Broken Strings || Niall Horan [AU]

21 | moving on

❝Well I could be angry, but you're not worth the fight. And besides I'm moving on. I've counted to ten, and I'm feeling alright. And besides I'm moving on.❞ ▬ Interlude: Moving On, Paramore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sometimes, when you receive important news, everything else just melts away. You ignore your phone vibrating in your pocket, the clock slowly ticking on the mantlepiece. The gentle feel of your mother's hand on your arm. You forget your past and present and future, or at least, the parts that don't involve the news that, currently, is all you care about. You're stuck in a moment, a brief passing of time in which this information is pretty much what your world revolves around, and nothing else. That's how I feel now.

My father's murderer has been captured. For now, nothing else matters.

I know immediately that this news is good news. But, for some reason, I don't cheer or even smile. I simply look away from my mum, my gaze fixing to the carpet, more specifically focusing on a speck of dirt carried in by one of the policeman's shoes. I wonder why it took so long, whether they really have found the right man, or simply caged an innocent person. After all, it's been five years, and five years is a long time. How possibly could they have tracked down the killer after such a long time? The failed investigation ended years ago; I still remember the detectives informing us so. 

As if reading my thoughts, one policeman clears his throat and tells me, "The murderer turned himself in this morning. He had your father's wallet and identification, as well as the weapon used. He said he couldn't live with the guilt. He still needs questioning, but later today, if it proves that he's the killer -- which will most likely happen, as the evidence sways that way, and he's confirmed it himself -- he will be jailed for life. No person should get away with what he's done to your family."

Only now do I look up, my vision blurred with tears. I meet the policeman's brown eyes, and then the other's. Their expressions are equally sombre. I revert my gaze to the floor. 

Movement around me startles me. Mum scoots over, wrapping her arms around my body. I relax into her embrace, looking up at her. I notice that her moss-green eyes are as watery as mine, but there's a difference: Mum's lips are drawn into a faint smile. Niall comes over too, quietly, sitting down carefully on the arm of the sofa. He's hesitant to hug me, but I blindly reach out with one arm and hook my hand around his waist, pulling him close. It's a messy tangle of limbs and bodies and I can barely see through the thick wall of tears, which has quickly built up across each eye and is already spilling over onto my cheeks, but they're not sad tears, they're happy tears. It's a good moment, a moment of understanding, of moving on and forgetting. 

Now I know that the murderer of my father has been captured, I feel like I can finally close that chapter of my life and begin to write a new one. I guess the idea of my father's killer still walking the streets a free man, the knowledge that he never got what he deserved, was one reason I could never let go of what happened. But now, I finally can. This time tomorrow, when the man is jailed and the investigation will close, so will the door leading into that part of my life. It will be locked forever. And when that happens, a hundred windows will open, too. It will still hurt, of course it will; not a day goes by where I don't feel pain and grief over what happened, and I'm sure I'll remain that way for a long time. But now, I can finally say that the murderer has been brought to justice. 

Another thing I take solace in is the fact that the killer turned himself in, that he obviously spent every day for the past five years feeling so guilt-ridden that he simply couldn't live freely any longer. It fills me with relief, the fact that he knows that what he did was wrong, that he knows he tore our lives apart. It pleasures me to think of him crying, hating himself, the guilt ripping apart his life as the death of my father did ours. And now, he's finally going to pay for what he did. He's going to rot in a jail cell for the rest of his days with nothing to think about but why he's there.