Chapter 41
It had been a week since Brody and I camped out on my stretch of land, since the firelight and the almost-kisses that still lingered on my skin like a promise.
Early May had arrived with warmth you wanted to cling to, the days started to stretch, and the evenings were cool with grass damp against bare feet.
Clara and I sat on the porch, lemonade sweating in tall glasses, the hum of life buzzing from the tree line. The screen door creaked every time the breeze shifted, and for once, neither of us was rushing off to something.
“You know,” Clara said quietly, tracing her finger around the rim of her glass, “if you hadn’t believed him… If you hadn’t believed him when I didn’t… I would have left Mason. I was ready to walk away. I would be divorced right now.”
I stared at her, throat tight, heart caught between guilt and something else I couldn’t name. “Clara...”
She shook her head, eyes bright but steady.
“I don’t mean it to hurt you by bringing this up, because I know you still hold some odd sense of guilt or anxiety.
I just… I need you to know. Your belief…
it gave me enough cause to fight for him.
To fight for us. I didn’t see what you saw.
I didn’t want to. But you did. I couldn't see past the hurt. But you gave him a chance, and you helped him. Helped us... I... we owe you so much, Cass.”
I exhaled hard, trying to find levity, trying to breathe through the sting. “Well… my belief in men has to pay off sometime, right?”
Clara let out a wet laugh, nudging her shoulder into mine. “Oh my god, Cassidy.”
For a moment, it was quiet. The smell of cut grass drifted from a neighbouring yard. Jackson’s laughter carried faintly through the open windows inside.
Clara shifted, eyes turning serious again. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“After you found out… after you knew he was married… why did you stay?”
The question knocked the air from me. I stared out at the yard, at the fading streaks of pink in the sky, at anything but her eyes.
“It’s a lot of things,” I admitted slowly.
“He manipulated me. He always knew exactly when to pull me back in. The promises, the apologies, the big sweeping gestures, they made me believe, or maybe they made me want to believe. I was desperate to think it was love. That it was real. That I wasn’t just…
being used. That I wasn't this horrible thing.”
The words scraped coming out, but once they started, I couldn’t stop.
“I tried to leave. So many times. But every time, he reeled me back in. And maybe… maybe I had to see it for what it really was before I could finally walk away. Maybe I needed it to break completely. I was so in it. I was blinded by what I thought we could be. I loved him, Clara. And he played me perfectly.”
Her hand covered mine, squeezing. “I hate him for that.”
“I hate myself for letting him.”
“Don’t,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you dare. You were lied to, manipulated, and cornered. That isn’t love, Cass. It’s control.”
Tears pricked my eyes, but I blinked them back.
Clara softened, thumb brushing over my knuckles. “So… what’s going on with Brody?”
A laugh bubbled out of me, fragile but real. “Wow, we are covering all emotional bases today on porch talk time." I took a deep breath and continued. "Honestly? I don’t know.”
Clara arched a brow.
I shook my head, smiling despite myself. “We’ve been spending time together. Camping, helping Adam, talking. And… he wants to go again. Camping. On the property I bought to build on. Said I should see how the sun sets and rises in different spots before I decide where to build.”
Clara smirked. “That sounds suspiciously like dating.”
“It’s not,” I protested, heat creeping up my neck. “I mean… I don’t think it is. We’re just… us. We’ve always been us. The Palmers have always treated us like family.”
Clara gave me a soft smile, "They have, but they all treat you and look at you differently."
I took a sip of my lemonade, and she continued.
"Adam has always treated you as a little sister.
Maybe not so much now with the overt flirting, but I think that has more to do with making you feel like you again or messing with Brody.
Judy and Dean have always treated you as a daughter.
Brody... Now, Brody has always been respectful, thanks to our family's relationship and the age difference that came with growing up. But the way he looks at you..."
"How does he look at me?" I almost whispered, my eyes locked on hers.
She gave me a smile that only your big sister can give, "Like he's been waiting a long time for you."
I sucked in a breath. That couldn't be true, could it?
I tried to push the idea away. I was too broken, Brody couldn't want me like that.
.. But then the image of his eyes in firelight, the brush of his hand against mine, how it felt to be held in his arms, the steady way he said before now replayed in my chest, warm and steady.
Clara tilted her head, studying me like she could see through all my denials. “Do you want my advice?”
“Always.” I breathed.
She grinned softly. “Stop overthinking it. Brody’s not Andrew. He’s not anyone but Brody. Just… let yourself see what happens.”
Something in me relaxed at her words, though the ache of fear lingered.
Long after that conversation had ended, I fell asleep with Clara's words drifting through my mind.
Morning light came in soft and steady, like someone had left the day on low.
I made coffee and carried my laptop out to the picnic table in the backyard, because the house felt too full of other people’s opinions.
I set the laptop open and stared at a blinking cursor like it owed me an apology.
This was the chapter, this part of my story.
.. I had been circling it since I wrote the first one.
The part of my story I kept pushing to the back of the file because it simply would not stay quiet on the page.
In the book, it would be fiction, Maya and Jonah, not Cassidy and Andrew.
.. but my truth had to bleed for the fiction to live.
My fingers hovered. I tried clichés first. The usual writer’s ritual of coffee, a stretch, and a few safe sentences about the weather.
I tried to write around what he had done, about what he had almost done.
That lasted until the fourth paragraph when the quiet inside my skull gave way and the flashback arrived, abrupt and unwilling.
He was at my door. Not in the way he’d been the first time, warm and relaxed, a man bringing flowers and soft promises.
This was different. His eyes had been wrong.
I could feel the tension radiating off him.
I could still feel the fear in the moment when I realized what he was going to do to me, the smallness of my own body braced against the cold.
I told myself I would write it like a surgeon: clinical, distanced, controlled. But my hands betrayed me. They typed what my brain could not keep in a neat box.
Maya opened the door on a man she thought she knew.
He stepped into her apartment with something desperate in his jawline.
He moved with the slow certainty of someone used to doors opening for him.
She told him to leave. He told her she was his.
His hand found her wrist. The pressure came first, the force that said you will not choose for yourself tonight.
She jerked back. He pulled her forward. His mouth landed on hers like it was an order, a command. Her protest was swallowed by his hand.
Even typing those words, I felt the old, animalistic panic curl through me.
My breath came fast, my chest tight. I wrote about the smell of his jacket, the scraping of his shoe on the floor, the way his voice tried to make things small and tidy with sentences like you're overreacting and you don’t know what you’re saying.
I forced the scene to move as it had moved, no cinematic neatness, no hero music.
The moment that broke the air and made everything jagged again came exactly as it had: a sound that blurred into motion.
Brody’s shape knocking into the doorway like a fist. Andrew crashing through the table.
People shouting. The terrible bright sharpness of the world reasserting itself.
I pressed my palms flat to the table and let tears come.
They blurred the screen, and when I blinked them away, I realized that the thing I feared most was naming it, seeing it spelled out and true.
But the more I put down, the lighter the pain became.
It wasn't gone. It would not be “gone” for a long while.
But there was a difference between being a carried thing and being an owned thing.
As I wrote, as I turned the attack into sentences, it felt like I was taking it out of the dark and setting it on the table where it could be looked at.
There are details I excised because the point was not to make anyone gawk at the violence; the point was to make people understand the tremor that came after.
The way your hands shake when you try to button your jeans.
The way a favourite sweater smells like someone you don't want to remember.
The slow-burning humiliation that waddles up through your chest. I wrote those textures.
The loss of control. The betrayal that comes from a break in trust from someone you loved.
The replay that is always just below the surface.
The hollow feeling afterward, with people around you trying to stitch things back together as if that could erase the ugliness of what had happened.
I stopped and read what I’d written back to myself, because I wanted to make sure that I was not getting lost in revenge or self-pity. I wanted the pages to be honest, not pretty, because the truth is the most dangerous and most freeing thing to hand another person.
I typed past the part in which the men arrive; I typed the way I curled inward, the sweater pulled up to my mouth, the laughter of someone who’d already broken.
I wrote about Chase’s hands that were normally so steady, trembling, clumsy, desperate; about Mason and Brody and the impossible ordinary ferocity of people who love you.
I wrote about the sirens, the guilt that followed their lights like a second shadow, and the way the house smelled afterward.
When the story shifted into "after," I didn't soften it. I wrote the numbing quiet in the room, the way questions tumbled in and out of my hearing. I wrote the way my family looked at me, Dad’s jaw, Mom’s hands twisting in her lap, Clara in my bed with me, like when we were kids and I had a bad dream. I wrote the part that matters most: the community that didn’t abandon me, the people who put their hands on my shoulders and said, We see you.
By the time my fingers paused at the sentence that grounded the character's decision to speak up, my throat felt raw.
Like, instead of writing my truth, I had been shouting it.
The sun had moved, carving a new shadow across the table.
The backyard was warmer now. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked and a lawn mower droned.
Life, dense and monotonous and tender, kept existing around this quiet, seismic thing I had just slid into words.
I read what I had just written in one long breath. It was not perfect. It was not polished. It was exactly what it had to be.
On impulse, on a kind of quiet, audacious courage I didn't even know I had, I opened my email, found Marin's thread, and attached the file. The little cursor blinked like a heartbeat. My thumb hovered over the trackpad, and then I hit send.
There was no dramatic shaking of the sky. No angelic chorus. Just the small thud in my chest, the same one that had been there when Brody kissed the top of my head on my parents' lawn and the one that came when Clara squeezed my hand and said, We will get through this.
I stared at my laptop and with my hands gripping my knees.
A first draft completed is a kind of big deal.
It was for any book you write. But this one was so deeply personal.
It made me bring the worst thing I had to face and set it down and say, We won't let this live in the dark anymore.
Writing it didn't make it disappear, but it made it less of a burden to carry on my own.
I texted Clara a single line: Sent it. First draft is done.
Her reply came in seventeen seconds: I am so proud of you. Come in. We'll celebrate with sweets and stupid movies and no talking about anything hard unless you want to.
I laughed despite the tears on my cheeks. I backed up the document and closed my laptop, letting out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
I walked inside and right into Clara's arms.
Later, Brody would text to check in. Mom would call to ask if I needed anything. The day did not suddenly ease into perfection. Trauma doesn't come with a clean cut. But something inside me changed, a small, crooked tilt toward living rather than hiding.
That night, when I crawled into bed, the field I’d camped in with Brody waited behind my eyelids.
I imagined the meadow through the seasons, the house I wanted, the small library I would build with wood warmed by Brody's hands.
I felt tired, yes. But also a little less hollow.
I felt the soft, steady presence of people who were on my side.
As sleep took me, moments with Brody trickled through, like a blanket being tucked around me.
I let it hold me. Not because it fixed what had happened, but because, for the first time in a very long time, I had trusted my own voice enough to let it be heard.
I had sent it out into the world. And if that was a form of choosing myself, quiet, stubborn as a weed, then I would own that choice.
And maybe if I could trust my choices again, other choices wouldn't seem so scary.