Chapter 36 In My Childhood Bedroom
IN MY CHILDHOOD BEDROOM
ROWAN
If someone waited long enough outside your heart, would you open the door?
ChaosInPurple: I would, but not just because they waited.
Time doesn’t automatically make feelings real. But it’s impossible to not care when someone keeps showing up consistently without trying to force their way in, without making me feel like I owe them something in return.
I let people in easily. I talk, I laugh, I share pieces of myself. But there are deeper parts, the ones that haven’t forgotten what it feels like to lose people I thought would always be there. Those doors don’t open so quickly.
So, if someone waited and kept proving that they’re not going to disappear the moment things get real… then yes, I’d open the door to my heart completely.
“Are you going to tell me why Violet has been staying at Mom and Dad’s?”
Archer has been showing up at my house every morning since Violet left, like he doesn’t have an entire company to run and better things to do with his time than stand in my kitchen watching me clean things that don’t need cleaning.
I set the rag down and turn so he can read my hands clearly. “Don’t act like you don’t know. I have seen your car outside their house. Every day.”
“Since I don’t get an answer there, here I am.”
Which means he went to Violet and put her in the position of having to explain something she shouldn’t have to explain.
I’m counting the days until she decides she has had enough and goes back to her own home or to one of her friends.
Even my parents’ hospitality can only hold her there for so long.
I want to tell Archer exactly what I think of his intrusion. Instead, I pick up the rag and drag it across the already sparkling counter.
“Is your cleaning service suddenly on vacation?”
“It’s my house. I can clean it if I want to. Or do I need your permission?”
“Oh, absolutely not,” he says. “You’re doing brilliantly on your own. You don’t need anyone’s permission for anything.”
I don’t take the bait.
A beat of silence passes before his voice drops. “What happened, Ro? Talk to me.”
I ball the cloth between my hands. When I finally sign, the fabric moves with the force of it.
“What happened is what was always going to happen. She left. What else is there to say? Can you just… can you leave me alone for a few days? Please.”
I didn’t expect him to turn around and actually leave, but I did expect him to take my frustration into account, like he has done in the past. But he doesn’t.
“She left?” Archer repeats. “You think that’s enough of an answer for me.
” He shakes his head. “The last time I saw you two together, she was outside this house holding on to you like you had hung every star in the sky and not simply come home from a trip. So forgive me for struggling to connect those two things. I need you to explain it to me, Ro.”
The cloth stills in my hands.
“Because I’m not enough, Arch. I will never be enough.
Violet has her memories back. She knows the truth about that night.
She knows I lied to her and I’m the reason behind her accident.
” Each word I sign feels like a stone I’m placing down, one by one.
“So what exactly do you expect? There’s no reason for her to stay.
The entire foundation we built everything on was a lie.
It was always going to crumble one day.”
He doesn’t even flinch at the mention of her memories returning. Of course he already knows. Probably everyone knows by now.
“Did Violet say that to you, in her own words, that you weren’t enough for her?” Archer asks after a long moment.
I give them the easiest response—silence.
He exhales slowly, and when he speaks again, his voice is low and slow, the way it gets when he needs me to hear every single word.
“After I failed you… in the woods, I made a promise to myself to be there for you always. Not because you need me, but because I need you. I can’t let anything happen to you, Ro. Not when I can do or say something.” He pauses, and I can feel what’s coming.
Archer and I rarely go back to that night. I hate that he feels the need to go there now. Before I can sign for him to stop, he continues.
“But today, for the first time in my life, I’m genuinely scared.
I don’t know how to protect you from yourself.
There’s a girl who loves you so much that, right now, she’s sitting in our parents’ house going through your childhood photographs, sleeping in your childhood bedroom, waiting for you to find the courage to let her in completely. ”
He pauses, and something in the quiet of it reaches me in a way I don’t want to be reached.
“You were right about one thing,” Archer continues, and today his voice has lost every trace of its usual lightness. “You’re not enough for her. You are standing here choosing fear you already know over the life you could have, the one she is actively trying to build with you.”
An ache hits me beneath the sternum.
He takes a long breath before he goes on.
“I never thought I’d find another couple like Mom and Dad.
I had started to believe that kind of love was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, something that didn’t happen twice in the same family.
Then I watched you and Violet together, and I thought, damn I was wrong. Miracles do happen more than once.”
Beneath his frustration, I recognize grief. As always, my brother mirrors the emotions I press deeper and deeper inside myself. Right now, I am both irritated and grateful for him in equal measure.
“You told me you felt like a coward the night you didn’t walk into that restaurant. And then life gave you a second chance with her. Don’t waste it, Ro. If you let this fear win again, life might not be generous enough to offer you a third.”
He holds my gaze, and this time I don’t look at him like I’m at the end of my frustration. For once, my insides don’t squirm in resistance.
“Your happiness is entirely in your own hands right now. Every single person who loves you is rooting for you—except you.”
My brother turns around and leaves, giving me no chance to respond, not that I had anything left to say.
I place the last piece of bread in front of Echo’s mouth, and he gobbles it without hesitation. It’s humbling to watch him act like any other dog. How can a creature who has known so much pain still open himself up to trust and love?
I set the empty plate onto the coffee table and pull him closer, before drawing the blanket over both of us.
This has been our ritual every evening since Violet left—Echo and I on the porch, the night air cold around us, my parents’ house visible just across the way, where she is right now.
Close enough to see. Far enough to feel like a different world entirely.
Until today, I told myself I was sitting here waiting for her to leave. But tonight Archer’s words won’t leave me alone.
There is a girl waiting for you…
What if she isn’t waiting to leave? What if she is simply… waiting?
After dinner, I usually take Echo inside, back to the bedroom. The solarium has been off-limits since the night she left. Too much of her lives in that room. The plants she watered. The couch where she curled against me. The glass walls that held all her brightness and laughs.
But tonight, knowing she is just across the dark, sleeping in my childhood bedroom, in the bed I slept in before I became the version of myself I’m not sure I like right now, I feel a closeness to her.
You know she needs you.
I don’t say the words out loud, simply run my hands against Echo’s fur, but he seems to hear them anyway.
The irony of us isn’t lost on me. A blind dog and a selectively mute owner.
Echo nudges his head against my shoulder in response, as if correcting me. She doesn’t just need me. She needs both of us.
I tip my head back and stare at the ceiling.
Her last words have been living in my chest, taking up space, refusing to be quieted.
“You can fight against our love all you want, Rowan. But I’m fighting for it.”
My eyes close as the ache behind my eyes returns. I genuinely never imagined that a day would come when someone would be standing at the door of my life, wanting in, fighting to stay, and the only thing keeping her out would be me.
I know Violet. I have loved her through screens and anonymity and then the extraordinary months that followed. I know she will give up everything she has for us.
But what happens in a few years, when she realizes that what she gave up wasn’t worth it?
When she wants someone who can claim her in public, not through a phone screen or a brother’s voice, but in his own words? Someone who can walk into a crowded room and reach for her hand without counting the cost of it.
That is what she deserves.
Violet was never made for the shadows.
She was made for the light, while I have spent my whole life learning to live without it.
I don’t know when I fell asleep. But the moment my eyes open, I know something is wrong. I sit up and turn the light on. The pale glow immediately spills across every corner of the porch.
It’s raining heavily and Echo isn’t here.
I turn toward the door and then remember that I closed it when we came outside, to keep the warmth in. I look under the couch, behind the plants, along every inch of the porch. It doesn’t take long, as there isn’t much space.
Where is he?
My heart lurches sideways. It’s dark, but it’s always dark for Echo.
I step off the porch.
The cold hits me immediately—the temperature and the memories of it that live in my body. A shiver moves through me, and then a sharp, familiar pain pulses against my throat, and for one terrible second, I am not standing in my garden in the rain.
I press my hands hard against my eyes. When I open them, I force myself to look.
One of the solar lights has toppled, probably knocked over by the wind. When I move to right it, I notice the small paw prints pressed into the grass beneath the porch’s overhang, sheltered just enough from the rain to still be visible.
What was Echo doing here?
I run the perimeter of the house, searching for more. But the rain has been thorough—whatever trail there was has been washed clean.
I stop in the middle of the garden and turn in a slow circle, the rain coming down hard around me, and I have no idea which direction to choose.
Then I hear it, that soft whimper that comes from Echo’s debarked vocal chords. This time, it’s coming from the forest.
Fuck.
I run, following the sound, crashing through the undergrowth, calling his name in my head, and then the sound stops like the forest has swallowed it whole.
There is nothing left but rain and dark and the distant, rolling boom of thunder.
My entire body seizes, and just like that, without warning, I am no longer here.
I am eight years old. I am on the ground somewhere in the cold and the wet and the dark.
I am so frightened that it feels easier to pray for death so this pain, this burn against my throat, will be over.
I feel too small in my too large, too loud, and too powerful surroundings, shaking so hard my teeth knock together.
Lying against the wet, dirty grass, I wonder if anyone is coming. I wonder if I am worth coming for.
My knees hit the wet ground.
My hand flies to my throat and to the scar that lives there, invisible to everyone but as real to my fingers as it was the night it was made.
There is nothing there, and yet the pain arrives, old and loyal, and the tears come with it, rolling down my face and dissolving into the rain before they can even be named.
I can feel myself being pulled under, the past rising up the way it always does in the cold and the dark. But before I fully lose it, I hear another whimper.
Echo.
I surface.
I am not hurt today. I am not broken today. I am not weak today.
I repeat the words like a rhythm, my eyes still streaming as they scan the darkness around me.
I am strong.
Today, life has given me the chance to save someone the way I once needed to be saved. And I am not going to waste it.
I drag a breath in, cold and sharp and clean, and push it back out slowly. I try to call his name but nothing comes out.
Echo. Echo. Echo.
The words ring in my head, but I only wheeze.
Fuck.
My hands curl into fists against my trackpants before instinct takes over and I reach for my phone.
My phone. Thank God.
I don't think before hitting play on one of the videos I’ve been watching on loop these past days. Violet's beautiful face fills the screen as she calls Echo's name, her voice bright and warm.
“Echo, my good boy,” Violet says in an excited voice and truth settles in me, certain and undeniable — we need her. Echo and I both.
I let the video play on repeat, her voice cutting through the rain and the dark, giving me something to hold onto as I try to save someone else.
Echo makes another sound, and I find him trapped between two fallen branches.
I clear the path and he’s shivering hard.
Without thinking, I pull my hoodie off and wrap it around his small body, tucking him against me.
He doesn’t stop shivering but curls into me.
When he finally lets out a breath, something in me breaks open completely.
The tears fall freely now, mixing with the rain, and I don’t try to stop them.
For the first time, despite the fear, despite the cold, despite everything the night dragged up from the places I keep most locked, I feel the foreign sensation of… pride moving through grief.
I’ve never felt this feeling when my company has won awards, when I’ve been given titles that I have spent years feeling like a fraud for receiving.
But I feel true pride today, in getting up off the wet ground, in calling his name out loud, in holding him close when every part of me wanted to collapse.
I close my eyes and hold Echo closer, and every moment floods back at once.
My parents’ faces at every milestone, every proud smile I received and quietly filed away as evidence of their delusion rather than proof of my worth. Every accolade I accepted while the voice in my head tallied all the reasons I didn’t deserve it.
When did this start?
When did I decide that I was the one thing in my own life not worth fighting for?
This feeling of self-erasure, that I have protected and justified for so long, has taken so much from me already, and I’m going to let it take Violet too.
How did I become so willing to give up the best thing that has ever happened to me?
The one person who looked at every part of me—my silence, my scars, the careful distances I keep—and decided, without hesitation, that I was worth staying for.
Echo shifts against my chest, and I press my face into his damp fur.
Not anymore.