Witness

For three days, we hardly left our room. The relief of being together again, and both in one piece, was enough to exhaust us both, and leave us wanting nothing more than to cuddle together in bed. We took turns leaving to go get food, and then we would inevitably eat it on the floor with our hands, only to crawl back into bed afterward. We decided it was best to stay away from the news – it would only make things worse to watch as our fates unfolded. Hudson would call with updates, anyway.

“It’s kind of nice, being disconnected,” Harry mused brightly, popping a crisp into his mouth before giving me a toothy grin. “I don’t remember the last time I was without my phone.”

“I wonder how many followers you’ll manage to lose on Instagram,” I teased, earning a wry laugh from him. I was glad there was any humor or positivity left in him.

But later, I caught him staring out the window when he thought I wasn’t looking, a forlorn expression glimpsing his features. I knew the happiness was too good to be true. Harry was sure to miss his bandmates, his team, his fans. Even worse yet, I thought, his family.

Though, the Greek Isles were a bit of a better deal than Church Stretton.

I’d never been to a place that got so dark at night – the little island in the sea of hills turning absolutely black when the city fell asleep. In New York, things never got perfectly dark; there was always some car, or some neighbor, or some marquee. I couldn’t help but think that even Holmes Chapel never got so dark.

“We could go out and look at the stars,” I suggested softly to Harry, hoping that would truly improve his mood, not just on the surface. “They should be insane around here.”

Harry shrugged. “Maybe when things settle down a bit.”

He was scared. My heart sank.

Things were quiet between us then as I nearly began to cry. He’d been so strong for the both of us for those days in Church Stretton, and though he didn’t mean to show it, in that moment he was weak. He was afraid of leaving.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed, my voice strained.

“Would you stop apologizing?” he snapped. “It’s not your bloody fault!”

And with that, he rolled over onto his side to face away from me, and that was how we fell asleep – tense, afraid, and ultimately alone. Together.

For what felt like the millionth night in a row, I cried myself to sleep. It was amazing how many tears I had stored up. I thought by then, they must have run dry. But I was full of surprises those days.

In the morning, I woke to Harry unpacking pastries onto a plate from downstairs. He grinned at me, and all the nervousness I fell asleep with went away. Things were okay between us, they had to be. In those times, we had to stay together. We had to bend together, not break. Because breaking was what Damien wanted.

“Those look delicious,” I complimented, eyeing a Danish on the plate.

“The ones I make are better,” Harry countered winningly. “But these will have to do.”
On the fourth day, I decided we needed to leave. So I dragged Harry by the hand, running shoes on our feet, and went on a jog through the hills. We didn’t run as fast as we normally did, both exhausted from just being alive, but we ran. And that was some resemblance of what we had at the beginning, when things were so much simpler.

And at the time, I had thought they were so hard.

“Do you want to do some moves with me?” I asked when we were done, back at the Inn with Harry panting like he’d run a marathon.

“Some moves?” he asked, hands on his knees, hunched over.

“Self defense,” I clarified, my blood still pumping with the adrenaline of running again.

Harry looked up at me and gawked, then dramatically crumpled onto the ground. “Mara, I can’t go on,” he moaned, reaching out to me as though he was dying.

I rolled my eyes.

“Fine,” I submitted. “I’m gonna keep running. I’ll see you in a bit.”

It felt like survival to keep running, to keep pushing myself to run faster and faster. Subconsciously, I was training. The faster I could run alone, the faster I would be able to run if I had to run from my life. I tried to keep the negative thoughts at bay, but the truth remained – I’d already done it once, and without a trace of Damien, it was possible that it would happen again.

I thought of Amelia then. I thought of her parents, the parents who had always been so kind to me, without their daughter. Of Greta. How they deserved better than what I had brought them to. How no matter how much Harry told me I shouldn’t be sorry, I would always be at fault.

It was always going to be my fault.

“I’m happy for you,” I’d told her that afternoon when she decided to go back to New York. I’d told her that I was happy for her to march to her death. I was happy for her to go off get murdered by the man who was just trying to get to me.

“And I’ll be happy for you, no matter what you choose,” I heard her say in my ear as I ran. “I love you.”

I wondered if Amelia had trained herself like I had, if she would have still been alive. But then I remembered that he shot her from behind, that she never saw him coming.

The coward.

We’d managed to ruin so many people’s lives, Damien and I. It started with Eric Spengler, then turned to me, then spread like a virus through the lives of everyone we knew. Damien’s father Arthur, philanthropic mogul, afraid to go out in the public eye. Amelia, dead at nineteen. Amelia’s family, never to see their daughter again. Harry Styles. The boys. The fans. We made a great team, Damien and I.

Shaking the tears from my eyes, I turned around and headed back to the Inn. Harry was right. I couldn’t afford to think like that. I couldn’t afford to be sorry – it wasn’t my fault, right? Or was it?

And why fucking me?

That was the question that had been keeping me up at night for months. That was the question that always haunted my every movement. That was the question that pulsed in my mind as I tried to move forward. Why me, why me, why me?

Did Damien not want any witnesses, and when I ousted him to the police, did he want revenge? Was he simply a bloodthirsty murderer, looking for his next fix? Was I a fun game to play for him? Had I wronged him somehow?

None of it made sense.

When I got close enough to the Inn, I saw two figures sitting outside on a bench. My heart clenched in my chest. From meters away, I could spot the burst of red that was a poppy in a lapel. The O.E.O. was here. I picked up the pace, racing to find Harry sitting next to Hector Pruitt, talking casually.

What the hell was going on?

“Hey,” I greeted, slowing to a halt in front of them. “What’s going on?”

Harry turned his face to me, a weak smile perched on his lips. “Hector came by with a visitor,” he hummed, grabbing at my hand and squeezing it.

I glanced between the pair confusedly. “A visitor?”

Who could possibly be coming to visit me? Mary, or someone from the Old Red Lion? One of the boys? My gut clenched at the other options. Agent Hudson? Amelia’s family? Thomas?

“Lilia,” he began, and I rolled my eyes at his insistence. More than ever I wished to rid myself of that name. “Something… has come up.”

“Okay,” I responded slowly, drawing out the word to show my annoyance at their coyness. “Can we please just get to the punch here? You guys are killing me.”

Hector sighed. “We’ve had a team doing research on you for a while now, trying to figure out some sort of motive for Damien to pick you specifically out of everyone in the world to target,” he explained, my skin scrawling at the thought. “And we found something that… we didn’t expect to find.”

The breath caught in my lungs. “What is it?” I gasped.

Harry squeezed my hand again, bringing my attention back to his expression, which was a combination of sympathy and bewilderment. “Mar,” he began softly. “They found your dad.”

The world was spinning. Though my feet were planted firmly on the ground, it felt as though I was bending and breaking, tumbling down to the floor below. Tears welled in my eyes, at first, tears of confusion and astonishment. And worst of all, I couldn’t breathe. The news had taken all ability away.

“What?” I managed to choke out breathlessly.

“We thought we would try a blind paternity test,” Hector explained, fiddling absently with his poppy. “Take a sample of your DNA and match it to all on file in the city, see who we found. It was a slim chance, but he appeared. And when we contacted him, he wanted to meet you.”

The news was simply unbelievable. Fathers did not simply re-enter your life after nearly twenty years of absence and want to meet you. And officers of the O.E.O. certainly did not allow things like this to happen under normal circumstances – why the hell would they bring him here?

“Did you ever think,” I wheezed, more angrily now, “that maybe, for just a second, I wasn’t interested in meeting my father? That he was never there for me for my whole life and that now maybe wasn’t the best fucking time?”

Hector turned his head to his lap, to ashamed apparently to look at me.

“And maybe, just fucking perhaps,” I continued, “it was a bad idea to bring him here when I’m basically a ticking time bomb? What the hell were you guys thinking?”

“Lilia,” Hector sighed. “You have to meet him. We brought him here for a reason.”

My blood was boiling in my veins then, the anger and the hurt furious within me. I glanced to Harry, with tears in my eyes, betrayed that he would allow such a thing to happen. He was always supposed to be on my side. He was always supposed to be the one who understood me and all the things that came along.

“I’m not interested,” I spat, a few straggling tears slipping down my cheeks. I wish then I didn’t cry when I got angry, that instead I lashed out in rage and destroyed everything in my path. I didn’t want to seem weak to them. I didn’t want to lose this battle. I didn’t want to meet my father.

And so I stormed away from them, pushing my way through the crowded lunchtime rush at the Inn and forcing my way up the stairs. They couldn’t tell me what to do. They couldn’t change my life like that without my consent. They couldn’t violate everything I knew with one simple tweak of my life.

And more importantly, who the fuck did my father think he was coming here after all those years?

I pushed through the door to our room and was immediately met with a face I was not expecting to see.

Tall. Carefully groomed, grey hair. Stylish suit, complete with a bright red pocket square. The same, long nose as me. A face I had seen a dozen times, in the news, across banquet halls, on Wall Street.

“Oh,” he blurted awkwardly, in a voice that was almost sad. “You look just like your mother.”

Arthur Trask.