He Punished Me for Erasing Her Ink, by Carving His Rage Into My Flesh Chapter 08

He Punished Me for Erasing Her Ink, by Carving His Rage Into My Flesh Chapter 08

After I left the military medical center, I had no desire to return to that mansion.

I had been trapped there for too many years.

I was finally ready to concede, surrendering.

I would hand Adrian, the man who no longer loved me, over to Isla.

I rented a new apartment not far from the harbor.

Nolan lived in the same building, and his proximity gave me a small sense of safety.

With him being on leave.

Sometimes, he drove me around the neighborhood.

Sometimes, he invited me over to sample his latest culinary experiments.

I never expected a man who looked so tough and masculine on the outside to put on an apron and spend two patient hours cooking.

It honestly made me see him differently.

At dinner, I often teased him with a smile, “With cooking like this, the food on base must have been torture for you.”

He gave a helpless little laugh. “When I was a regular soldier, I just had to force it down.”

“Back then, I missed Mrs. Whitmore’s cooking all the time. It wasn’t until I climbed the ranks that I finally earned the luxury of a private chef.”

The moment he mentioned my mother, my fork paused in midair.

Nolan looked at me with concern.

“Claire, I didn’t mean to bring up something painful. If you don’t want to talk about your mother, I won’t push.”

But the mere mention of her legacy sent a sting to my eyes.

It had been so long since I had tasted her cooking.

And the finality of it nearly crushed me.

After Nolan rescued me from the warehouse, he had handled the funeral arrangements and the cremation with the utmost dignity.

As for the truth behind my family’s bankruptcy, he used his military connections to dig it out.

It turned out everything had been orchestrated by my husband.

Adrian had secretly set up a fraudulent contract that broke the cash flow of my mother’s company.

Then he made sure no bank in the city would lend her a dollar.

Nolan had also found people to recover the money.

The company was operating normally again, and the workers’ unpaid wages had been properly settled.

But my mother would never know any of it.

I waved a hand at Nolan and said, “It’s okay. I’m just glad there’s someone else left in this world who remembers her for who she was.”

I lowered my head and fought back tears.

“If I hadn’t insisted on marrying Adrian, she could have lived another thirty or forty healthy years. She took her own life to keep her debt from becoming my shackle.”

My life had been given to me by my mother.

But her death… that was the price of my mistakes.

The night before, Nolan and I had talked about many memories from the past.

We talked about how my mother used to make homemade canned peaches for us in the winter.

The three of us would sit on little kitchen stools, scrubbing jars and peeling fruit until our hands were sticky.

I was always the one who ate the most.

Once, I asked my mother curiously if she didn’t like sweet things.

She didn’t look at me. She just kept cutting the peaches in front of her.

“When I was a kid, I craved sweets too.”

“But once you become a mother, you stop craving them.”

I had remembered that sentence to this day.

The biggest lie in the world was probably, “Mom isn’t hungry,” and “Mom doesn’t want any.”

I told Nolan about how my mother swore off junk food.

To teach me not to eat too many, she deprived herself of her favorite shortbreads.

One day, she found the cookies I had secretly hidden away. She smiled at me with a little embarrassment and said, “Sweetheart, I didn’t realize these were actually good.”

Every year during the holidays, we would make handmade dumplings together.

While I helped my mother strip corn from the cob, music played from my phone.

Suddenly, my mother asked, “Do you understand this song?”

I shook my head.

“Nope. Not a word.”

She gave a proud little hum.

“And here I thought your college education would be worth something. Even I caught a few words.”

I froze for a second, then replied, “You really understood it? Mom, that was Spanish.”

Then the two of us burst out laughing.

I had lived with epidermolysis bullosa since childhood.

For someone as broken as me, loving me meant picking me up piece by piece. It must have been exhausting.

Only my mother would happily collect the shards and murmur, “This piece is mine. That one is mine too.”

That night, I kept the darkness at bay.

Instead, I celebrated her life with the stories that made me smile.

I thought her final wish had been for me to live happily.

Then I would carry our happiest memories with me and live every day of the rest of my life well.

The pain left by a loved one’s death would never truly shrink.

But the optimism and kindness she had taught me while raising me would remain the treasure I cherished for the rest of my life.

In the end, I leaned against the living room couch and said softly to Nolan, “I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. But I’m not ready for another relationship.”

“Before I learn how to love myself, I can’t love anyone else. I shouldn’t.”

I looked into his aching eyes.

“But I think we can always be friends. Friends for life.”

People were always too quick to confuse love with loneliness.

I had survived a failed marriage.

I could no longer imagine sharing my life with someone else.

And I no longer wanted to place my hopes in a vow held together by a thin sheet of paper.

Nolan only gave a soft, “Okay.”

He didn’t say anything else.

He gently patted my back until I fell asleep.

Late that night in Harbor City, two rootless souls leaned quietly against each other.