Chapter 29
I hadn’t planned to stay the night.
I told myself I was just dropping by—that I needed comfort, clarity, a place to breathe.
But when my mother offered to make up my old bed, I didn’t say no.
When she handed me a pair of clean pajamas folded with a lavender sachet tucked inside, I nodded like I was twelve again.
And when I curled up beneath the same quilt I’d had in high school, the weight of it felt like permission to stop pretending I was okay.
I didn’t have the strength to go home to my townhouse. Not after watching the pieces of my life splinter like glass.
So, I stayed.
I didn’t answer Ronan’s calls. I didn’t read his messages.
They came in waves throughout the evening, each vibration of my phone like a reminder of everything I couldn’t make sense of.
I left the phone facedown on the dresser, trying to pretend none of it existed.
That I wasn’t unraveling. That the ache in my chest wasn’t the sound of something breaking open inside me.
The truth was, I didn’t trust myself to respond.
Not when the pain still felt fresh. Not when my hands still remembered the trembling woman on the video floor, or the cracked soil of my family’s failing legacy.
So, I lay there.
In my childhood bed.
In the quiet of the house that raised me.
Surrounded by the familiar creak of the floorboards, the distant hum of the ceiling fan, the soft scent of magnolia drifting through the open window.
And eventually, I drifted.
But what came next wasn’t rest.
It was a nightmare.
Worse than any I’d ever had.
Because it didn’t feel like a dream.
It felt like a warning.
It started the same way the video had. Static. Cold tile. My body—curled, broken, too still. It wasn’t the woman I’d seen.
It was me.
I knew it in the way my ribs ached. In the tightness of my jaw. In the blood pooling beside me, warm and thick and real.
I was crying. Not sobbing. Not even moving.
Just breathing.
Barely.
My fingers twitched like they wanted to claw the floor. Like they knew I was supposed to get up. Fight. Run.
But my body didn’t listen.
I just lay there. Waiting.
And then I heard it—the quiet shift of boots on tile .
Ronan.
I couldn’t see his face. Just the black laces. The shadow of his legs.
He didn’t speak.
Didn’t kneel.
Didn’t touch me.
Just stood there. Watching.
Judging.
Ending me.
I tried to scream, but my mouth wouldn’t open.
Worse than the fear was the betrayal. I hadn’t even wanted him in the beginning—not really.
I’d been curious, maybe. Reckless, definitely.
But I’d never intended to fall this hard, this fast. Ronan had pulled me in with careful hands and quiet power, with the way he saw me, listened to me, held me like I was made of something worth protecting.
And damn him—he had made me believe it. Believe in him. In us.
He’d opened a door to something I didn’t even know I wanted—something that felt like devotion, like permanence.
And I had walked through it willingly. Trusting him.
Trusting the fantasy he’d spun with every look, every touch, every low-spoken promise.
He had given me tenderness and worship and control disguised as care, and I had mistaken it for love.
I had thought I was safe with him.
But now I knew better.
Now I’d seen the truth. The archive of women. The blood. The violence. He was too dangerous. Too practiced. Too precise in the way he gave and took. And no matter what I felt for him, no matter how much I ached to believe I was different, I couldn’t ignore what he’d done.
What he’d hidden .
And how easily I could become just another ending.
Another Lady.
I couldn’t unsee it.
Couldn’t unknow it.
These realizations crashed into me in my dream, the anguish all consuming.
And then suddenly, everything changed.
The floor dropped. The tiles cracked apart. My body dissolved into smoke.
Then, I was outside.
At the nursery.
Except it wasn’t the nursery anymore.
It was a graveyard.
Of plants. Of dreams. Of everything my parents had ever built.
The trees were skeletal. Gnarled, blackened things with weeping bark and brittle limbs. Rows of planters sat overturned, the soil inside them gray and ash-like. The greenhouse had collapsed in on itself, jagged glass glinting like shards of ice.
There were no sounds. No birds. No breeze. Just this sickening silence—thick and wrong and final.
Then I saw my parents.
On their knees in the dirt.
Digging.
Desperate.
Bleeding.
Their hands were raw, fingers split and caked with mud as they clawed at the roots of something long dead. My mother was sobbing—loud, broken cries that echoed through the empty trees. My father beat the ground with his fists, shouting words I couldn’t hear.
I tried to run to them. To scream.
But I was frozen .
Useless.
I watched it all like I was trapped behind glass, banging my fists on the walls of my own mind.
I screamed?—
And woke up gasping.
The scream ripped out of me before I could stop it. A raw, choked sound that left my throat burning. I bolted upright in bed, the quilt tangled around my legs, my entire body slick with sweat.
It was dark.
Still.
It felt like a horror movie, at the part just before everything goes wrong.
I pressed my hands to my face, trying to catch my breath.
My chest heaved.
Tears came before I could stop them.
Hot. Messy. Relentless.
Because that dream—it wasn’t random. It wasn’t just fear or stress or my subconscious trying to process the mess.
It was truth.
Truth twisted into metaphor. Pain dressed up as prophecy.
I could become her.
The woman on the floor. The one who begged with her breath. Who bled silently into tile while he walked away.
And the nursery? It wasn’t just dying—it was already dead. My parents had been digging its grave with every missed payment, every silent plea.
I was losing everything.
Ronan.
My sense of self .
My anchor.
My past.
I hugged my knees to my chest and let the grief pull me under.
Because this wasn’t just about a man I couldn’t trust.
It was about a life that no longer made sense.
It was about realizing I didn’t know how to protect the people I loved. That I couldn’t stop what was already in motion. That I might be the one who walked straight into her own ruin, eyes wide open.
And worse?
I’d asked for it.
I’d wanted it.
Craved it.
Begged for it.
Now all I had left was a bruised heart, a dying nursery, and the echo of Ronan’s voice in my head telling me he’d never hurt me.
But he had.
Not with fists.
Not with lies.
But with omissions.
With silences.
With the truths he’d buried in folders named Lady.
I wiped my eyes, but it didn’t help.
Because I couldn’t unsee any of it.
Couldn’t unknow what I knew now.
And I had no idea what the hell to do with that.
I reached for my phone, my fingers trembling, breath still ragged from the nightmare. Four missed calls. A stream of unread messages from Ronan, each one a silent echo of a life I wasn’t sure I belonged in anymore.
I didn’t open them .
Instead, I went to my contacts and tapped a different name.
Trevor.
He picked up on the second ring. “Zara?”
His voice was groggy. Concerned. Familiar in a way that made my throat close up.
“Hi,” I whispered. “Sorry—it’s late. I know.”
“Are you okay?” He was fully awake now. “What happened?”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead. “I just … I needed to talk to someone. Can you come get me?”
A pause. “Where are you?”
“My parents’ house.”
Another pause, heavier this time. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’ll be there in twenty.”
“Thanks.”
I ended the call before I could second-guess it. Then I climbed out of bed, my body aching like I’d actually lived the nightmare.
The bathroom light was too bright. I squinted at myself in the mirror, startled by the reflection—red eyes, pale skin, hair sticking to my temples with sweat. I splashed cold water on my face, scrubbed my teeth like it might erase the taste of fear, and pulled yesterday’s clothes back on.
I wrote a note to my parents on the back of a grocery list, the words short and vague—just enough to keep them from worrying.
Then I slipped out the back door.
The air outside was thick and quiet, the kind of quiet that made you feel like the world was holding its breath. I stood at the end of the gravel drive, arms wrapped tight around myself, staring out at the dark rows of the nursery I used to know.
My mother had said they were losing everything. She hadn’t told me they already had.
The porch light flicked on behind me, but I didn’t turn back.
When Trevor’s headlights finally cut through the dark, I blinked hard and straightened.
The car rolled to a stop. The passenger door clicked open.
I climbed in.
Trevor didn’t say anything at first. Just pulled back onto the road, hands steady on the wheel. He smelled like clean laundry and old coffee. The dashboard glowed soft blue, casting shadows across his face.
“You look like hell,” he said quietly.
“I feel worse.”
He nodded. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
I stared out the window at the marsh slipping past in streaks of silver and black.
“My parents are losing the nursery,” I said softly. The words felt too small for the truth of them. “The house, too. Everything.”
Trevor blinked, his hands tightening on the wheel. “Wait—what?”
“They didn’t tell me. They didn’t want me to worry, I guess. Thought they’d fix it before I ever found out.” I let out a bitter laugh that didn’t feel like mine. “But it’s bad, Trevor. Like, years-of-debt, no-way-out, everything’s-dying bad.”
He exhaled hard through his nose, and I saw the hurt flash across his face. “Zara, I’m so sorry.”
“You remember what that place meant to them, right? To me?” My voice cracked.
“I grew up there. Every damn inch of that nursery is part of me. I used to spend hours in the greenhouse, labeling seedlings, pretending I was in some secret garden. My mom taught me to prune roses before I could tie my shoes. My dad let me ride around on the flatbed when I was barely big enough to hold on. That place was their life. It was ours.”
Trevor’s jaw clenched. “I know.”
“It’s not just a business, it’s—it’s who they are. And now it’s rotting. Literally. I saw it with my own eyes. Cracked pots, dead trees, weeds taking over everything. It’s sad.”
His voice was gentle. “They should’ve told you.”
“I think they were trying to protect me. But all it did was make me feel useless. Like I should’ve seen it.
Like maybe if I hadn’t been so caught up in my own mess—” I broke off, shaking my head.
“I feel like I failed them. Like I’m watching everything I love fall apart and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. ”
Trevor didn’t speak right away. Just reached over and placed his hand lightly over mine, a quiet gesture that didn’t ask for anything, just offered presence.
“You didn’t fail them,” he said. “You’re just one person. And you’ve always carried too much.”
A lump rose in my throat.
“They were always so proud of you,” he added. “Your parents used to talk about your articles to anyone who’d listen. They had your column clipped and taped to the side of the cash register. You think you were gone, but you were always part of that nursery, Zara. Always.”
Tears pricked my eyes. “I just wish I could fix it.”
“I know you do.” He squeezed my hand.
I stared back out at the marsh, the weight in my chest as heavy as the darkness outside .
And then?—
“I think I’m in love with someone I can’t trust.”
Trevor didn’t flinch. Didn’t gloat. Just kept driving.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” I said. “I didn’t even want it.”
“But it happened.”
“Yeah.” My voice cracked. “And now with that plus the nursery … I don’t know who I am anymore.”
We didn’t speak for a long time. Just the sound of tires on asphalt, the faint hum of the engine, the pull of two people suspended in a moment too fragile to touch.
But I felt something shift in me—something small and desperate and still alive.
Because maybe, if I could talk to Trevor—really talk—then I could remember who I was before all of this. Before Ronan. Before secrets and folders and blood on the tile.
Maybe I could remember how to be normal again.
Even if it meant starting over.
Even if it meant leaving Ronan behind.