I Signed Away Eight Million To Leave Him Chapter 16
“If you don’t want to talk, I can just leave this and go.”
“What is it?”
He took out a new wooden picture frame, along with acid-free photo repair tape and a clear protective sleeve.
“I asked someone in the school archives. Regular tape would just damage the photo more over time.”
He sat at the table, washed his hands, and only then carefully took out my mother’s photograph.
Everything he did was slow and precise.
He flattened the curled corners first, secured the tear from the back with the special tape, then slid the photograph into the clear sleeve and placed it inside the new frame.
The scar across my mother’s cheek was still there.
But the photograph was whole again.
Eli pushed the frame toward me.
“I can’t fix what already happened.”
“But at least it won’t keep breaking.”
I raised my hand and touched the edge of the frame.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t smile the way he usually did.
“Mara, there’s something else I need to tell you.”
I looked up at him.
“I’ve waited for you for years.”
“When you were engaged to Graham, I had no right to come closer. And when you first moved here, I didn’t want to take advantage of you at your lowest, to let you mistake dependence for love.”
“So I waited.”
His hand rested on the table, not quite touching mine.
“I waited until you had your own job. Your own place. Until you didn’t need anyone else deciding where you should stay or what kind of life you should have.”
“Today, when I saw that court car, I knew. You can protect yourself now.”
Eli looked at me, his voice gentle but firm.
“I don’t love the girl who needed to be saved.”
“I love the Mara who knows what she wants, the one who can stand in her own doorway and keep out the person who hurts her.”
“So I want to ask you properly, just once.”
“Would you be willing to give me a chance?”
I looked at the man in front of me.
When I was a little girl hiding in that cottage, he would leave a warm sandwich outside the door without forcing me to open it.
Later, after I was taken into the main house, he learned I was engaged and kept himself firmly in the place of an old friend.
Now he was sitting here, repairing my mother’s photo—and still leaving the choice entirely in my hands.
He never demanded gratitude in exchange for kindness.
And he never turned protection into a leash.
I set the restored frame on the table and laid my hand over his.
“Okay.”
I nodded.
“Eli Torres, let’s try.”