Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
Cassandra
I’m sitting in the kitchen when Lola finally resurfaces from her cave, nursing a cup of coffee that has long since gone cold, but still I wrap my hands around it like the faint warmth can ground me, like the heat seeping through ceramic might hold the pieces of me together for just one more morning before I fracture again.
“Hey, Cass.” Her warm smile greets me, soft and sleepy, the kind of smile she’s only capable of before life claws at her.
“She’s finally alive.” I smile back, or something close to it.
“Can we talk?”
“If it’s not about your brother, sure.” I look up, meet her eyes, and force a breezy tone I don’t feel. “Anything else, Lola. Seriously. Ask me about politics or death or taxes. Just don’t say his name.”
“Well…” she starts, already walking towards me and sinking into the chair opposite, swallowed in a shirt I definitely don’t want context for. “I wasn’t going to talk about him but…”
“No. No, but. We don’t need to talk about him. The kiss was a mistake. Meeting him was a mistake. My girlish crush. A fucking mistake.”
Lola flinches.
She tucks her legs beneath her like she’s trying to make herself smaller, like she’s bracing for whatever comes next, and maybe she should, because she doesn’t drop it — not today.
“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” she says softly, eyes flicking to the chipped edge of the kitchen table, the one we’ve had since uni, the one full of burn marks and memories neither of us have the heart to sand down, “but he’s leaving. In thirty days.”
My stomach drops.
But I don’t blink.
I don’t breathe.
I just sip my cold coffee like she didn’t just carve open my chest and pour salt straight into the wound.
“Good,” I say, voice flat. “Hope the next girl he breaks is better at pretending it didn’t mean anything.”
“He’s being deployed again,” she adds. “It wasn’t his choice.”
I shrug, mechanical. Cold. Hollow. “Still leaving though, right?”
“Cass…” She reaches for my hand, but I pull away like it burns, like even her touch might be enough to unravel the veneer I’ve stitched across my skin.
“No. Don’t. You don’t get to tell me he’s going off to play war like that excuses anything. He doesn’t get to use duty as a reason for turning me into a fucking placeholder.”
Lola stares at me, jaw tight, shoulders tense in a way I recognise, a way that means she’s holding too many truths in her mouth and deciding whether to spit or swallow.
Then she says it — quiet, like softening it will make it hurt less.
“He was engaged once.”
Silence.
Everything inside me stills. The kitchen, the faint hum of the fridge, the traffic outside — all of it fades beneath the thundering stillness pressing against my ribs.
“Three years ago,” she continues. “Her name was Mia. They met in training. He loved her. Like… properly loved her.”
I stare at her.
At the face of the only person who’s ever really known me.
And I wonder if she realises what she’s doing — what she’s tearing open.
“She died.” Her voice cracks. “On his last tour. He watched it happen. Held her when she bled out. Said he didn’t even know which part of her he was trying to keep warm.”
My throat tightens.
But I don’t show it.
Not a flinch.
Not a flicker.
I force the lie into my voice like it’s a language I was raised on.
“Tragic. Still doesn’t explain the blonde.”
Lola exhales like she’s the one hurting. “Cass—”
“No,” I snap, sharper than I intend. “Don’t tell me he’s broken. I know what broken looks like. I look in the mirror every morning.”
She goes quiet.
And I hate it.
Because this is the part where I’m supposed to cry, supposed to let the truth leak through the cracks, supposed to admit that her brother shattered something delicate in me I didn’t even realise I had left.
Instead, I stand.
Pour what’s left of my coffee down the sink and watch it swirl the way thoughts do when you’re trying too hard to outrun them.
“Can we not do this?” I whisper. “Can we not act like he was anything but a mistake I let touch me?”
Lola watches me, eyes full of something between pity and guilt, and I swear that combination hurts more than his absence.
“Cass…”
“No,” I say again, softer this time, like the word itself is costing me something. “You want to know what I do want to talk about?”
She nods, cautious, bracing.
“My job.”
She blinks. “What about it?”
“I hate it.”
“You always have.”
“No. I mean I hate it in a way that’s starting to rot me, Lola. Like I can’t tell where the mask ends and I begin anymore. The hands. The eyes. The pretending. Every night I leave feeling dirtier than when I walked in.”
Her face softens. “Then quit.”
I let out a hollow laugh, brittle around the edges. “And do what? Get a degree I can’t afford? Start over when rent’s due next week?”
“You could stay here—”
“I can’t,” I say, cutting her off. “I can’t keep depending on you to be the one holding me up.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it again, and the weight of what I’m about to say presses against my ribs like a storm gathering.
But I say it anyway.
Because I have to.
“Two years ago, I applied to a volunteer medical programme.”
She freezes. “What?”
“It was a long shot. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t think I’d make it past the first cut. But last week…” I swallow. “I got the call.”
Lola goes still.
“They accepted me.”
“Cass—”
“I leave in two months,” I say quietly. “Training first. Then deployment. Field work. Disaster zones. Real shit. Not seedy bars and bunny ears and men who think their money buys my silence.”
Her hands shake.
And that’s when I see it.
The real Lola — not the sarcastic one, not the tough one, not the one who patches herself together with caffeine and excuses — but the girl who’s been my sister in every way that matters, the one who’s pulled me out of bathroom stalls when I couldn’t breathe, the one who gave me a home in a city that eats girls like us alive.
She looks… wrecked.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to jinx it.”
“You’re leaving.”
“I have to.”
“Cass—”
“No.” I force a smile — the one I put on when everything inside me is collapsing. “This is good. This is right. I don’t want to survive anymore, Lo. I want to matter.”
She nods.
But her eyes don’t agree.
And neither do mine.
Because now I have thirty days to forget the man who made me feel everything I swore I couldn’t.
And sixty until I leave the only place I’ve ever called home.
God help me — I don’t know which one will break me first.
She’s too quiet.
Lola never shuts up, but right now she’s blinking too fast, breathing too shallow, like she’s trying to hold something inside that’s fighting to break free.
“Lo?”
She looks up.
And her bottom lip trembles before she breaks.
“I can’t lose you too.”
The words hit like a punch to the ribs.
She shoves her coffee aside and pushes up from the chair like she can’t stay still in the centre of this moment. Her hands fist in her hair, pulling it back, pacing the length of the kitchen like there’s a bomb lodged beneath her sternum and she’s detonating in slow motion.
“You don’t get it,” she says, voice rising. “You don’t fucking get it, Cass.”
I don’t breathe.
She keeps going.
“I’ve spent the last five years living in fear I’d get that call. The one that tells me Dax stepped on something he shouldn’t have. That they couldn’t find enough of him to send home. That they folded a flag and handed it over with a story and a medal instead of a fucking brother.”
Her voice cracks, jagged and raw.
“I’ve had nightmares so loud they woke the neighbours. Nights where I sat in the hallway outside his old room just to feel close to him — because I didn’t know if I’d ever see his stupid face again.”
She turns to me, eyes wild and wet and broken.
“And now you’re telling me you’re going too? That you’re just going to pack up and throw yourself into danger zones like that won’t gut me?!”
Tears spill hot and fast.
I stand, because sitting feels wrong now, because I don’t know what to say, because what could I possibly say that wouldn’t feel like another wound?
“I thought I’d lost him,” she whispers. “But at least with you… at least you were safe. You were here.”
My throat burns.
“I need you here, Cass. I need one fucking person in my life who isn’t a heartbeat away from disappearing.”
Silence.
Only her breathing — too fast, too loud, too full of fear.
I move to her slowly. Wrap my arms around her even though my own hands are trembling. And for the first time in a long time, I’m the solid one.
“I’m not dying, Lola.”
“But you could.”
“So could anyone. So could you.”
“That’s not the same and you know it,” she whispers into my shoulder. “Don’t give me some poetic bullshit about how we could all get hit by a bus tomorrow. You’re choosing this.”
I hold her tighter. “I’m choosing to do something that matters.”
“And what if it kills you?”
“Then at least it meant something.”
She pulls back, eyes bloodshot, face blotchy. “You mean something to me.”
I can’t speak.
Because that — that breaks me in a way even he couldn’t.
“Please,” she whispers. “Just stay. Stay here. Stay safe. Let him leave. Let the world spin without trying to save it.”
“I’ve been surviving for so long,” I whisper back, “I forgot what it felt like to want more. And now I have the chance.”
“I need you, Cass.”
Her voice is barely there.
“And I need to do this,” I breathe. “I need to prove I’m more than a girl who serves drinks in a dress that makes her feel like she’s drowning.”
She wipes her face with the sleeve of whoever’s shirt she’s wearing and nods, small and fragile and brave.
“Promise me one thing?”
“Anything.”
“Come back.”
My voice shakes.
“I will.”
But the lie tastes bitter on my tongue.
Because I don’t know if I can keep that promise.
Not anymore.
Not with thirty days left to burn.
And a war inside me that no one else can see.
Lola cries herself quiet on the couch, and I don’t say anything else. I just sit beside her, curled into the corner of myself like if I make my body small enough, maybe the ache hollowing out my ribs will shrink with it.
She finally falls asleep with her cheek pressed to a throw pillow, one hand gripping mine like she’s afraid I’ll vanish if she lets go. And maybe she’s right. Maybe I will.
The flat settles into silence — the kind that feels stretched too thin, the kind that makes every shadow look heavier. The kind you can hear your own heartbeat inside.
But my mind won’t quiet.
It keeps spinning back to him — to that look, that voice, that jaw, that impossible contradiction of want and distance. To the way he made me feel like I was his. To the way he made me feel like I was nothing.
I slip away quietly, to my room, to the stillness, to the part of me that’s been bleeding in silence for years.
And I write.
Not a diary entry.
Not a goodbye.
Not a confession.
Just words.
For me.
For the girl I’ve been trying to outrun.
Dear Me,
If you’re reading this, it means you’re about to do something reckless. Or brave. Or maybe both — because isn’t that what you’ve always been? A little too reckless for your own good, and a little too brave for the world that tried to break you.
You said you’d never fall again. And yet here you are. Torn up over a man with ocean eyes and a mouth made for promises he never intended to keep.
You said you’d never be one of those girls.
The ones who ache for someone who hurt them.
But your hands still shake when you remember the way he said your name.
Your thighs still clench when you remember the way he looked at you.
You still remember what it felt like to kiss someone who made you feel like more than the sum of your broken parts.
But here’s the thing.
He isn’t the story.
You are.
You always were.
You are not the girl in the dress they picked out for you. You are not the lipstick they wipe away at the end of the night. You are not the tip on the tray or the song in the background.
You are the fire.
And fires don’t beg to be remembered.
They leave smoke in lungs and ash on tongues and scars that never really fade.
So tomorrow, when you put on your shoes and walk into that office and tell them you’re ready to go where you’re needed — remember this.
You don’t owe anyone your body.
You don’t owe anyone your forgiveness.
And you sure as hell don’t owe him your heart.
You survived before him.
You’ll survive after.
So burn, baby.
Burn until you forget the taste of his name.
I set the pen down and stare at the paper, at the ink bleeding slightly into the cheap notebook lines, holding everything I couldn’t say out loud.
Maybe it’s enough.
Maybe it isn’t.
My hands still shake.
But I feel steadier than I have in days.
Because for the first time in a long time, I’m not waiting for someone to save me.
This time, I’m saving myself.
And maybe — just maybe — that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done.