Chapter 24
Bliss
“I started collecting Nevers when my mom died,” I said, my fingers resting against the edge of the sculpture. “I realized I only had fourteen years of memories with her, and somehow those fourteen years had to carry me through the rest of my life. So, me being me, I decided to make it count.”
Cade’s eyes slid from the sculpture to me. “Naturally.”
“Exactly. Healthy coping mechanisms are mid.” I gave him a weak smile, but it didn’t hold for long.
“Every time something amazing happened, or something awful happened, or something normal happened that made me miss her so hard I couldn’t breathe, I wrote it down in my Never book. Then I glued a marble to the others.”
“What is a Never book?” Cade asked, still eyeing my Nevers with thinly veiled judgment.
“It’s like a scrapbook, except emotionally unstable and less likely to be shown at family reunions.
” I brushed my thumb over one of the marbles near the edge, remembering the exact page that went with it.
“Every marble has a story. A date. A reason. Something my mom missed. Something I had to survive without her.” My throat tightened, but I kept going because stopping now felt worse.
“And unfortunately, Luke became every Never I had to survive without her.”
Cade’s face changed then, not enough for most people to notice, but I noticed. His jaw shifted. His eyes sharpened. His whole body went still in that terrifyingly quiet way of his.
I looked down at the marbles instead of him.
“I knew what he was doing was wrong. Maybe not at fourteen, not in the way I understood it later, but somewhere deep inside me, some small voice kept whispering that anything I had to lie about, anything I had to keep hidden from the people who loved me most, couldn’t be good.
I’d been raised better than that. My dad, my brothers, my mom before she died—they had all taught me that love didn’t need secrets to survive.
“I know now that what I felt for Luke at fourteen wasn’t love.
It was infatuation dressed up like love, panic dressed up like devotion, and teenage-girl angst convincing me that having an older boyfriend meant I was special.
By the time I realized he was a monster, there was a stark difference between the girl who swore she couldn’t breathe without him and the seventeen-year-old girl who could only breathe when he wasn’t around.
“He had put me through so much hell, and still, I was desperate to prove I loved him enough. Stressed to the point I was physically sick. I had lost weight. I would self-isolate so he wouldn’t think I was doing something behind his back.
I was failing every class after being an honor roll student my entire academic life, and my guidance counselor put me on academic probation with this careful, concerned voice that made me want to crawl out of my skin.
She told me if I missed one more assignment or scored lower than a C on my exams, I’d be forced to forfeit my scholarship. ”
Cade sat there in my frilly living room with the neon pink lips on the wall behind the couch casting a soft blush over everything, including him in nothing but boxers with my pink cheetah-print blanket wrapped around his waist as he ate a snack-size bag of Doritos because he was Cade Mercer and apparently needed to eat every twenty minutes.
The whole picture was ridiculous. Ridiculous and weirdly intimate and so painfully perfect it made my chest ache, because it was everything I wanted and still hadn’t let myself name.
His eyes stayed on mine, steady and dark and listening in a way that made me feel more exposed than if he’d interrupted me at all. Then his jaw flexed, and he glanced down for half a second before looking back at me.
“It was methodical,” he said quietly. “He wanted the life drained out of you.”
“Oh, totally. I remember sitting in that office nodding like I understood school was important when my entire life felt like it was caving in around me. I didn’t know who I was anymore.
I didn’t feel funny or bright or like the girl everyone expected me to be.
There was no joy left inside of me, Cade.
No sun. No zest. Just this thin, exhausted version of myself trying to survive in a life I didn’t have the tools to fix.
The scarier part was that some days, I didn’t want to survive it. ”
“Pip—”
“I found my way through it.” I gave him a soft smile before he could spiral into that terrifying quiet rage again. “You’re looking at this giant eyesore of an art piece wondering what the fuck it even is, but this thing saved me.”
“Tell me why you thought life wasn’t worth living, Pip.”
“What life did I have? I was failing in everything, not just school. I don’t think I have the words to explain how dark it was for me.
I wanted my mom. It was the last time I remembered being happy.
I knew deep down that Luke was the reason I was so lost, but I believed without him it would be worse. ”
The words came out smaller than everything else because they were the truest part.
Cade didn’t move, but I felt his attention sharpen on me like I’d handed him something fragile and terrifying at the same time.
I looked toward the marble sculpture in the corner, the massive, beautiful chaos of it catching the low light from my bedroom, hundreds of colors and designs locked together in a way that probably looked random to everyone else but had never been random to me.
“When she died, I started collecting Nevers,” I said, because there was no way to explain any of this without starting there.
“Every time another milestone happened, or something good happened, or something terrible happened, and the first thought I had was that I wanted my mom, I collected one. Every achievement. Every bad day. Every stupid heartbreak like Drake Jensen choosing Aura, which, in my defense, was devastating at the time because apparently my grief had terrible taste in boys.”
Cade’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t interrupt me.
“It started with marbles and a journal,” I continued, brushing my fingers over the edge of the blanket because somehow looking right at him made the words too big.
“I would write the Never down in the journal, and then I’d glue a marble onto an old cabinet door from when my dad remodeled the bathroom after Mom died and he needed projects to keep himself moving.
Marble after marble, and the story of each Never in a binder I kept under my bed.
It just kept getting bigger from there. Three days after Mom died, I bought this bag of like fifty marbles from a kiosk in the mall because that was apparently my first official stop on the emotional damage world tour.
At first, they were just these really cool ornate-looking marbles.
Pretty things. Tiny little pieces of glass I could hold when I had a new Never. ”
I swallowed, fighting back the emotion clawing up my throat.
“This tower of Nevers is getting exponentially cooler, Pip.”
I went to the couch where he was sitting, and he opened the cheetah blanket so I could cuddle into him.
“The first one was for her funeral. I had never been to a funeral before, and now I was going to hers, and she wasn’t there to hold my hand.
So, I held the marble. Then I had to collect one for her death too because losing my mom and wishing my mom was there to help me survive losing my mom were somehow two separate nightmares.
One for seeing my dad cry for the first time.
One for Ryker’s wedding, then Knox’s. One each for my nieces and nephews.
One for my first kiss, my first date, and then too many to count for surviving Luke Dempsey. ”
Cade’s hand tightened around mine, but I kept my eyes on the sculpture.
“The first time he hit me. The first time he cheated. The first of many no’s he ignored.” My voice didn’t crack, and for some reason that almost made it worse. “The first time I understood that love shouldn’t make you feel like shit.”
The room went so quiet I could hear Cade breathing beside me.
“And the day I bought one for academic probation, it hit me that I would probably need one for not graduating too. Then I thought I could buy one more and go see my mom.”
Cade went completely still beside me.
“My last one.”
I got up and ran to my room to get the marble I carried everywhere.
The glass was cool against my palm, familiar in a way that felt alive after all these years.
I held it out to him, and Cade took it like he knew without asking that this wasn’t just another marble.
Inside the glass, the dagger moth looked suspended in motion, its wings delicate and wooden-looking, detailed in a way that still made my chest ache every time I looked at it.
It was beautiful. Frozen forever in its little glass cage.
“I’d never seen one like it before,” I whispered.
“And I am the marble girl, Cade. I scour the internet for unique ones. Trinkets and Things started ordering special ones because I kept wiping them out of anything pretty or weird enough to represent my Nevers, but this one was different. It had this little dagger moth inside, all three-dimensional and detailed like somebody had trapped one tiny, perfect thing inside glass and decided it was better that way.”
I watched him roll it gently between his fingers, his face unreadable except for the muscle flexing in his jaw.
“Anyway, I was sitting at my desk with that dagger moth marble and a pros and cons list because apparently seventeen-year-old me decided to be thorough about emotional destruction. The cons list was everything I loved. My dad. My brothers. Aura and Charm. Music. Movies. Sports. The way my dad makes pancakes on Sundays. My mom’s old perfume bottle on my dresser.
Every reason I had to stay in this world was written in front of me. ”
Cade’s voice came low. “And the pros?”