Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 32

Another boy told me, “He offered me a ride home once. I had a fever. Barely standing. The teachers thought James was just cutting class again. But he didn’t say a word, just helped me into his car and made sure I got home safe.”

Even the janitor stopped me in the hallway. A man whose face was always half-hidden behind a broom or a bucket.

“I seen that boy pray,” he said, voice soft like a confession. “He sits at the back pew when no one’s around. Talks to the cross like it’s the only thing in the world that listens. That boy is good.”

The gardener chimed in too, eyes wrinkling at the memory. “Helped me carry the pots out to the garden. Just did it without asking. Most kids don’t even notice I’m here.”

And I started to wonder...

How many beautiful things go unseen just because the world stopped finding them?

James. Always James. The boy they called trouble. The boy they painted in red.

But slowly, I saw the brushstrokes for what they were: hasty, heavy-handed, meant to obscure rather than reveal. And under them, the real picture emerged.

I remembered the way he used to make jokes just to get me to smile, his timing is always off, his delivery a little clumsy, but his eyes gleamed when he saw me laugh.

I remembered how he saved me that night I nearly drowned, how his arms pulled me up from panic like they were made of instinct. He hadn’t even hesitated.

I remembered the beach—how he ran barefoot into the surf just to splash water at me, grinning like a child. The Ferris wheel, where he offered me his hand not for romance but to ease my fear of heights. The way he lit up when we ate ice cream, as if that moment mattered more than anything he has ever experienced.

He used to compliment me in passing, soft, sideways remarks like, “You look good when you’re thinking,” or “Your laugh makes things feel lighter.”

He used to hold me without asking why I needed it.

He used to notice when I didn’t speak. And sit in the silence with me like it was holy.

And all of it... every single moment... was once so ordinary, I had let it pass through me.

Now it returned in full color. As if memory had decided I was finally ready to see.

The world had branded James as the villain. Loudly. Repeatedly. Like a headline too catchy to question.

But love… real love… doesn’t come from headlines. It grows in the quiet. It’s built on the things no one claps for. The lunch given in secret. The ride home. The prayer whispered. The plant carried.

And I... I had once looked into that boy’s eyes and seen something soft, something scared, something good.

I had believed it. Then I let the noise take that belief from me.

But now… now I knew.

The truth isn’t always the loudest thing in the room. Sometimes, it’s the boy kneeling behind a pew, asking God if someone will ever see him for who he really is.

And sometimes, it's the girl who finally does.

At home, the silence wrapped around me like a heavy, damp blanket, thick and suffocating. The air smelled faintly of worn fabric and old wood... the scent of my room, but somehow colder tonight. The weight of knowing pressed deep into my chest, a heavy stone settled on my ribs, making it hard to breathe. I sank onto the edge of my bed, the rough cotton sheets scratching against my skin as my fingers trembled. I whispered into the quiet, voice barely more than a fragile breath, “I’m sorry, Mom. For a moment, I forgot how to see the light in him.”