Chapter 30
The cold slaps my skin the second the door shuts behind me.
The music thumps through the walls, muffled now, heartbeat fading.
My lungs open for the first time all night.
I walk. Boots clicking on wet pavement. Streetlights smearing gold across the road.
My breath spilling soft white clouds into the dark.
Each step is a release. A shedding. A quiet unravelling of every thread he stitched into my ribs.
My lips still tingle. My neck still hums where he touched me. Old ghosts, old habits. But my chest…My chest belongs to someone else entirely.
Dane. His name whispers through the cold like a promise.
Like a memory crawling out of the shadows of my past, dragging light with it.
The boy who saw me before Blake ever tried to build me.
The man who remembers me before I remembered myself.
The one who doesn’t want to own me, just see me.
Wind lifts my hair. My mask dangles from my fingers.
My heart is raw, scraped open, but beating.
Every step sends another memory tumbling loose. My footsteps echo on the pavement.
Blake.
His voice. The control. Years of shrinking myself to fit into the shape he wanted. Pretty. Quiet. Convenient. He edited my memories without ever touching them, replacing childhood sun with his storms.
Dane.
Childhood flashes return like flickers of old film sun on bikes, scraped knees, him carrying me when I fell. I’d forgotten so much. Or maybe Blake pushed those memories down so far, they had nowhere to breathe.
I blink against the sting in my eyes and keep walking. The street narrows as I turn toward the lane leading home.
Carrie’s office flashes through my mind. The papers shaking in my hands. Her arms around me, steady when I was anything but her whisper: You can survive this. Even if you don’t believe it yet.
I believed nothing then.
Gracie.
My baby.
My forever ache.
The white hospital sheets bleed into my vision. Her tiny body. The impossible stillness. The sound I made when they placed her in my arms, animalistic, broken, not-human.
The world tried to keep moving after that, but mine stayed stuck in that moment.
And then—
The car crash. The metal. The shattering glass. The screaming. The kind you hear outside your own body, even when it’s coming from your own mouth. The crash that stole the last pieces of who I used to be.
I stop. My hand finds a fence post. I lean. Breathe. Fail. Try again.
Hot sweats break across my back, my breath stuttering in quick, shallow pulls. The world blurs. My pulse thunders behind my eyes.
Group therapy rooms unfold behind my eyelids, circles of grieving mothers clinging to paper cups of lukewarm coffee. Women who looked like ghosts. Women who helped me remember how to be human again. We held each other’s stories like fragile things. Like glass hearts. Like faith.
The nightmares. God the nightmares. Waking up drenched, reaching for a baby who wasn’t there.
Sheets twisted in my fists. Skin burning.
Heart thundering like I was still trapped in the car.
I start walking again. Slower. Heavier. Like each step is pulling a thread loose inside me.
Streetlights paint my skin in pale gold.
Shadows stretch long behind me, curling like fingers around my ankles.
Every memory, good, bad, unbearable, presses against my ribs.
By the time I reach my driveway, my throat is torn and raw, and I’m not sure if I’ve been crying, or if the night has just found another way to break me open.
My hand trembles as I reach for the door. Inside, the house waits. Quiet. Dark. Too full of ghosts.
Blake’s warmth lingers on my skin. His voice haunts the edges of my memory.
Gracie’s absence presses into me with the weight of a collapsing sky.
And I am still here.
Barely.
Tonight, I burned the last bridge to Blake.
Tonight, Pandora saved Penn. And as the sky begins to pale toward morning, I realise something simple.
Something terrifying. Something holy. I want Dane.
I want the man who sees me. I want the life I buried.
And for the first time in years, I’m free to choose it.