I was 17 when she left. 17 and very stupid. Or cowardly. You take your pick. I was certainly afraid. What Pam had proposed wasn't exactly…proper, back then. Isn't even all that proper now, and it's been 20 years.

I knew I loved Pam—I always did, just wasn't ever sure what sorta love that was. I knew she loved me, too, she told me as much. It was during our "destructive" phase, after the day Isis was rescued.

We'd all received our punishments. Selina was right to assume Pam's parents would put a padlock on her door. They did, and it stayed there for two whole months.

Selina and Bruce's weren't all that bad. Old man Pennyworth interrogated Selina, asked if she'd made any trouble on her little excursion, she'd sworn up and down it was simply an adventure.

Bruce had to work morning shifts at his family's grocery for the rest of the summer, and my parents made me get a job washing dishes at Pennyworth's diner.

Harvey got the worst of it. His daddy was drunk when he got home late that night, and when Harvey didn't answer his questions about how his ear got burnt, his daddy took a hold of it and yanked him over to the stove. The next time we saw Harvey, nearly half his face was covered in bandages, and that skin never really healed. Turns out having your face held against the metal grate of a stove with the flame on high can leave a nasty scar.

But anyway, the thing with me and Pam happened two summers later. We were all drinking a lot at that time, trying our best to forget our problems, getting into more trouble than we ought to. That night, we'd all piled into Bruce's convertible and headed out to the river with a six pack and some whiskey Selina had lifted off the shelf.

Selina and Bruce lit a fire, and while they were dancing, making fools out of themselves while Harvey laughed, Pam pulled me into the darkness and pressed me up against the car, kissing me deep and slow enough for me to taste the nearly half-bottle of whiskey she'd downed.

I thought about fighting her, just out of surprise, in the first rushed moments…but that hand of protest ended up resting on her shoulder instead.

Her words were slurred when she spoke, but there was a lot of emotion behind them. "I love you, Harley. I think you're—you're just so…bright. I see you."

I was too drunk to really comprehend any of that at the time. Or at least that was my excuse for never talking to her or myself about it. And she never brought it up either, but she would smile at me like we had a secret, and that would make me blush. She only smiled at me.

Still, I didn't know Pamela Isley was the love of my life until she was long gone. I was 23, still where I was then and exactly where I am now, in Castle Rock, working at Pennyworth's diner. I'd started seeing this boy—this man. He wasn't pushy for intimacy like Jack had been, and I think that was what I liked about him. Eddie was smart and extremely outgoing and as kind as a man had ever been to me. He had red hair and the prettiest green eyes…eyes I could gaze into and imagine someone else's.

But that was just it. See, he was imagining someone else too. Eddie Nygma had a secret. One just like Pam's. One sorta like…mine. The night I caught him he put his head in my lap and cried, and when he looked up at me, there was a pain in his eyes that I recognized. In that moment, I understood, for the first time, what I had really lost.

My chance to be set free.

I'm 37 years old now, and today, I opened the newspaper and cried.

Richmond Lawyer Shot Dead in Street

"Harvey…" I whispered.

I hadn't spoken to Harvey Dent since he left for college, same as Pam and same as Bruce. Selina sometimes called, but for the most part, they didn't just leave Castle Rock, they left me too.

I knew Harvey had become a lawyer because the whole town was so surprised. See, his daddy was a bully. A bad apple. And so people around here just assumed Harvey would be trouble too. I knew they were wrong, though. The Harvey I knew was kind and protective. Considerate and mostly soft spoken. He was the kind of boy that stood up for what he believed in, and it seemed he'd been that kind of man too.

Harvey had been a prosecutor, one who brought criminals to justice. I remember reading that he convinced the state legislature to impose harsher punishments on domestic abusers, which is I know something that hit close to home for him.

And now here he was. Looking up at me from a black and white picture, still handsome, despite his scars. I was looking at a face I would never again see in person.

The article said he'd been personally escorting a witness to the courthouse when a man with a gun approached them, threatening the woman he was accompanying. Bystanders said they saw Harvey first place himself in front of the woman, and then try to reason with the gunman. He was shot three times, once in the hand that had been outstretched towards the gunman, once in the gut and once in the chest. He bled out in the ambulance before they reached the hospital.

The woman lived, her only wound coming from shrapnel as it exited Harvey's body.

The paper was wet with tears before I even finished the article. At the end, the author stated, "Mr. Dent's funeral will be held in his hometown of Castle Rock, Virginia, and will be hosted by childhood friend Bruce Wayne."