The Last Letter || Self Para
Even the song that had been a reoccurring noise on the radio told him all that he needed to know, "Maybe one day you'll understand why, everything you touch surely dies." Why couldn't 'one day' be today? He needed to know so that once he fully isolated himself from the world, he would have a legitimate reason why.
Kayden had left several hours ago, leaving Damien to sit in the silence of his kitchen with, what he assumed to be, the last letter. It was slightly longer than the other's, fitting for the end of something that shouldn't have even been necessary in the first place.
He had turned the television off, not wanting to hear the news networks repeat the same information over and over. Why hear their tormenting voices reminding him of what he could have prevented ever hour when his conscience was already doing that twenty four hours a day?
Unfolding the letter, he began to slowly ingest each word, making his way over the page slowly. He agreed with living for her… so long as that meant moving to live in an Alaskan bungalow in the mountains at least twenty miles away from the nearest town. While he didn't agree with her kidnapping being a fault of her own, he continued to read, if not just to see the last words that she intended for him.
As the letter began winding down, her words becoming more motivational for her sake, Damien caught sight of the phrase thoughtfully and meaningfully placed in a sentence.
Three words.
The rest of the letter had been important for him to read as well, but his eyes kept finding their way back to that one simple phrase. It was then that he noticed the wet spots that had begun to appear on the page.
Why was he crying? He. Didn't. Cry. Not since he'd been sixteen and came home to find his parents dead. Since then, his emotions had been kept in check and he had never run the risk of crying again. Until now.
Love. That was what had been plaguing his thoughts when he hadn't been able to figure out what the change in him had been, the change that she had initiated. It had been staring him pointblank in the face and he had been too blind to see it before.
Frustration mixed with anger consumed him, him loathing the thought that she had confessed all of that and didn't even have the piece of mind knowing that her feelings were reciprocated. Now, he had absolutely no way of telling her that, his mind having already started to turn to the negative side. The killer had left the last letter for him, possibly the last letter that she would ever write, meaning that most of his business was done with her. You don't release the end of series and expect for it to continue going.
This was it, she had to be either dead or a few seconds from being dead. So, filled with self-loathing and regrets, Damien refolded the letter and left it on the counter, shlepped up the stairs to his room, then laid down to simply let all of his frustration wash over him. He'd been blind to what had been directly in front of him and now she was gone forever. Now all that was left for him was to see the killer be caught and then he could retreat to Alaska to waste away inside a house on top of a snow capped mountain. Wonderful.