Chapter 23
Cade
I watched her for a long moment after she went quiet.
The apartment had fallen silent around us sometime during the last hour. The world outside the bedroom kept moving. Cars drove past. Somebody’s dog barked somewhere down the street. Charm and Aura were probably home and asleep now, but in here, it felt like time had stopped.
Bliss sat beside me beneath the blankets, her fingers twisted together in her lap while tears dried slowly on her cheeks.
I’d spent months learning every version of her.
The loud version. The chaotic version. The glitter-covered menace who stole my food and told me she hated me for sport.
The girl who collected Nevers and somehow managed to compare everything in life to either a bear attack or a social experiment gone wrong.
But this version?
This version was new.
This version was terrifying, because every piece she handed me felt like discovering another room hidden inside a house I thought I already knew.
“I was fifteen when everything went sideways in that you never get another first time kind of way.” Her voice went thinner. Quieter. “I was lying in the bed of his truck, drunk on peach schnapps, telling myself it hurt for every girl.”
Every muscle in my body locked because I understood immediately.
There wasn’t a single part of me that missed what she was trying to tell me, and the knowledge settled heavy and ugly in my chest while I stared at the wall and tried not to picture a fifteen-year-old Bliss convincing herself that was normal.
I stared at the ceiling for a second and swallowed the rage trying to crawl up my throat until I didn’t know if I needed centering or if she did.
“I’ll take Smile in My Mugshot for two hundred, Alex.”
Her head snapped toward me so fast I almost regretted saying it.
Almost.
Then a laugh slipped out of her, small and broken and still wet from crying. It shouldn’t have been my favorite sound in the world given the circumstances, but there it was.
She knew I was telling her to breathe, and the tension between us loosened just enough after that. Not lighter. Not better. Just easier. Easy enough for her to keep talking without having to climb back inside the worst moment of her life and drag me in with her.
“It was varying stages of that from then on.” She looked down at her hands. “I only need one incident to charge him, and my story becomes credible because now you can corroborate enough felonies the DA can pick from a smorgasbord.”
Holy shit.
The fact that she could say something like that with the same voice she used to order coffee should’ve been impossible, but somehow that was just Bliss.
I rubbed a hand across my jaw. “If it comes to that—and I don’t know if it will—guys like that usually jump on the first plea deal that offers protective custody.”
Her eyes flickered toward mine. “But?”
I pulled her closer automatically. “But if they give me a witness stand, Pip, it’s going to be historical.”
That earned the faintest twitch of her mouth.
Good.
I wanted every smile I could get tonight. Even the tiny ones. Especially the tiny ones. I kissed the top of her head and pulled the blanket higher around us while she settled against my side.
“He made everything feel confusing,” she whispered. “One minute he’d tell me I was beautiful and special, and the next he’d be furious about what I wore or who I talked to or whether somebody else looked at me too long.”
The rage came back immediately. Not the loud kind or the kind that burned hot and disappeared just as fast. This was something colder and far more deliberate. The kind of anger that sat quietly in the corner of my mind taking notes.
“Around my family, he was perfect,” she continued.
“Always helpful. Always charming. Always there. And nobody knew. I agreed they wouldn’t understand our connection.
He was twenty and I was barely fifteen, and my young heart believed every lie.
He banked on that, knowing I would never tell them what was happening. ”
I looked down at her where she was curled against my side, blonde hair spilling across the pillow and hiding the bruise she kept pretending wasn’t there.
She’d spent half her life surviving things that should’ve broken her and somehow still showed up every day armed with a joke and enough sunshine to blind a small village.
And holy shit.
For the first time all night, I realized she wasn’t telling me this because she needed me to understand Luke.
She was telling me because she finally wanted somebody to understand her.
“Keep talking,” I said quietly.
She nodded, and I watched my thumb move against her hip in slow circles while she gathered herself.
“I kept thinking if I loved him enough, he’d stop being angry and mean all the time,” she whispered. “By the time I was seventeen, I realized there was nothing resembling human decency in him.”
The sadness in her voice hit harder than the anger ever could have.
She wasn’t describing a monster anymore.
She was describing disappointment. The kind that only came after years of believing in something that had never existed in the first place.
Listening to her, I realized the thing that still hurt wasn’t who Luke was.
It was the moment she finally understood who he wasn’t.
Silence settled between us while she stared at the blanket gathered over our legs.
Then she abruptly sat upright, like one second she was curled against my side and the next she was bolt upright because somebody had launched an idea directly into her bloodstream.
“Pip.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh my gosh.”
That tone never led anywhere normal.
“What?”
She threw the blanket off herself. “I want to show you something.”
I sighed. Of course she did. Ten seconds ago, we were discussing felony-level trauma. Now she looked excited. “That sentence concerns me.”
“It should.”
“Fantastic.”
She pointed toward the living room. “Come on.”
I followed because, let’s be honest, I would follow her into traffic.
The second I stepped into her living room, my eyes went to the marble sculpture in the corner.
I’d noticed it the first time I came to her apartment.
It was impossible not to. A massive display of glass and color and light twisted together into something chaotic and beautiful, random and intentional at the exact same time.
Back then, I’d thought it was another strange little piece of Bliss Bennett.
Something pretty and weird and impossible to explain unless you lived inside her head.
Now, after everything she had just told me, it looked different.
Heavier.
Less like decoration and more like evidence.
Bliss crossed the room toward it, quiet now, the earlier spark dimming into something softer as her fingertips drifted over a cluster of marbles near the center.
“I made it,” she said.
“I remember.”
Her gaze flicked to mine.
“I saw it the first day,” I said quietly. “I just didn’t know what I was looking at.”
Her smile trembled a little.
“I’m still making it.”
Something in her voice made me go still. The humor that had been dancing around the edges of the conversation faded first. Then her smile softened until what remained felt quieter. More vulnerable. Like she’d finally reached the part of the story she’d been trying to tell all night.
I glanced back at the sculpture. “Okay.”
Her fingertips lingered against the glass. “Those are all my Nevers.”
For a second, I didn’t answer.
Not because I didn’t understand the word.
I did.
She’d given me pieces of it before. The little moth marble. The prom one. The way she collected tiny things for the moments her mom would never get to have with her.
But this?
This wasn’t a collection.
This was grief made physical.
Hundreds of tiny, shining memorials built into one impossible thing by a girl who had found a way to make absence beautiful because otherwise it would have swallowed her whole.
My chest tightened so sharply I had to breathe through it.
“All of them?” I asked.
She nodded, eyes on the sculpture. “Every one I could name.”
And for the first time tonight, I realized I still had absolutely no idea where this story had been trying to take me.