Farewell to My Undercover Ex The Fall and Rebirth of a Mafia Princess Chapter 06
Even after I moved to Northwood, a small town three hours north, the past wouldn’t let go.
Claire plastered their perfect little love story all over social media.
Declan took her to Africa to see the Great Migration. They made matching rings at some little artisan workshop. And the selfies? Endless.
Meanwhile, Declan’s face was everywhere online. His story played like a movie script.
The cop who spent ten years undercover and brought down the most notorious crime family in the state.
Even at the corner store, people talked about him in hushed voices
like he was some kind of local folk hero.
Despair turns into hatred if you sit in it long enough.
I hated Declan for what he did to my life.
I hated my father for the choices that put me here.
I hated the world for not caring.
But most of all, I hated myself for not being able to do a single thing about any of it.
I stopped leaving the house.
I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling, watching the paint peel away in strips.
I watched the room go from black to gray to pale morning light
without closing my eyes.
I dropped to ninety pounds.
In the middle of all that, Declan called me once. Because of Claire.
She’d mentioned she liked a bracelet I used to wear in college. One of the pieces the feds had seized. She wanted him to buy it for her at the police auction.
His voice was flat. Like he was leaving a voicemail.
“I’m not the villain here, Renata. I did my job. Don’t throw your life
away just because you can’t handle the truth. Move on.”
Something in me broke for good after that call. I cut my wrists.
My landlord found me and called 911.
He was worried about me. But he also knew he couldn’t have a liability like that on his property.
Once I was stable, he told me I had to be out by the end of the month.
I had nowhere to go. Not a single person to call.
That’s when an old woman took me in. She made her living cleaning cheap motels on the edge of town, barely scraping by.
“Sweetheart,” she’d say, smiling like she meant it, “life’s hard more often than not. But nothing lasts forever. You just have to outlast the pain.”
The more I learned about her, the more I realized she’d been
through hell herself.
Lost her parents young. Married, had a son, then lost her husband to a workplace accident before the boy turned one. Raised her son alone.
By the time she was in her seventies, she was raising her grandson on what little she had left.
That woman was Nolan’s grandmother.
She died when Nolan was sixteen.
He handled her death quietly, like he’d already learned how to bury the people he loved.
It made me think about who I was at sixteen.
I threw tantrums over a broken nail. Ran to my dad every time I scraped a knee.
At sixteen, I made the worst decision of my life. I brought Declan home.
At sixteen, Nolan lost everything. And I took him in without thinking twice. I thought I could protect him.
I donated every cent of the offshore trust my father left me.
To keep us afloat and keep Nolan in school, I needed work.
My hands were shot, but my eye was still good.
So I taught myself photography. Took freelance gigs wherever I
could find them.
Stay busy long enough, and the pain drops from a roar to a hum.
Two years slipped by like that.
Nolan turned eighteen and got into college in the city. The same city I’d run from.
He looked at me. “If you’re not ready to go back, I can take the trair up here every weekend. I don’t mind.”
I shook my head. “It’s time.”
My photography was taking off. I needed to be where the work was
Nolan paused. “I’ve always thought…”
“That maybe you stayed here because there’s someone back there you weren’t ready to face.”
“Someone I can’t face? Yeah. I guess so.”
The realization hit all at once.
Oh.
I hadn’t thought about Declan in months.