Until Death Do Us Part? (Completed)

Chapter Twenty Three: Insurance Papers

I'd known it all along.

Of course I had.

A small, unconscious part of me had known that it would come to this. It had known it ever since Suri told me she'd keep an eye on Tris and try to find a reason why he'd probably murdered me. In fact, come to finally think of it, I think I'd known it even before that. I'd known it since the time Anubis suggested that Tris was the one who'd killed me.

But I had never let myself think of it consciously before. I'd pushed the thought itself in the back of my mind, and buried it in the place where you hide the memories you wish you'd never had in the first place. The memories you wish had never existed, the memories you wished faded away from your mind forever, leaving no traces of their existence behind. But they never did.

They lingered in your mind. They stuck there, in a small, dark corner in the very back of your head, like a spider does to its web, unwilling to let go, camouflaging themselves with other memories, so that they could jump out and startle you when you least expected them to.

This memory, this thought, was one of those tucked-away, dark ones too. How could I forget it? After all, I'd been the one to make the call to the company. I'd been the one who'd discussed everything with the agent. I'd been the one to decide the dollar amount. And, in the end, it was me who'd signed the papers.

Because, after all, getting an insurance policy was like keeping a gun in your bedroom: you hoped you never had to use it, but you kept one in hand, just in case.

I knew why I hadn't let myself think of it before, of course. I'd known it all along too.

To think that Tris had killed probably killed me for something else, say, like, a new girlfriend and he wanted me out of the way was unbelievable. Uncomprehending. Unbearable. Impossible. The mere thought of him being with someone else while I was alive, while I cooked his favourite dishes and waited for him to get home and kissed him and told him that I loved him was painful enough. But the thought that he'd killed me for another girl, that he'd stolen the most precious thing I had--after him, of course—just so that he could be with someone else, someone I doubted could understand him as well as I did, someone I didn't believe even for a second could give him what he wanted would cause unbearable pain. I would blame him for the rest of my existence.

At least, in the first case, Tris would've had someone other than himself to blame for his horrible deeds: love. Which can make us lose our minds and cause us to do things we never even considered we were capable of. Which gave us power and made us powerless at the same time. At least he'd had an emotion, no matter how futile I thought it was, fueling him. Clouding his mind. Masking his thoughts. Taking control of him and making him do things he wouldn't otherwise have done.

And maybe one day, when he probably realized that the girl he'd done this all for wasn't exactly what he wanted. Maybe one day he'd realize that she couldn't understand him like I had. Maybe one day he'd feel remorse for his actions and wish that he hadn't done them. Maybe one day he'd realize his mistake and grieve for me.

And that; the fact that he'd never loved me, would be enough to fuel my own love into hatred. Because, if he'd never truly cared for me, then he'd never feel remorse for his actions. He'd never feel guilty. He'd never grieve for me.