LIES
In that instant, I instinctively pulled my hand away, and almost immediately, Dad jolted awake, his eyes wide with dread.
“What happened?” I rasped as if I’d been screaming into an endless void, no relief in sight.
I remembered Charlie, the game, the hunt… but yet, my mind faltered on the obstacle I never saw coming. Jake. The name burned fiercely in my mind, a silent, unspoken ache.
It all felt impossible—like the ground beneath me had cracked open.
“It’s okay, Annabelle,” Dad’s therapy voice floated soothingly through the chaos, gentle yet distant, trying to still the storm within me.
“You don’t have to try and remember everything right now. ” But tears kept falling, unstoppable.
“Anna,” Charlie snapped, her voice firm, pulling my gaze to her for a moment.
For the first time, I looked at her—really saw her.
Her hands wrapped in bandages, her arms bruised and scratched, her beautiful midnight hair, which seemed to go on forever—now cut short to chin-length, making her seem years older, more fragile.
Her face, marked with healing bruises, leaned heavily on a crutch as she stood before me.
“I’m so sorry, so, so sorry,” I whimpered, my words tumbling over each other in a blur of pain. I was a mess, tears streaming down my face, reaching out blindly as she slowly hobbled toward me.
Her arms wrapped around my shoulders in a gentle, comforting hug. “Shh. It’s okay,” she murmured, her voice wavering but her hold steady. “It was my fault for smoking there. We didn’t know.”
Through shaky, tear-streaked eyes, I looked at her—aching with truth I couldn’t voice. I knew deep down, that wasn’t entirely true. She had taken the blame for something I had caused, and that weight pressed down on my chest with unbearable force.
Charlie and I spent another relentless week in that sterile, cold hospital room, each day stretching endlessly into the next.
Her feet healed faster than anyone had dared hope, yet beneath her triumphant smile, I knew the truth—she would carry the weight of peripheral neuropathy forever, a silent reminder of our ordeal.
The doctors looked at her with a strange mix of relief and wonder, telling her she was fortunate to keep her feet after everything, but I saw the flicker of numbness in her eyes, like she was already processing a heavy loss she couldn’t quite understand.
She nodded, seemingly detached, like someone hearing the words but unable to truly grasp what they meant.
When they moved her closer to me, I felt a bittersweet comfort—her presence so near yet filled with a quiet ache of what was lost. Every day, she would sit by my side for hours—her voice gentle, her words tumbling about everything and nothing, as if whispering me back to life.
They say Charlie saved my life that day—snatching me from death’s grip with CPR, saving me from the cold floor of that warehouse.
But beneath that gratitude, I hid a darker truth—a secret I was too fragile to share, something wrong inside me that I hadn’t yet mustered the courage to confess.
The doctor’s figure appeared in the doorway, his face etched with seriousness, a heavy silence hanging in the air.
“Your CT results are back,” he announced.
Charlie moved to leave, instinctively reaching to comfort me, but I caught her hand, anchoring her still.
His voice then cut through the quiet, gravely and unyielding. “It showed enlarged lymph nodes.”
The room fell silent, Dad frowned.
Charlie looked at me with confusion morphing on her face, “Anna?”
Those words didn’t shock me, they made the lie simply impossible to keep.
“I already knew,” I uttered.
Dad turned slowly toward me, his face shadowed with worry.
Charlie froze, her eyes searching mine. “What do you mean?” she whispered, trembling with uncertainty.
I looked down at my hands, heavy with years of unspoken fears, and finally confessed, “I got the biopsy results three days before Halloween.”
Her breath hitched as she stared, helpless and confused.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she begged, voice cracking under the weight of her hurt.
I looked away, overwhelmed by pain and shame. “I wanted one normal night,” I finally admitted through tears, longing for a fleeting moment of peace amidst the chaos of our hidden fears.