Page 135 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

This isn’t my story to tell. It’s Marcia’s. And Sophie needs to hear it without me standing over her shoulder.

Marcia reaches out and squeezes my hand. “Thank you for the chocolates, dear. The ones with the salted caramel. You remembered.”

“Of course.”

I turn toward the door. And then I look at her one more time—at Sophie, standing in this room with her dark eyes still burning with anger, still guarded behind walls she’s spent a lifetime building. But underneath all of that, barely visible, like light bleeding through a hairline fracture—there’s doubt. The first crack in her certainty that I’m the monster she thinks I am.

Please, I think. Please listen to her. Please understand.

I nod once and walk out.

The door closes behind me, and the last thing I hear is Marcia’s voice.

“Come sit down, dear. Would you like some tea?”

I make my way back down the stairs and through the empty foyer, my footsteps echoing off walls that have sheltered hundreds of women with stories I’ll never know.

I get in the car, close the door, and sit in the gathering dark with my hands on the steering wheel and my heart in my throat, hoping I haven’t just made the biggest mistake of my life.

CHAPTER 36

Sophie

Marcia’s room is small and immaculate, a space that belongs to someone who’s learned to live with very little and made peace with it a long time ago.

A single bed with a quilted coverlet in faded blues, tucked neatly against the wall. A narrow bookshelf crammed with paperbacks. A wooden dresser with a lace runner and three framed photographs. I can’t see the faces from where I’m standing, but the frames are mismatched, the memories inside them clearly worth more than the frames themselves.

The window is open a crack, letting in the cool evening air and the faint sound of voices from the dining hall below. On the windowsill, a small ceramic pot holds a sprig of lavender, dried but still fragrant.

It looks a lot like the shelter room I stayed in all those years ago. The careful use of limited space, every object earning its place because there’s nowhere to put the things that don’t. I know this room. I’ve lived in this room, in a different city, in a different life, when I was twenty-one years old and learning how to sleep without screaming.

“Please, sit.” Marcia gestures to the chair beside the window—a worn armchair with a crocheted throw draped over one arm. “I’ll put the kettle on. I have chamomile, or peppermint if you’d prefer.”

“Chamomile is fine. Thank you.”

Marcia moves to the small electric kettle on her dresser.

I sit in the armchair and fold my hands in my lap. My pulse is still elevated from the confrontation with Max and the suffocating silence in his car. My stomach is hollow from throwing up in the bathroom. My head is full of clinical trial reports and adverse event logs and the image of the small, silver-haired woman currently selecting tea bags from a tin, seizing on a table while researchers took notes.

The kettle clicks. Marcia pours two cups, sets one on the small table beside me, and lowers herself into the chair opposite.

“There.” She wraps both hands around her cup, her dark eyes settling on my face. “Now. What would you like to know?”

Direct, no preamble. She knows why Max brought me, and she’s not going to waste either of our time pretending otherwise.

“The clinical trial,” I say. “You’re Participant 03. You had a seizure during the trial for almost two minutes. You were hospitalized for four days.” I keep my voice even. “And then you went back.”

Marcia takes a sip of her tea. “I did.”

“Why?”

She tilts her head, studying me. The lamplight catches the lines of her face—deep grooves around her mouth, crow’s feet fanning from her eyes, the map of a long life etched into a face that must have been striking when she was young and still is now. Her gaze is clear and sharp, unclouded by age.

“Because what they’re working on matters,” she says simply. “More than my comfort. More than a bad few days in a hospital.”

“A seizure isn’t a bad few days. You could have died.”

“I could have.” She says it without flinching. “I’m seventy, Sophie. I could die tomorrow from a dozen things that have nothing to do with clinical trials. A stroke. A fall. My heart deciding it’s had enough.” She sets her cup down. “When you get to my age, you stop being afraid of dying. What you’re afraid of is dying without having done anything that mattered.”