The Myth Of Forgiveness Chapter 6

The Myth of Forgiveness,

Chapter Six.

David and Elena bumped into each other a few weeks later,

One rainy afternoon outside the grocery store.

An accidental meeting,

Both reaching for the same cart,

His umbrella sheltering them as the sky opened up with rain.

He leaned in to kiss her and she responded passionately before collecting herself and gathering up everything she had to whisper,

I can't against his neck.

I know,

He whispered back,

His arms tightening around her anyway.

Elena didn't know until it was much later that Michael saw this exchange across the parking lot from a cafe window at a business meeting.

His colleague's surprised question interrupted their meeting.

Isn't that your wife?

As Michael turned to look out the window,

Seeing Elena and David,

His stomach hollowed out as his jaw tightened.

The shame was immediate,

A heat that rushed into his ears.

He'd suspected something was going on with her.

The way she smiled absently into the distance,

The way she hummed while preparing dinner,

These past few months,

She seemed happier.

But suspicion was different than seeing with your own eyes.

Michael didn't end up going home that night.

He stayed in the car in the parking lot until the street was empty.

He sat gripping the steering wheel until his hands shook,

Until every breath hurt,

Until he felt the betrayal congeal into something harder and sharper.

They lived in a small town,

A community where everyone seemed to know everyone.

Michael casually asked around and found out where David lived.

Over the few days it took to gather up this information,

The anger had built to a fever pitch.

And by the time he climbed the stairs and forced the door,

It's as if the decision had already been made.

David barely had time to stand before Michael's rage descended.

It wasn't a fight.

It was an eruption,

Years in the making,

Resentments,

Jealousies,

Old wounds,

All pouring into the blows.

When it was done,

David's body lay still as Michael's own chest heaved with the raw animal of what he'd done as he collapsed onto the floor.

The trial was merciless.

Headlines screamed jealousy,

A love triangle ending in murder.

Elena sat in the courtroom every day,

Her face carved in grief.

Her sons would now lay.

.

.

Nico was eight and Nathan was just about to turn six and their father would spend the rest of his life in prison.

Michael's revenge hadn't returned Elena to him.

It hadn't erased the kiss in the rain or the longing in her eyes.

All it had done was trap him in a cage and pass the weight of all that remained undone,

All that was left unspoken right down to his sons.

That's the thing about revenge.

It never ends with the man you think you've punished.

It seeps into the ones who come after,

Teaching them that violence is how you answer heartbreak,

That silence is safer than the truth or that love is somehow dangerous.

Truth might have broken this cycle.

It seemed that revenge only chained it tighter.

Every family has its inheritance.

Sometimes it's land,

Antiques or money.

Sometimes it's recipes or traditions.

But for the Salazars,

It was something far heavier.

Control disguised as love.

Shame disguised as loyalty.

Silence disguised as protection.

Along with the rage passed down generation after generation.

Michael hadn't created these patterns.

He'd simply received them.

The way a child receives the shape of his father's eyebrows or the cadence of his mother's laugh.

Nathan and Nico would come to know this truth not through stories told but the ones left untold through glances and silences.

The atmosphere of home where love and hurt were always tangled up.

They grew up believing that heartbreak and loyalty were inseparable,

That intimacy was somehow dangerous,

That love was something you paid for in pain.

Michael's boys had absorbed their father's rage like oxygen,

Carried their mother's shame like a second skin.

They each just expressed it in their own unique ways that what isn't healed is always handed down.

Nathan and Nico's father had learned his own life lessons about how love and frustrations were expressed in a family.

He'd absorbed his own father's rage like a sponge.

Carrying it with him into his marriage,

Expressing it in his family.

He'd also inherited his mother's shame about it which made him cruel in subtle ways.

He cut down his wife and sons with words instead of fists teaching them that emotional intimacy was weakness,

That needing someone too much was somehow weak.

Prison didn't reform him.

It calcified him.

Time behind bars was supposed to strip a man down,

Force him to reckon with what he'd done.

Instead,

It hardened Michael.

Cut off from his work,

His family,

His friends,

He had nothing left but his anger.

And anger became his faithful companion all the way up to his last breath.

All those years behind bars,

The bitterness only grew.

Bitter at the family he grew up in.

Bitter toward the system that had caged him.

Bitter at Elena for not saving him from herself.

Bitter at David,

Most of all,

For being the one he knew she loved.

He knew from the beginning of their marriage that it would never be him.

Once the trust had been broken,

He knew that she only stayed married for the boys so they'd grow up in a family.

Knowing that he never truly had her love was one of the hardest things he had to continue to live with.

In the middle of the night,

Alone in his cell,

Not able to sleep,

He felt enraged with himself that he'd taken the security from his boys when they were so young.

They were the innocent ones in all of this.

But the truth,

The full story,

Never made its way to his sons.

Nathan and Nico were only told the version that was spoken.

That their father had made a mistake,

That his anger had gotten the better of him,

And that he was paying for that now in jail.

Elena never took the boys to visit Michael.

They didn't ever talk about him at dinnertime.

Whenever they would ask a question about their dad,

It was sidestepped into a lighter,

Brighter topic.

After a while,

Nico and Nathan simply stopped asking questions about their dad.

They saw the pain it brought up in their mom's eyes.

They didn't know about their father's string of affairs.

They had no idea that their grandmother hadn't supported their mom when she wanted to leave him.

That their mom lived with a kind of quiet loneliness that was never spoken about.

They never knew that the love of their mom's life had been taken by the hands of their father.

Elena thought she was protecting them by keeping all of this quiet,

By hiding the ugliest parts of the truth.

But family secrets don't dissolve in silence.

They ferment.

What is unspoken doesn't disappear.

It lodges itself in the next generation,

Living out in some kind of similar symmetry until someone finally has the courage to see it.

This is the strange inheritance of families.

What is unfinished doesn't vanish.

It's more like it waits.

The rage that Michael had carried from his father,

The shame he'd taken from his mom,

The grief Elena swallowed whole,

All of it became part of what Nathan and Nico would one day have to face.

Children feel what isn't said.

They grow up under the weight of stories that never made it to the light,

Learning to read the atmosphere of a home instead of the language of truth.

The boys grew up with silence and silence,

As they learned,

Is never empty.

But instead,

Loaded with something much more dangerous.

Life with their mom,

After all of this,

Was punctuated with a lot of silence.

She carried a grief so heavy they could never quite reach her again.

As boys,

They learned how to braid love and hurt together,

As if the two were somehow connected.

They learned that you could share a home with someone without sharing trust or tenderness or safety.

They remembered the day they lost their father.

What they inherited was a lot of his unfinished business,

The shame unnamed,

The love as if buried alive.

Prison didn't undo any of that.

It only sharpened it.

For Michael,

Yes,

But also for Nico and Nathan.

In the ways of what remained unresolved would find its way into their own life.

All these secrets became theirs to carry.

Though they didn't know it yet,

The weight was inside of them.

Because what isn't healed is always handed down.

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