Chapter 36 #2
“Like?”
She let her hands slip from mine and gave a small shrug. “Well, for starters, you need to know this wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything to deserve what happened.”
I nodded. “I think… I’m slowly figuring that out.”
“Good.” Her smile curled as her palms ran down my arm. “And don’t be afraid of the bad days. You might feel like one bad moment can knock away all the progress you’ve made, but it doesn’t. It’s still there. Your body and mind just need time to heal. Setbacks are normal.”
“What about… permanent setbacks?” I asked quietly.
“You mean the painting thing?”
I nodded.
She let her smile soften. “Marcus told me about it. From what he said, you were getting better, right?”
My head dropped. “I was. Now it feels like I’m back at square one.”
She shook her head. “You feel that way because deep down, some part of you thinks you should feel guilty for moving on.”
My brows furrowed, and she kept going.
“I did the same thing—but with the people in my life.”
If her chuckle was sunlight, then her sighs were winter blizzards. Her expression grew distant, touched with sadness, like a storm cloud had made a home above her head.
“There was this one time, a few months after what Javi did, when I caught myself laughing. Just… laughing, at something completely stupid with one of my friends. And it hit me—I was moving on. And back then, I confused moving on with forgetting. So I sabotaged myself for months. I felt guilty for continuing my life, for feeling joy when something awful had happened to me. I stopped talking to my friends. My family. I hibernated in my apartment. I moved to a different country. I did everything I could to get away from my normal because I thought that was the only way I could protect myself.”
She sucked in a breath. “It sounds stupid. Because it was. But my head was so foggy back then, nothing ever made sense.”
She paused, her voice quieter now.
“But the point is… painting takes you back to when things felt normal. And right now, some part of your brain is telling you that’s a bad thing. That remembering what peace feels like is wrong. But it’s not.”
She looked at me for a long moment, like she was waiting to see if it landed, if it clicked. And it did. Maybe not all at once, but enough for something to stir in my chest.
“I want to paint again,” I admitted, voice barely a whisper. “But every time I sit down, I freeze. It’s like… I’m not allowed to feel okay.”
Lana nodded. “Yeah, because something in you thinks you have to prove how broken you are. That if you start to feel even a little bit whole again, it means what happened wasn’t that bad. But it was. And healing doesn’t erase that.”
My throat tightened. “But what if I’m never the same again?”
“You won’t be,” she said gently. “And you’re not supposed to be. But different doesn’t mean worse.”
I blinked at her, silent.
She gave me a small smile. “You’re allowed to evolve, okay? Pain changes us, yes. But so does strength. And love. And art.”
I swallowed hard.
“I think…” She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “I think part of you is scared that if you paint, and it feels good, you’ll forget what happened. Or worse, you’ll start to feel like it didn’t matter. But it did. It always will. You just don’t have to live there forever.”
That was what it felt like. Like I’d built a house inside the worst moment of my life and couldn’t find the door out.
“I hate that it still controls me,” I whispered.
“It won’t forever. Not if you keep choosing to push through the fear. Not if you keep choosing you.”
Her words cracked something open in me. Not enough to break, but enough to let a little light in.
“I miss who I used to be,” I admitted, my mind wandering back to before November.
Lana reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, warm fingers brushing my temple. “Me too. But I’ve also learned to love the version of me that came after. The one who survived.”
I nodded, and a tear slipped down my cheek.
“You’re going to be okay, Cora,” she said softly. “Not overnight… but eventually. You just have to stop expecting yourself to be okay already.”
I looked down at my hands. They didn’t feel steady. But maybe they didn’t need to be. Not yet. Not always.
“I think I thought I was supposed to be okay by now,” I admitted. “Like the worst part happened, and now the rest should just be… better.”
Lana smiled softly, with something like understanding behind her eyes. “People love a happy ending. They love tying everything up in a neat little bow, like once you’ve survived the big thing, that’s it. Conflict over. Life fixed.”
She paused. “But that’s not real. Not really. Life doesn’t stop giving you peaks and valleys just because you’ve already been through one.”
I let her words sink in, feeling them ripple somewhere deep.
And I realised… that was it.
That was the truth no one wanted to talk about. That I didn’t want to talk about. That healing wasn’t a finish line. That survival didn’t promise ease. That some chapters didn’t end with clarity, but with continuing.
It meant not needing to be okay forever—just being willing to keep going when I wasn’t.
I glanced over at her, a small smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. “Marcus was right about you,” I said quietly. “You are smart.”
Lana smirked, her expression softening. “And he was right about you, too.”
“Me?”
She nodded. “He said to not be surprised if you resist at first. Said you have good shields.”
I looked down, her words sitting warm in my chest.
To be loved is to be known.
My mum was right about that.