It's a fact that you can't help who you fall in love with. And for Rosaline Davenport and him, it definitely shouldn't have been each other.
Because, sometimes, love stories have blood on them.
[warning: this is the mother of all slow-burns]
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【 05.
Five
Furqat 】
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[ Furqat • absence/departing/separation of a beloved person ]
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ZACHARY SITS TRAPPED in his mental loop of alternate ways that interaction with Rosaline could’ve gone. He’s so lost inside his head, wondering how he let himself be caught off-guard and be so taken aback that he lost track of all the caution and that delicate wire he was supposed to be walking on.
Despite it going so horribly wrong, there’s a part of him that wonders if perhaps it was also a blessing in disguise. Maybe he just gave the woman a plausible theory to why this happened to her, maybe he gave her something that’ll help her hold onto her sanity. It doesn’t necessarily have to be good, or rational, or logical—but he supposes all that is nothing in the face of such traumatic loss and overwhelming grief. And, boy, did the woman embody grief in all its rawest glory.
Maybe she’ll grab onto him being the reason, the cause of her unborn child never having the chance to come into this world. Maybe she’ll help soothe her own pain and agony by channelling those emotions into the hatred and resentment she must have undoubtedly started feeling towards him already. And that’s fine—more than fine, in fact. Because she’ll never have to see Zachary again, and neither will he.
So as long as it provides her some sort of solace, he has no qualms about a woman he doesn’t know hating the memory of him. Zachary has already saved her life once—maybe he can help her keep it by giving her a way to cope.
That’s honestly all he can ever offer a stranger. There’s literally nothing else he can do here—nothing else.
A large hand touches his shoulder and Zachary glances up instantly from where he’s seated on a metallic chair right outside Rosaline’s room, its legs screwed to the floor.
He meets Garry Harker’s familiar face and scoffs disbelievingly.
“You do realise you’re hours late?” Zachary lifts a dark eyebrow. “I thought it was just a trip to the lakehouse to get Rosaline’s stuff.”
“And you realise that the lakehouse is a whole hour away, right?” Garry Harker lifts a brow in return. “Try making that trip in this snow, and it feels like you’ve been on the road for days.” He sighs and then takes the seat next to Zachary, dropping down heavily on it—with no grace at all. “And then her parents called from the airport, saying that they needed me to get them and drive them here. Apparently there weren’t any taxis around; I guess no one wants to risk driving in this weather. Snow’s only going to get thicker come tomorrow.”
