GOING TO LOSE YOU FOREVER! CHAPTER 7

He took a deep breath, his eyes focusing slightly. "We have to go, Valeria. We have to get back to the hotel. There is nothing more that can be done here."

Valeria's head shook. Her body racked in sobs. "I cannot go back. I cannot leave. I cannot see people. I don't deserve to exist after all I have done." She sounded a note of agony. "I killed them. I killed them, and I can never restore them back."

Manager Kim didn't say anything for a second. He allowed her to cry, allowed her to have her words drowned out in tears. But he couldn't let her lose herself entirely.

"Listen to me," he told her, his tone firm but quiet. "You don't get to choose your destiny today. The world will judge you for what you've done, but you don't get to take your life, either. There's still more that you have to do, Valeria. You need to make things right. You need to face what's ahead, whether you want to or not."

Valeria looked up at him, her expression twisted with anguish. "I don't know how to meet it," she panted. "I don't know how to meet myself."

Her crying was about to shatter once more, and she pressed her hands hard against her chest. Pain in her heart was too much to bear. It was suffocating her. How was Valeria ever going to survive the consequences of what she had done when she could barely keep herself on her own two feet?

Manager Kim sighed, rubbing his temples as he looked down at her. “You have no choice. You’ll have to face it. And you’ll have to live with it.”

But she understood this much: no running. No hiding from the darkness that she had unleashed.

And she would have to live with it.

The coldness of the room seemed to echo the cold emptiness that Kc felt in his chest.

The tick of the wall clock metronome was only to emphasize the silence that had descended on him. He sat, eyes on the ceiling, but his mind a thousand miles away. Full of images of Vanessa's lifeless body, her parents' tears, the pain gnawing at him since he'd heard the news. The hospital was a labyrinth of emotions, fury, despair, sorrow all mixed up in one dense, choking fog.

But nothing to the fury that had erupted when he had looked and seen Valeria on her knees before him, begging forgiveness from him. His rough, battered heart was unable to handle her words, her pleas. His burning eyes could not process why she was standing there, tears streaming down her face, apologizing it had been an accident. How dare she ask him to simply move on, forgive her for shattering his world?

Her face, in that instant, tormented him every second of every minute. Like the specter of all that he had lost. His future. His family. His dreams. All gone because of a woman too arrogant to realize the magnitude of devastation she had unleashed.

Kc sat up, the heaviness of his sorrow weighing on him even more. His eyes scanned the vacant side of the bed where Vanessa ought to have lain. The vacancy resembled an open chasm that could never be filled in. He was suffocating, struggling to breathe but getting nothing. His thoughts were repeating over and over again—Valeria's face smeared in tears, the empty apology she extended, her pleading for forgiveness.

"I wasn't trying to…"

The words kept repeating in his head, with each repetition cutting into him like a knife. He recalled the expression in her eyes—the same one she had expressed when she initially informed him of the accident. She labored so pitifully hard to get him to comprehend that she hadn't intended for this to happen. But how was he supposed to comprehend? How could anyone who had lost everything through her ever be able to comprehend?

"I did not mean to take them from you, Kc."

Like poison. The words seared him through and through. She did not mean to take them? Yes, she did. That was what he could not forgive. She took Vanessa, she took their child, and no apology would ever be able to return them.

The sheer magnitude of it all came crashing back to him. His chest constricted, his breathing tight. Fists balled, he could see her still in his head,Valeria, standing before him, reaching out, begging him for forgiveness. He couldn't even glance at her without viewing his own failure staring back at him in their depths.

"You destroyed me."

Those things he had screamed in her face now echoed in his head, a mantra, repeatedly. The pain, the anger, the shame, it whirled, whirled. Kc couldn't get it out of his head. His mind kept rolling and rolling over and over again that horrible question in his mind.Why wasn't I good enough? Why hadn't he stood up for Vanessa, defended her? Why had he let himself get swept up in his own bubble, hearing Valeria, when now there was apparently nothing to it like that?

Kc stayed awake. The visions, dreams of what had been accomplished that night, haunted him even in his sleep. He awoke in the dead of night, drenched in sweat, his heart pounding in his chest as he looked into Vanessa's face in the darkness.Not only her face. It was the face he would be spending his golden years with. The face of his child's mother. And she was gone now. Gone, forever.

There was a phone call, pulling him out of his daze. It was from his lawyer.

"Kc, we have to discuss in which direction the case against Valeria is going. I know it's difficult, but we have to consider justice."