Chapter 1
“She’s coming with me, Caden—end of story.”
“Please, Mandy, don’t fuckin’ do this. I need to make it right.”
Chief’s voice is pained, broken, unlike anything I have ever heard from him before.
“Look at her,” Mom whispers, her voice steady and unwavering. “She doesn’t want that. Not now.”
Their words slam into me, ricocheting off plaster walls.
Bright fluorescent lights burn my eyes every single time I open them, and every single beep of the multiple machines attached to me is enough to make my skull throb.
My body thrums with painkillers—each pill a promise to dull the agony.
But it’s still there, a living thing writhing beneath my ribs.
The blissful numbness is now gone.
I shift slightly on the crisp, white sheet, heartbeat echoing in my ears.
My chest aches from each breath, punctuated by memories.
Jeremy’s soulless smile as he pointed the gun and shot me.
Travis pleading with me not to leave. The thought of his daughter, out there alone, in a broken system. My father, his lies. It’s all too much.
The blast of that gun tore everything apart, it ripped every painful reality out and splattered it over the sidewalk.
My stomach twists. I close my eyes and a wave of bile rises.
I swallow it down, but it claws at my throat, begging to escape.
My mind feels chaotic under the weight of all this.
I can’t sort it. I can’t heal it. I just.. . need to run.
I need to turn and never look back.
“Mischief!” Chief’s voice has my eyes opening again. “Baby, look at me.”
I don’t.
It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t.
Everything in my body is screaming at me to run from all of them, every single ounce of pain they have all brought to my life. Including him. He is my father, but right now, I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see anyone but my mom. I just want it all to stop.
I turn my head away, trying to smother the sound of his pain. Tears are gone; I can’t find the energy to let them out anymore. My heart is protecting itself. If I stay, I’ll drown in their lies. I have to leave this place, leave them, leave everything that hurts.
“We’re ready to move her now,” the nurse informs them.
My mother is having me moved to a hospital a thousand miles away, in a place where none of them can reach me. She is protecting me, she is protecting us, and I am grateful to her for that. They wheel me toward the back door. Chief is bellowing my name, and it hurts, it does.
There is a deep pain in his voice that will haunt me.
As they load me into the ambulance for transport, another voice fills my ears. Travis.
“Mischief!”
His voice rips through me and makes my body rigid. I made sure he couldn’t see me in the hospital. I know Mom gave him updates, but she respected me when I said not to let him in. Hearing his voice now brings it all back. Every single fucking lie he told me.
Every broken promise.
“Violet, look at me,” he bellows.
I don’t turn my head, but the tears I was so sure were dried up start rolling down my cheeks. Someone is holding him back, I don’t know who, but I am grateful.
“Don’t fucking leave,” he goes on, his voice cracking. “I love you. Do you hear me? I love you.”
I clench my eyes shut, my jaw so tight it hurts.
“Travis, just let us go,” my mother’s voice is careful, but firm. “She needs time, do you understand that?”
“I can’t live without her, Mandy,” he grinds out, his words so full of pain it is soul-crushing. “I can’t fucking watch her go.”
“You have no choice. If you love her, you will let us leave.”
The ambulance doors thud shut. The world tilts as the engine roars to life. Through the small window, I see him drop to his knees. His head slumps and his shoulders sag as he watches the ambulance disappear down the road.
I let the tears fall, knowing it will be my last.
These, these will be the last tears I cry for Travis Phoenix.
The hospital I am transferred to is less brutal but more foreign than the ER I left behind.
There’s a glass wall between me and the nurses’ station.
There are no cops, no angry dads. Instead, it’s the low, white-noise hum of climate control and the clinical blue of the night light washed across every surface.
You could eat a meal off these floors. It’s so goddamned clean.
I sit in the new bed, feeling lost and alone.
The bandage across my ribs itches like hell, but I won’t touch it—not after the scolding I got on the way here for trying to stick my fingers inside and scratch the flesh there.
I am only grateful for the fact that my mom is here, because if she wasn’t, I really don’t know how I could breathe.
She is in the adjoining room with the doctor, speaking in a soft, professional voice—the one she never once used on me.
I can hear her, through the glass, saying things like “trauma history” and “No, father is not to be informed of the patient’s location.
” Every syllable lands like a punch to the chest, and I close my eyes, trying not to think of how this moment will impact the rest of my life.
My mom’s phone, which is in front of me, rings.
She took mine after I begged her to.
I just can’t face the calls, the messages, and everything else that will be flashing across that screen.
I see Reagan’s name and answer it. “Reagan?”
“Violet?” she croaks, and I can hear the pain in her voice. “Oh, Vi. Thank fuck.”
“I’m okay,” I say. The words struggle up my throat, raw and half-formed, like they’re learning to walk. “I’m—I’m here.”
“I can’t believe that happened. Honey, I am so sorry I wasn’t there. What is happening? Where will you be going?”
“I’m just in a different hospital, but...I don’t think I’ll come back, Reagan. I can’t...”
“I figured as much. You have been through it. Does...does Travis know?”
“He tried to see me when I left,” I close my eyes, the pain soul-crushing. “He was screaming. Outside the ambulance. They wouldn’t let him in. He just kept screaming my name, and I—” I bite down on the sound.
It would be so easy to start sobbing and never stop.
“Oh. That’s rough, honey.”
“I saw his face,” I say, “before they slammed the door. He was on his knees.” I squeeze my eyes shut again, chasing away the world. “Part of me wanted them to stop. To let him in. You know?”
“Of course. You’re the softest hardass I’ve ever met,” Reagan says. But her voice is a blanket now, and the sarcasm just something to hide how much she’s struggling, too.
“I can’t go back there, Rea. Ever. I can’t. It would kill me.”
She makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a cough. “You don’t have to. I’ll come there. Say the word. We will work this out, together.”
“Not yet. I just—” I look at my hand, IV line running from it. “I need to not be somebody else’s problem for a minute. Okay?”
Reagan is quiet, then she says carefully, “You’re not. You never were. But I understand. When you’re ready, honey, you know I’m there.”
I know.
I always know she will be there.
We talk a while longer, then say goodbye and I hang up. My mother is watching me from the door. There is a coffee in her hand, and her shoes are off, and she looks so tired I want to tell her to go sleep. Instead, I ask the question that’s been gathering inside my ribcage since the ambulance.
“Am I making the wrong choice?”
She walks over, sitting on the edge of the bed and reaching up to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “No, honey,” she says. “You’re not. You need time to figure out who you want to be next. You have been through so much. You need time.”
I nod. It’s not comfort, not exactly, but it is something.
She eventually leaves me when the painkillers kick in. I roll onto my side, cradling the hollowness where my heart used to be. I wonder if the part of me that loved Travis will ever stop bleeding.
I don’t dream.
The body is smarter than the mind sometimes; it knows better than to go back to a place that feels like dying. When I wake, it is nearly night again, and my mother is asleep on the vinyl recliner with a blanket wrapped around her knees.
They say that pain means you’re alive.
I count my breaths and try to believe it.