Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 7

I watched her from the side. Her profile soft in the lamplight, hair swaying with the wind. A single loose strand curled against her cheek, and she didn’t bother brushing it away.

“What was she like?” I asked quietly.

She turned to me, and for a second, I thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then she smiled, small, nostalgic, and almost painful.

“She was… kind,” she said, voice thin. “The kind of kind that made other people want to be better. She used to sing while cooking breakfast, even if she couldn’t hold a note. Always wore mismatched socks. She’d write me little notes in my lunchbox, even in high school. My friends teased me, but I didn’t care.”

She laughed softly, shaking her head. “She once made me a dress from scratch for a school dance. It looked like a curtain, honestly. Bright purple with uneven stitching. But I wore it anyway. She cried when she saw me in it. Said I looked like the brightest thing in the room.”

I tried to imagine that. Betty standing in a too-loud dress in a too-loud gymnasium, pretending not to notice the looks. But I knew she would’ve smiled anyway, just to make her mom proud.

“She sang in the church choir,” she continued, almost in a whisper. “Always off pitch but somehow always the loudest. She’d hum when she brushed my hair, when she cooked, when she folded laundry. I hated it as a kid. I’d groan and tell her to stop. But now... now the silence is louder than her songs ever were.”

Her hands were folded in her lap, fingers tightening like she was holding something fragile between them. A moment. A memory. A heartbeat.

“She sounds amazing,” I said, and I meant it.

Betty nodded slowly. Her gaze drifted past the pond, to somewhere I couldn’t follow. Then, without warning, her breath hitched, and the first tear slipped down her cheek like a crack in porcelain.

“I’m barely holding on, James,” she whispered.

I blinked, sitting upright. The tremble in her voice cracked something open inside me, something I didn’t even know I had locked away.

“I---I see my dad trying so hard,” she went on, her voice wet and broken and brave. “He’s doing everything. He’s cooking now, paying the bills, even doing the laundry. I hear him cry at night sometimes, when he thinks I’m asleep. And I just…”

She paused, wiped at her cheeks quickly like the tears were betraying her.

“…I have to be okay. I have to do good in school. I have to keep the scholarship. I have to tutor you. Not because I don’t want to, but because I need to. I need to show him that I’m trying too. That I’m still here. That I’m not falling apart.”

The way she said it, calm and quiet, like she was explaining a math problem, hurt more than if she’d screamed it.

I felt it like a punch beneath my ribs. Not just sympathy. Something darker. Something selfish.

Envy.

Because for all the pain she carried, she had something I didn’t, love that lingered even after loss. A father who tried. A mother who left behind warmth, not silence. And she… she was strong in a way I didn’t understand. Strong in the way people are when they choose kindness anyway. When they carry grief in their spine and still walk upright.

She made me feel small.

Not because she wanted to, but because I wanted to believe I was more than what I was. And she reminded me of everything I wasn’t.

I didn’t deserve her.

I didn’t deserve her laughter in the gym, or her smile over ice cream. I didn’t deserve the way she looked at me like I was worth saving. Like I wasn’t a ticking time bomb of disappointments and wasted potential.