Chapter 295: 295/The Sentence of Heaven
Chapter 295:
Julie’s POV
My facial features contorted completely, my voice emerging sharp, fractured, and flooded with a mixture of threat and absolute panic: "Steve! Where is Ethan?! Where is my son?! You promised me... you fucking swore to me that you wouldn’t let them take him away!"
He turned toward me with sluggish steps and a thoroughly broken frame, but he didn’t utter a single word. Instead, he bowed his head toward the floor, his muffled weeping intensifying as he covered his mouth with his palm. This silence of his was enough to wrench the final thread of denial from my mind, casting me straight into the hell of the bitter truth the very truth I had long fled from and mocked anyone who dared utter it. The cold crawled into the deepest depths of my bones, and I felt a burning lump in my throat, cutting into me like a razor blade with every single breath.
I recoiled backward until my spine collided with the iron edge of the medical bed, clawing my fingers violently and frantically into my hair as I shook my head left and right in hysterical refusal: "No... no, Steve! Tell me you are playing with me! Tell me they only took him to change his clothes! Ethan didn’t die... my son cannot die and leave me entirely alone in this miserable world!"
Steve stepped toward me, his features completely mangled with grief. He dropped to his knees before the bed, firmly grasping my contorted hands in an attempt to restrain my panic attack, crying out in a weeping, shattered voice: "Julie, please! Stop ripping yourself apart! Ethan died before he ever saw the light... he died inside your own womb, sister! You have to accept the truth, he has gone to a better place."
My gaze froze instantly into the void, my movements locking up as if my very soul had vacated my body along with his words. The screams withered away from my throat, replaced by a terrifying numbness that crawled over every detail of my pale face. The tears finally cascaded... but they were no ordinary tears; they were hot, searing droplets like burning coals, bleeding in absolute silence over my cheeks and soaking into the fabric of my gown.
Slowly, I pulled away, drawing my hands out of his grip. I gathered my knees tightly against my chest, sitting in the corner of the bed, shaking violently and relentlessly. I felt my entire entity fading away, and every shred of hope and future I had meticulously woven in my imagination throughout those months was now buried beneath the cold tiles of this hospital. I shut my eyes with a raw force, wishing with all my heart that I had never awakened from that deep sleep.
I lifted my head with extreme slowness, as though my neck carried mountains of lead. I looked toward Steve, my eyes pooling with the hot tears that scorched my pale cheeks, and said in a choked, dead voice completely devoid of any pitch of life: "He died because of me... I am the one who killed him."
Steve’s features instantly locked, overtaken by a genuine terror. He shook his head in absolute, decisive refusal, recoiling a step back as if he had just received a physical blow, speaking in sheer dread with widening eyes: "What the fuck are you saying, Julie?! Don’t you dare utter such madness!"
My breath hitched in my chest, the airway narrowing inside my throat as a consuming desire to dissolve from existence and vanish entirely took hold of me. I continued through a bitter, gut-wrenching wail that tore at my exhausted insides: "I am the one who wanted to get rid of him and kill him in the beginning... don’t you remember? He died because heaven is punishing me. He didn’t want a cruel, hesitant mother like me. He abandoned me and his heartbeat stopped because, in the beginning, I didn’t want him inside my womb."
Steve rushed toward me with rapid, frantic steps, nearly tripping over himself from pure panic. He lunged over the medical bed with a violent momentum to wrap me in an absolute embrace, crushing my body which was twitching like a slaughtered bird against his broad chest.
He whispered, his tears soaking into my shoulder: "Julie, please... I beg of you, don’t say these cursed words... you are not the cause. This is fate, it was just his time!"
I forcefully shoved my face away from his shoulder, pressing my hands hard against his chest, gasping violently as my body writhed between his hands, trying to break free from his warm confinement: "No, it is the absolute truth! He left me alone and departed because I am not a good mother, and because I thought of aborting him once!"
He tightened his trembling fingers into the fabric of my medical gown, screaming in a weeping, choked, and raspy voice, desperate to silence my terrors and expel my demons: "Shut up, Julie! Shut the fuck up, for God’s sake! That is not true! You loved him and you fought for him!"
But I knew in my darkest depths, with a flat, immovable certainty resting inside me, that it was entirely true. The guilt of the past was gnawing at my entrails, multiplying alongside the physical agony of birth, and the burning sensation was consuming my chest, nearly dissolving my ribs. We remained in that excruciating, tragic state of embracing and bitter wailing until the door handle turned, and the doctor entered after a long duration of which I measured nothing and remembered no details.
The discharge procedures and the official paperwork passed like a heavy, foggy dream. The doctor signed my release from the hospital after checking my superficial vital signs. I took my first steps toward the exterior gate with a completely collapsed body, leaning entirely against Steve’s shoulder, who was carrying me far more than I was walking on my own two feet. And while other mothers were exiting all around me, vibrant smiles carving their faces which were illuminated with joy as they held their newborns in their embraces, swaddling them in warm woolen clothes... I walked out with empty, freezing hands, dragging behind me my ultimate defeat, walking behind a tiny wooden coffin that held a precious piece of my soul and flesh.
****************************"""
Hours later, I was sitting on the bare, freezing earth, the yellow soil filling my limbs and the crevices of my fingers, wearing my loose black abaya wrapped around my exhausted, slender frame. I extended my trembling hand with slowness, beginning to touch the damp, fresh dirt of my little son’s grave. I felt it with fading fingers, a silent weeping ripping through my chest and choking my throat. I said in a low, raspy voice that could barely form: "Ethan, my love, my soul... you departed so quickly without me ever seeing your smile, or even knowing the beautiful color of your eyes... I never heard the sound of your cry, I never nursed you from my chest even once... you left, and abandoned me in this bleak wilderness entirely alone."
Steve leaned down toward my spot with slow, measured steps, placing his warm, consoling hand upon my rock-stiff shoulder, saying in a sorrowful, quiet, and pleading tone: "That’s enough, Julie... please. You’ve been sitting here under the sun for hours, and your body hasn’t even healed yet."
My breath caught, and a loud, sharp cry fractured my voice once more as I clutched the soil tighter, digging into it with my fingernails. I shook my head in absolute refusal: "I won’t leave my son alone in this darkness. He won’t sleep lonely and terrified here beneath the earth... I will stay with him to protect him."
Steve tightened his grip with greater force on my shoulder, crying out in a weeping, shattered pitch that gathered all the helplessness of the world: "Enough, Julie... enough, please! You are killing me, and you are killing yourself!"
He grabbed my arms with firm persistence, forcing me to stand up from the cold ground against my will, my body surrendered, heavy, and completely devoid of resistance like a dead corpse. He walked me with stumbling steps toward the main road until we climbed into the backseat of a taxi, leaving the place behind at a rapid pace. But my mind, my heart, and the spirit of my boy remained right there buried together beneath that damp soil.
We arrived at the house, a body moving completely without a soul, like a wooden puppet manipulated by strings. The moment we unlocked the door and stepped into the sorrowful living room, Madam Salma approached us, her features heavily draped in deep anxiety and grimness. She was moving left and right in front of me, speaking to me in a pleading, tender tone, urging me to find patience, but I remained with my sight fixed blankly into the void, locking my eyes onto an imaginary point on the wall. I couldn’t hear a single thing she was saying or repeating, as though a voice from the ancient past had completely silenced the entire world around me, rendering me entirely deaf.
The heavy minutes passed like years, until Madam Salma finally surrendered to my coldness, leaving the apartment and quietly pulling the wooden door shut behind her.
After her departure, Steve approached and sat in the spot directly adjacent to me on the sofa. He stared intently into my glassy, expressionless eyes, speaking in a quiet, deep voice that carried a brand new resolve and a clear intention: "Julie... listen to me carefully. We are leaving this cursed place for good."
I moved my lips mechanically with a dry friction, and without looking at him or even blinking, I muttered in a dead, faint pitch: "Whatever you wish... it no longer matters."
He took a deep breath, filling his burdened chest, and continued as he tightly interlaced his fingers in front of his knees: "When I ran away from home in the past, when I was a kid, I settled in a town called ’Bay Shore’... it’s a small, quiet town, completely hidden from sight. We will live there, in the house of my old friend, Jake."
I closed my eyes with extreme slowness, as if expelling the phantom of the room from my imagination. I leaned my head back against the cushion of the sofa, saying with the exact same coldness and indifference, without a single objection: "As you want... do whatever you see fit."
