Chapter 320
KASMINE.
By the time Kester was rounding up his story, I had forgotten how to stop crying. The tears wouldn’t stop falling. They slipped down my cheeks silently, like they didn’t want to interrupt him. Like they understood that his pain was finally finding a voice.
He looked at me again, and his expression–God, it was worse than tears.
“Kester,” I breathed, shaking my head slowly. I didn’t even know what to say.
It was like I was staring at the little boy he used to be–the one who needed love more than anything in the world but got none in
return.
Even though I knew he hadn’t told me everything and hadn’t laid out the full horror of what his childhood looked like, the little pieces he had shared tore through my heart, shattering it to pieces. His parents. His loneliness. That house that never felt like
home.
No child should ever go through that.
“I was just boy,” he whispered. “And I swore I’d never be that helpless again. I’d never trust anyone to protect what’s mine. I’d be the one in control. I’d always be in control. If my father couldn’t protect my mother, the woman I loved more than anything, then no one else can protect what’s mine better than me.”
Now, he was shaking. Not just his hands but his entire body. Like the weight of everything he’d carried alone was suddenly breaking him open.
I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my forehead to his shoulder. His skin was burning with the tension he was trying so hard to keep caged.
“You don’t have to carry that alone,” I whispered. “You don’t have to hold all of that in anymore.”
He didn’t say anything right away. Just wrapped his arms around me so tight I could barely breathe, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even want him to let go.
Then, he spoke again.
“You’ve been saving me long before you knew it, Kasmine. You might not know this, but you are the reason I am alive today.”
I blinked and pulled back just enough to look at him. “You always say that. But I still don’t understand how.”
He smiled.
“You won’t remember,” he said softly, “But it was my birthday. Not that anyone remembered. I was alone in the house. No cake. No candles. No hugs. Not even a call from my parents.”
His eyes drifted past me as if he could still see the gloom of that lonely room. “I sat beside my window for hours, just staring into nothing and wondering how long it would take to fall. Wondering if anyone would even notice.”
My breath caught.
He chuckled, but it was empty… more like he was trying to breathe through the pain. “And then I saw you. In our yard. Little girl
with a white dress and ribbons in her hair.”
I swallowed hard.
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Chapter 320
“You looked up at me like I wasn’t some weirdo hanging off a window, and you smiled. Just like that. Big and bright. Then you said, ‘Happy birthday, Kester!‘ Then you yelled at me to get off the window, otherwise, I’d fall and die.”
I laughed and sniffed at the same time. I didn’t have the slightest memory of this, but it made me smile.
He shook his head, “You saved me, Kasmine. And you didn’t even know it. You didn’t know that was the first time anyone had spoken to me with kindness in months. The first time someone looked at me and actually saw me.”
My chest ached.
“I thought about that moment every day,” he whispered. “You became this… memory I kept like a flame in a jar, even when things got darker and even when I forgot how to breathe. That Second where you looked at me like I mattered? It stuck.”
I didn’t say anything at first. Just looked at him like I was seeing him for the very first time–not as the untouchable man everyone thought he was, but as that little boy by the window, begging the world for something as simple as kindness.
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