Until The Last Day (Claire and Lorenzo) novel Chapter 18

Lorenzo’s POV 

It was the first time I ever saw Aria like that. She was shattered, hysterical, and cruel. 

From the first day we met, she had always been cheerful, polite, youthful. She carried that fresh-graduate, twenty-two-year-old brightness that reminded me of another version of life I once had… the version of me when Claire and I were both eighteen and the world felt like sunlight, not winter. 

But that brightness was never hers. It was neverher. It was just borrowed color from a past I refused to face. 

Everyone around me pitied Claire. Everyone saw her as the girl whose future was stolen and destroyed. And they looked at me like I had to shoulder not just my mistakes, but her entire lost tomorrow. 

And they were right. I was the one who had to carry it. 

After the accident, I didn’t sleep properly once. Either nightmares woke me screaming or guilt kept me awake until dawn. But even through the darkest grief, I never thought of leaving Claire. Not once. I didn’t run from responsibility. I suffered with her. I fed her, carried her, held her through her trauma, through my own trauma, through all the years where pain became normal. 

But fate never stopped. We never got a break. One disaster followed another, and I couldn’t lift either of us out of the ruins. I drowned with her.  

And in that drowning life… in the stagnation… in the slow suffocation… I started craving oxygen. I missed the sun. I missed the version of Claire who laughed at seventeen and dragged me through life with wild courage. A part of me was desperate to feel that life again. To feel anything again. 

Aria wasn’t the one I wanted. 

What I wanted was the illusion she represented. 

“When I was with her… it felt like I could breathe again,” I whispered to myself once, ashamed even alone. 

She wasn’t the cure. She was the drug. 

Every time I saw Aria, I told myself it would be the last time. Every time, I knew I was betraying Claire. Every time, I swore it would end. 

But addiction doesn’t listen to reason. Addiction listens to escape. 

And in the end, I crossed a line I could not erase. 

When I remained silent, lost in the truth of why I destroyed my own marriage, Aria grew furious. 

“So you’re just going to throw everything away for a dead person?” she snapped. 

My head jerked up. My eyes met hers. Something sharp and lethal finally surfaced inside me. 

“Don’t,” I said quietly. “Don’t say another word.” 

Aria froze. She had never heard my voice like that. She tried to backtrack, her lips parting to explain— but footsteps pounded across the floor from behind her.

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