wouldn’t be. But even as I said it, I knew promises were cheap coming from me. Days passed.
We orbited each other in that flat, never quite colliding, never quite connecting. I tried to make small talk. She responded with silence or with sharp words that cut deeper than she probably meant. Then came the night I found the money.
It was sitting on the kitchen counter, a neat little stack of notes. Two thousand pounds. I picked it up, my heart hammering. I knew exactly where it had come from.
Carl. Even out of the country, he’d found a way to keep hurting us. “I nicked it off Carl before he left,” the other woman said when I confronted her. Her name was Faith, though I’d barely used it.
“Because he swore he didn’t deserve a penny of it. ”
I stared at the money in my hand, a sick feeling twisting my stomach. She’d stolen from him. He’d rob the first person he bumped into, and we’d be tied to it.
More trouble, more mess, more of my past following me like a shadow. “You had no right,” I said. She looked at me with those tired eyes. “You’re still looking through rose-tinted blinkers.
Carl will still rob and rip off people whether he’s got money in his pocket or not. ”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to defend him, even after everything. But the words wouldn’t come, because part of me knew she was right.
The arguments kept coming. She told me I was a coward. I told her I wasn’t the one fighting in the street. She said I wasn’t worth it.
I said she didn’t know anything about me. “If you think my life’s so miserable, why did you try and steal it? ” she asked one night. I didn’t have an answer that would change anything.
So I just shook my head and looked away. Her name was Faith. She’d had her own problems, her own mistakes that followed her around like ghost. She told me once, in a rare moment of honesty, that she’d been in Germany and come back with scars I couldn’t see.
“Never saw that coming,” I said. She just shrugged. “I asked Abby if she wanted to keep in touch. She said no.
”
I told her she still had my number. She looked at me like I’d offered her a poison pill. “I will never need anything from you. ”
The words hung in the air, cold and final.
I didn’t push it. I couldn’t. Because I knew she meant it. We found moments of almost-peace.
We talked about the dementia creeping into her father’s mind, the way he forgot names but never forgot the hurt Carl had caused. She said it was good thing Carl left the country because she didn’t know what she’d do if he was still here. I knew what I’d do. I should have finished him off when I had the chance.
The thought scared me a little. Not because it wasn’t true, but because I meant it. One morning, Faith looked at me across the kitchen and said, “This is a new beginning for both of us. ”
I wanted to believe her.
I wanted to believe that I could shed old skin and walk away from the person I used to be. But I’d said that before. I’d promised it to Tom, and to Faith, and to myself, and every time, I ended up standing in the wreckage of my own making. Still, I nodded.
“I’m not going to have any trouble with you tonight, am I? ”
“No,” she said, and I think we both knew it was a lie. We held the money between us like a living thing, an inheritance of bad decisions and broken promises. Two thousand pounds that belonged to no one and everyone.
I was standing at the window, watching the street below, the city moving on without me. Faith came up beside me, her reflection ghostly in the glass. “What are we going to do with it? ” I asked, not looking at her.
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said the last thing I expected. “What if we don’t give it back? ”
I turned to look at her, and in her eyes, I saw the same desperation I felt in my own chest.
Two thousand pounds. A fresh start. A way out of the life we’d been dragging behind us. But I knew better.
I knew money couldn’t buy forgiveness, and it couldn’t wash away the past. Maybe that was the mistake. Maybe that was how everything fell apart. Because the next night, I found her standing over him in the alley.
Carl. The blood was still wet on the pavement. She looked up at me, wild-eyed, and I saw the fear and the rage and the truth of what she’d done. “Do you ever listen to the words that come out of your mouth?
” I whispered, but I wasn’t asking her. I was asking myself. We were standing over the wreckage of a man who had driven us both to this point. And I knew, with a certainty that made my stomach drop, that this was the moment everything changed.
She had the money in her hand. He was lying on the ground. And I had no idea what she was going to do next. “What is wrong with you?
” I shouted, my voice cracking. Faith turned to face me. Her hands were shaking. “He was going to take it from me.
He was going to ruin us. ”
“You’ve ruined us,” I spat. “You’ve ruined everything. I should have known.
You’re just like him. ”
Her face twisted, and she took a step toward me. The rain was starting to fall, soaking through my jacket, but I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything but the panic rising in my chest.
“I’m not like him,” she said. “I’m nothing like him. ”
“You just ran him over,” I said. “You killed him.
”
She shook her head, but the denial was weak. I saw his legs. I saw the way his body was twisted. There was no coming back from that.
“It was an accident,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean to. I just—I saw him and I panicked. ”
I stared at her.
At the woman I’d been sharing a flat with, the woman I was almost starting to trust. She had a body lying at her feet, and her only excuse was that she panicked. I looked at Carl again. Even in the dark, I could see the damage.
I felt a flash of something that might have been relief, but it was quickly swallowed by fear. “We have to get out of here,” I said, my voice low. “We have to call the police. ”
“No.
” Her hand grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into my skin. “We can’t call anyone. We can’t. You have to help me.
”
I pulled away. “I’m not helping you cover this up. ”
“You don’t have a choice,” she said. That was the moment I knew I was trapped.
She had the money. She had the secrets. And she had me. We stood in the rain over Carl’s body, and I realized I was no better than her.
Maybe I never was. Because I didn’t call the police. I didn’t run. I just stood there and watched her hide the evidence, and I let her drag me into the mess.
Later, back in the flat, I couldn’t stop shaking. My hands wouldn’t still. Faith was washing her hands in the sink, watching the water turn red. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” I whispered.
She didn’t respond. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about anything. The silence was a wall between us, thick and ugly, and I didn’t know how to break through it.
The days blurred together. I’d close my eyes and see Carl on the ground. I’d hear the sound of the car. I’d feel his blood on my hands, even though I hadn’t touched him.
But I was there. I watched. I let it happen. One evening, the doorbell rang.
I looked through the peephole and saw two men in dark coats. Police. Faith was sitting at the kitchen table, the money spread out in front of her like a sick kind of treasure. “They’re here,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
She looked up at me, her face pale. “Don’t answer it. ”
The doorbell rang again. I stood frozen between the door and the kitchen, everything moving too fast.
I thought about running, but where would I go? I was already deep in it. Deeper than I ever wanted to be. The knocking got louder.
Faith’s eyes were wide, pleading. “Please. Don’t. ”
I opened the door.
The officers introduced themselves. They were asking about Carl. They knew we knew him. They had reports of him being spotted near our block.
I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t answer. I stood in the doorway with my heart in my throat, and Faith appeared beside me with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “We haven’t seen him,” she said smoothly.
“Not since he left the country. ”
The officer looked at me. “Is that right? ”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
I could feel Faith’s eyes boring into the side of my head. “Yes,” I heard myself say. “That’s right. ”
They left.
I shut the door and felt like I was swallowing glass. “You did the right thing,” Faith whispered. I didn’t feel like I did. We went to the funeral.
It felt like madness, showing up at his funeral like we had any right to mourn him. But we were there, standing in the back, watching the coffin be lowered into the ground. I kept waiting for someone to point at us. To accuse us.
But no one did. We were just two quiet women at a funeral, wearing black and looking appropriately sad. When it was over, Faith took my hand. “It’s over.
It’s done. ”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to swallow the lie and move on. But that night, I found the money in her room.
It was taped under her dresser, all of it still there. She had told me she got rid of it. She’d told me she buried it with him. I looked at it for a long time.
Then I took it. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I just knew I couldn’t leave it with her. It was too clean, too suspicious.
It was the thread that could unravel everything. I packed my bags that night. I left before the sun came up, slipping out of the flat like a thief. But I wasn’t a thief.
I was an accomplice. I was a liar. I was everything I never thought I’d be. I walked through the city streets with two thousand pounds in my bag, no plan, no future, only the weight of all my bad decisions dragging me down.
I told myself I could feel the fresh start. But all I could feel was the cold, hard voice of my own conscience, whispering one terrible truth: I wasn’t any better than she was. I never was.
