Summer of Our True Colours

Prologue

Phoebe

“ I love you,” he said, waving the explicit photograph of him with another woman around. “This? It means nothing.”

The words fell from him with ease, like always.

My boyfriend had no regard for my feelings or the damage he’d caused, and he never would.

The only thing he cared about were the games he played.

Games I’d grown tired of. Games that always ended with me being the injured party whether I’d agreed to play or not.

Even now, he expected me to fight to hold onto him.

Instead, I turned and walked out of his bedroom, the visuals of another woman on top of him pulsating through my mind like a painful sore I couldn’t ease.

“Woah, woah, woah! Phoebe, wait! There’s no need to overreact,” he called out, chasing after me as I charged down the staircase of his home.

I came to an abrupt stop halfway down and glanced over my shoulder at him, unable to believe the man I'd spent the last three years with was trying to make me feel like the unreasonable party here, despite the solid piece of evidence in his grip.

Evidence he'd felt comfortable enough to keep in his nightstand.

As though having it next to his bed, which I'd shared with him only last night, brought an extra layer of enticing danger to this already messed-up game he’d been playing without my consent.

“You believe me, don't you?” he asked, taking a step down to me, moving into a comfort zone he relished, where he thought he could force me to submit. “Babe?”

“Who is she?” I said through gritted teeth.

“Who is who?”

“Don't do that, Rob. Treating me as though I'm stupid is almost as much of a betrayal as realising you’ve been fucking another woman and keeping pictures of her riding your dick in your nightstand.”

“Phoebe!” he scolded. My boyfriend of too many wasted years had always hated women using curse words.

Rob liked his ladies to be ladies. Polite.

Unassuming. All those things by day, then a vixen by night.

He had his rules, and he made sure they were obeyed by all those around him whether they were ready to acquiesce or not.

I’d submitted to this fool for long enough.

“Who is she?” I repeated, my teeth grinding together.

“What does it matter who she is?”

“It doesn’t.” I shrugged. “I'm just hoping she at least matters enough for you to choose her over us. It's one thing to cheat on me with someone who may actually mean something to you one day. It's another to do it with someone whose name you don't even remember.”

“Babe, come on.” He reached out to touch my arm, but I dodged his attempt at affection, and his sigh of frustration filled the air.

“You know you’ve always been more of a take it slow kinda girl while I’ve been the guy who chases storms. I don’t know why you’re acting like this is such an issue when it doesn’t need to be. ”

“You can hear the words coming out of your mouth, right?” If I hadn’t had so much anger tearing through me, I’d have laughed at his audacity. “You’re out of your goddamn mind.”

“We can get past this. We can get back to being us.”

“You think there's an ‘ us’ after this? You really believe I think so little of myself to allow you to ever come near me again or continue this... this... joke of a relationship we were apparently in, don’t you?”

“Were?” He scowled. “You’re going to make me pay for a drunken mistake? We're young?—”

“We’re twenty-three, Rob! We’re not kids.”

“We don’t have kids, either, and it’s not like we’re married. Jeez. These things happen at our age. Better now than in ten years’ time, don’t you think?”

“Wow.” I shook my head, unable to recognise him anymore. “I guess congratulations are in order.”

“For what?”

“You sound just like your father.”

That was all it took. Six words spoken freely for his jaw to set and his eyes to narrow like I’d been the one to cheat here. “You'd better be careful what you say,” he warned.

“Or else? What's your next surprise, Rob? A slap to the face? Wasn’t that your father’s go-to move, too?”

The muscles in his jaw twitched, and his nostrils flared. “You're emotional, I get it, but don't push me too far, Phoebe.”

“Emotional.” I huffed out a humourless laugh.

Standing up for myself didn't come as naturally to me as it did to most, and the man in front of me had used that to his advantage one time too many.

He knew the things I'd witnessed in my own home. He knew the arguments I ran from daily and how I’d spent my life diffusing wars between my feuding parents and being the ever-doting people pleaser to those I loved.

Which was why him doing this to me after so long together hurt more than I cared to admit.

His betrayal turned out to be the final nail in my formerly weak-arse coffin.

I took a step closer to him until no room remained between us, my chin raised. “I'm not emotional, Rob… but I am done with you.” I searched his eyes, watching the scepticism shine back at me.

He didn't believe I had the strength to walk away.

Not from the Rob O'Connor, the guy everyone wanted a piece of around here, who had, for some reason, chosen good old dependable Phoebe Turner to climb into his bed every night for the last three years. He’d always been as handsome as he was charming, and the world fell at his feet whenever he demanded it to do so.

For someone to defy him, to rebel against him, seemed a ludicrous notion to his self-absorbed, ridiculously spoilt ego.

“You don't know what you're saying,” he said softly, reaching up to brush some hair from my face, but I swatted him away like a nuisance fly.

“I know exactly what I’m saying. We’re over. Goodbye, Rob.”

On shaking legs, I turned to walk away, my heart beating wildly despite the way he'd just broken it so easily, but I didn't make it far before he gripped my upper arm and spun me back around to face him.

Big, green eyes stared down into my soul like they'd done so many times before when we'd been making love or spending the nights whiling away in his room, sharing secrets, stories, and our dreams of the future.

When I stared back at him now, though, I no longer saw the man I'd spent three years—over one thousand days—with.

All I saw was that photograph still fisted in his hand.

The look on his face when he'd let another woman ride him.

The thrill in his eyes, and how I hadn't been occupying a single thought in his head in that traitorous moment.

I’d been his safety net. She’d been his adventure.

I refused to be that for anyone anymore.

“If you walk out that door now, Phoebe, I swear to God, there's no running back to me once you've calmed down.

There'll be nothing left of us once you've realised how irrational you're being. All you’ll have are the memories, because no one walks away from me and gets a second chance. You know that. You've always known it.”

“Rob,” I said calmly, leaning closer. “I don't even want the memories anymore, never mind you.”

The stunned look on his face could have won me an array of worldwide photography awards if I’d had the time to whip out my phone and capture it, but I needed no reminders of this coward’s face now.

With nothing left to say, I tore my arm out of his grip and gave him one last lingering look of disgust before I walked away and never looked back.

I didn't let a single tear fall as I ran out of his home on feet that felt incapable of carrying me as far as I needed to go. I’d become so good at keeping my emotions in check over the years, of burying everything down and living my life according to the needs of others, I often worried I’d lost the ability to cry at all.

It wasn’t until I turned the corner at the end of his street and pulled out my phone that I let the reality of my life wash over me.

There were too many things going wrong now. So many uncertainties and what-ifs that made my future too foggy to see any kind of path or light up ahead. Rob had been my one constant, even with his faults, and now I didn’t even have him to lean on because he’d chosen himself over a life by my side.

With a thud, I let my back fall against the red-bricked wall of whatever building I stood outside of, and I sucked in a deep breath, only to let it all pour back out again a second later.

“Breathe,” I told myself quietly, pulling the phone up in front of me again as I hit call on the name of the one person I needed more than ever right now and brought the phone to my ear.

“Phoebe?” my best friend answered in a panic. “How did it go? Do you need help burying the body?”

“Bailey, he...” I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the brick. “I was right. He… He…”

“Oh, honey. You sound broken.”

“Not broken. Just… glitching right now.” I sighed heavily, the weight of everything pressing down on my chest, making me feel like I was suffocating.

“How did you get him to confess?”

“I didn’t need to. The evidence was pretty damning.”

“There’s evi dence?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I forced out, unwilling to relive that raw moment right now while still trying to process what the hell had happened within the last thirty minutes.

“Okay. What can I do to help, then?”

With another exhale, I opened my eyes and glanced around the streets I’d grown up in, a foreigner now, trapped in a world that should have felt familiar but felt as alien as Rob.

The world spun on its axis, and all I could think about was escaping—me, the twenty-three-year-old woman who never ventured outside of our little town of Matlock.

Now, I had no choice. I had to get away.

From him.

Them.

Everybody.

“You could take me away from this place,” I offered quietly, a new itch clawing at my skin, telling me to run, run, run, run, run . “Please, Bailey. I can't be here anymore.”

“Away?” I imagined her frown—somehow heard it in her tone of voice. “To where?”

“I don't care. As long as men like Rob don't exist there. As long as men don’t exist there at all.”