27. Lottie
Chapter 27
Lottie
“S o… they’re back?” Emma asks, her voice calm. Much calmer than the chaos I can feel shredding me apart from inside my chest.
I nod.
“Words, Lottie. Remember?”
My throat feels like it’s closing in on itself, but I manage, barely. “Yeah. They’re back and trying to demand answers.” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. It’s rough, ragged like the truth scraping up the inside of my throat, trying to claw its way out is shredding my vocal cords, or maybe it’s from four years of disuse.
I grip the glass tighter, the cold pressing into my palm, sharp and grounding. I’m not there. I focus on it—anything but her—anything but the conversation I know is coming.
The birds outside, wings slicing through the air like they’re trying to flee from something. The slow ticking of the clock… every second dragging me closer to the end of this session, and yet it never feels fast enough. Emma’s soft breathing, the scribble of her pen on paper.
The hideous artificial yellow of the walls. Too bright. Too clean. Too cheerful and new, like it’s trying to erase everything ugly that is said in this room.
I’m not here. Not really. I just wish I were somewhere else. Somewhere, none of them could find me.
Emma sighs. I see her adjust her glasses from the corner of my eye, the same way she always does when she’s about to say something she doesn’t think I’m going to like. She always leads up to it, a careful question here, a gentle nudge in the right direction there. I don’t hate her… she’s nice, but the pity I can see shining in her eyes when I even get close to talking about that night is more than I can bear. “No one has any right to the answers. How are you feeling after being cornered?”
Feeling like I’m suffocating under the pressure of all the secrets.
I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a dam, and the cracks are starting to show. Years of silence, years of finally feeling like I can walk to class without having to look over my shoulder for them, and now they’re back.
Digging.
Demanding.
Like they deserve something from me… like they didn’t watch me shatter and scream and just leave me there.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I breathe through my nose, taking a deep breath and pushing the word out with all the air in my lungs, barely a whisper. “Overwhelmed.”
But it’s not enough. Not even close.
I can’t describe what it felt like to see Roman’s face again and feel my entire body freeze. Or for Crew’s words that have always felt like knives wrapped in velvet, and definitely not for the look in Elijah’s eyes—a mix of pity and betrayal.
They spit venom at me like I owe them an explanation, like I wasn’t the one who had to survive .
Emma’s quiet for a while. No scribbling or talking, just silence. She watches me from behind her glasses with the same frustrating softness she always does, like she’s afraid if she speaks too loud, I’ll break… which fair.
I did once, and it took me weeks to even walk back through that door. I sat in the waiting room day after day, Claire by my side, my hand clutching hers so hard I could swear I felt her heartbeat merge with my own. Then Archer came home. A few soft words, and his calloused hand in mine, and I was walking through the door to the session like I had been before.
He’s my safe place, and right now I wish he were here.
“I know this is hard, Lottie,” she says eventually, her voice too gentle for someone as damaged as me. “But sometimes saying it out loud gives you control over it. You decide what’s shared. What isn’t. They don’t get to take that from you, too… not after everything you’ve been through.”
I don’t answer her. I can’t. The moment I speak, it feels like I’m somehow handing something over that I don’t want to speak aloud. Letting it leave my chest, where it’s safe and buried. I’ve held it all in for so long, it almost feels like a part of me, and I don’t feel like I’d know who I was without it.
Emma pushes on, still in that voice that makes it sound like this is all optional, even when we both know it isn’t. “I think it’s time you spoke to them.”
My head snaps up so fast I swear I can hear the bones in my neck snap. My spine stiffens like she just yanked a string, and I’m the puppet. “No.”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t have to be now. Not even soon, but someday. You don’t owe them or anyone anything, but you do owe yourself a chance to stand in front of them and say that. To tell them they don’t get to ask, or demand, or pick at the wounds they helped create. You get to tell them that they lost the right to answers the moment they stopped being your friends and chose cruelty instead.”
I shake my head before she even finishes talking. I can’t help it, I can feel my pulse racing. “It’s not that easy.”
“It’s not easy at all,” she agrees. “But it is yours to do when you are ready, and if you never are, that’s okay too. But don’t stay silent because you think you owe them something. You don’t. Not after everything.”
Silence stretches out between us, and I feel the room growing smaller. The walls press in because I know where this is leading—where it always does when I have a session.
“They keep saying I owe them,” I say eventually, and it comes out bitter. I take a sip of water, the coldness soothing my throat. “That my ‘death’ ruined them.”
Emma tilts her head. “Why did you ‘die’?”
I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. Only exhaustion. “I died because I didn’t think I’d survive if I didn’t.”
“Then that’s your answer. They don’t need to know the whys or how.” She says it like it’s so simple, but she doesn’t know them.
Those three will stop at nothing until they wring out every secret from me, even if it means leaving me bleeding on the floor at their feet.
My hands shake, and I hide them in my lap. The glass is too loud in the quiet when I set it down on the table in front of me.
I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to scream. I want to rip open my chest and show someone what it looks like in there—how messy and broken and full of rot it still is. I was broken that night. Shattered and shredded from the inside out, and since then, I’ve never felt whole.
How can I when he’s still out there?
Emma waits another beat. Another tick of the clock.
I watch as she sits straighter, her fingers resting on the tissue box. “Lottie,” she soothes, “can I ask you something else?”
No.
“Yes,” I say anyway, because my mouth betrays me before I can stop it.
“The night you lost your voice… you’ve never talked about what happened. I don’t want to push, but I think we’ve been circling it for too long now.”
My stomach drops. I knew it was coming but it still feels like all the air has been sucked from my lungs. My vision goes spotty at the edges, like the air’s been sucked from the room.
I know what she’s going to ask next. I can see it in her eyes. “Can you tell me about him?”
And just like that, I shut down.
My body goes still. My jaw locks. Everything in me clenches so tight I feel like I might implode.
I stare at the wall across from me, right over Emma’s head, where the paint is slightly uneven near the baseboard. I count the brush strokes.
One, two, three?—
“Lottie?”
Four, five, six?—
Her voice is soft. I don’t deserve softness.
Too dirty.
Too broken.
I press my lips together so hard they sting. My lungs burn, and my heartbeat is a riot in my chest.
Pain.
He had me against the floor, his breath thick with the smell of whiskey, the carpet digging into my cheek. The room shrouded in darkness, but the small sliver of light that came through the drawn curtains.
The world lost all color, and the sound of my heartbeat was so loud it drowned out the vile words he whispered in my ear.
That night doesn’t have words.
It has screams, pleading, and blood… so much blood.
Emma doesn’t say anything else. She reaches out and places a box of tissues closer to me on the table, careful not to touch me, and then picks up her phone.
“Lottie needs to be collected today…”
I can hear the raised voice over the line from here, even if I didn’t see Emma’s flinch. Not Claire, then.
I don’t know how long I sit here counting.
Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two?—
“Lottie?”
Archer.
The silence stretches. “Can you give us some privacy?” Archer snaps.
Emma leaves, and I breathe.
Fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one?—
“Baby, you’re scaring me…” Archer’s hand cups my cheek, pulling my face to look into his brown eyes. “I’m here.”
His thumb wipes away a stray tear. His touch is careful, like I might break if he isn’t. He’s always known how to read me, even when I feel too lost in my memories.
I blink slowly, vision swimming. “I can’t.” My voice cracks.
His jaw flexes like he’s holding something back, something sharp and angry that he’s not going to direct at me. “Then you don’t.” He swallows, eyes searching mine. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, but if you do, you aren’t alone. Not ever.”
I nod, even though I don’t believe it.
I was alone. Discarded by people who were supposed to love me.
His hands rest on my knees, and his thumb strokes softly over my jeans. “Talk to me, please.”
I can’t. Not yet. Not ever. So instead, I lean forward and press my forehead to his, closing my eyes and focusing on the steady beat of his breath. In. Out. In. Out. Maybe if I sync mine with his, I can find my way back to the surface.
“I’ve got you,” he whispers. “I’ve always got you. I’ll sit here in the dark with you for as long as you need.”
Something breaks loose in me. A sob claws up my throat, and before I can stop it, I’m falling forward into his arms. Archer catches me like he always does, pulling me tight against him, his arms wrapping around my shoulders like he can physically hold the pieces of me together.
“I don’t want to remember,” I choke out. “It was easier to pretend it didn’t happen. That I was Lottie and not Scarlett, and that maybe if I pretended I was her, then it didn’t happen.”
“You don’t have to pretend anymore. You’re allowed to be angry. You’re allowed to fall apart. You don’t have to be okay for anyone else.”
I’ve spent so long surviving, I don’t know how to do anything else. I tell him as much. “I feel like if I let go of this… of all of it. I’ll disappear,” I whisper. “I don’t even know who I am without the pain.”
“You’re Lottie. You’re our girl,” he says without hesitation. “You’re brave, and stubborn, and you laugh when you’re tired and cry when you think I’m not looking. It tears my fucking heart out when I hear those gasping breaths you take to try stay silent. You steal my hoodies when I’m not home, and I love that they smell like you when I get back. You think sharks are the most misunderstood animal in the ocean. You carry the weight of a thousand storms and still get up every day. You inspire me. That’s who you are. You don’t need to be anyone else.”
I’m crying now, fully sobbing into his shoulder, because I’ve never wanted to believe something so badly.
But I’m still afraid.
Afraid that the memories are going to drown me.
Afraid that he’ll find me.
Afraid that Roman, Crew, and Elijah are going to pull my secrets from me, and that Archer will find out about my stripping.
Or that I’m in love with his best friend, too.
And I’m afraid that if I finally let it all go, it still won’t be enough to make it stop hurting.