Chapter 66: The Apology Draft
Daniel wrote the first apology as if the page owed him mercy. The blank document glowed on the table like a second interrogation.
He began with, I never meant to hurt anyone. The solicitor read it once.
Then he put the sheet down with two fingers, as if the paper had been found in a bin. “No.”
Daniel looked up. “No what?”
“No to the first sentence.” The interview room had emptied after the formal questions, but it still felt occupied.
The recorder was off. The walls were silent.
Yet Daniel could feel every answer he had given sitting around him like witnesses. He had admitted enough to frighten himself.
Not enough to free himself. Now the solicitor wanted a public correction before Evelyn’s team released the next batch of documents.
Daniel wanted that too. He wanted the word correction to sound clean. He had learned that rooms did not need people in them to remember what had happened.
He wanted apology to sound like a door. So he wrote around the truth instead of through it.
“I never meant to hurt anyone,” the solicitor repeated. His voice was flat.
“You locked a blind woman out in the rain.” Daniel’s hand tightened around the pen.
“I said I regret that.” “You said the situation became regrettable.”
The solicitor pushed the page back. “A storm becomes regrettable. A delayed train becomes regrettable. A decision has an actor.”
Daniel stared at the sentence until the ink blurred. He crossed it out.
The sound of the pen scraping paper was too loud. He wrote, I failed to understand Evelyn’s fear that night. Adrian had not threatened it. He had simply made the timetable clear, which was worse.
The solicitor did not even sit back. “Again.”
Daniel’s jaw hardened. “What is wrong with that?”
“You understood it. You ignored it.” The words took away his last soft corner. Every draft tried to make him smaller in the sentence than he had been in the room.
Daniel scratched through the line. Black ink tore the paper fibres.
He tried again. I accept that some of my actions contributed to her distress.
The solicitor gave a short breath that was almost laughter, but colder. “Some?”
Daniel dropped the pen. “You are supposed to help me.”
“I am.” “By humiliating me?”
“By stopping you from humiliating yourself in public again.”
The solicitor leaned forward.
“You cannot even apologise without cheating.”
That sentence did what the court, the cameras, and the station bench had not quite done.
It left Daniel with nowhere clever to stand.
For a moment, his face changed. It was the same instinct that had made him delete messages and call silence confusion.
Not into remorse.
Into terror.
Because he saw the shape of the truth and understood it had no flattering angle.
The solicitor placed a clean sheet in front of him.
“Write one sentence without hiding behind grammar.”
Daniel picked up the pen again.
His fingers looked older than they had in the morning.
He wrote slowly.
I left Evelyn outside in the rain because I chose my comfort over her safety.
He stopped breathing after the full stop.
The solicitor read it.
Then nodded once.
“Now keep going.”
Daniel looked at the page as if it had betrayed him first.
Outside, a phone vibrated on the table. For once, the problem was not that no one believed him. The problem was that someone finally made him write exactly what he meant.
The solicitor checked it.
His expression tightened.
“Evelyn’s office has asked for the final statement by six.”
Daniel looked at the clock.
Five thirty-two.
Twenty-eight minutes to tell the truth, or let Evelyn tell it for him. And the next life Evelyn entered would have no room for his edited version.