Chapter 31
The door closes behind me with a soft click, but it feels loud in the quiet. Too loud. Like it announces the moment my spine finally caves in on itself.
I kick off my shoes, missing the mat entirely, stumbling forward on legs that feel foreign—borrowed, trembling, unreliable. The hallway tilts slightly, or maybe that’s just my heartbeat thudding behind my eyes.
I move through the house on instinct, passing the framed pictures that face the wall because I can’t look at them yet—Blake smiling too wide, my own face too carefully arranged, Gracie’s ultrasound pinned like a promise that never got kept.
My breath trembles. My throat closes. I keep moving before I fall apart where I stand.
The bedroom greets me like a memory I’ve tried to outrun—soft sheets, too many pillows, the faint scent of lavender left over from nights I prayed for sleep and never got it.
I shut the door behind me. The world narrows to this room, this moment, this version of myself that hurts in every direction.
Pandora’s lipstick is still smudged on my mouth. Her mascara is cracked under my eyes. Her perfume clings to me like a lie I’ve worn too long.
I head for the mirror above the dresser and brace both hands on the edge. My reflection looks back at me—fractured, exhausted, still carrying Dane’s almost-kiss like a bruise under the skin.
“I’m so tired,” I whisper to no one, to everyone, to the ghosts pressed into the corners of this room.
I pull the wig off first—the long dark waves of Pandora slipping through my fingers like water. I set it down gently, like it’s something alive. Something dangerous.
Then I peel off the false lashes, carefully, carefully, as if they are holding together a version of me that’s about to split at the seams.
My clothes follow—Pandora’s clothes. The tight top. The skirt that feels like armour. The persona I built from desperation and pain.
They fall to the floor in a small heap, a carcass of who I had to become just to survive the last few months.
I pad to the bathroom on bare feet, the tiles cold and grounding under me. The tap groans to life. I splash water onto my face, then scrub harder, harder, until Pandora’s makeup melts down the drain in streaks of black and rose.
It leaves Penn behind. Raw. Blotchy. Human.
I brush my hair next, pulling the comb through slow strokes. The tug at the knots feels good, real. Something physical to tether me to my body instead of the storm in my chest.
My oversized tee waits on the counter, a worn black one with holes at the collar, stretched and soft from a hundred washes. I slip it over my head, drowning in it. It smells like detergent and home, and nights I wished for peace. It falls past my thighs. It feels like safety.
My bed is wide and soft, the blankets a heavy cocoon that has caught me through nightmares and panic attacks and the nights I couldn’t breathe through the ache.
I crawl into it like I’m climbing into the mouth of something that won’t swallow me whole.
The pillows engulf me, soft against my cheek. The mattress dips beneath my weight. And then silence. Not peaceful silence.
The kind that rings in your head. The kind that lets memories in.
My mind fires through them tonight with Dane and that almost-kiss, the weeks tightening like threads around my throat, the months of pretending to be Pandora, the years of loving Blake wrong, the years of surviving Blake right, the years of being a mother without a child to hold, the seconds in the car crash that rewired my life, the minutes in the hospital that broke me open, the endless days after that, the group therapy rooms full of shattered hearts, the coffee dates with grieving mums who understood without me needing to explain, the nights waking up sweating, the mornings pretending I’d slept, The stretches of time that passed like pages torn loose from a book caught in the wind, scattering farther and farther from who I used to be.
My breathing hitches. My fingers curl into the sheets.
My chest tightens, then loosens, then tightens again.
I close my eyes because it’s all too much.
I close them because I’m afraid of what’s happening inside me.
I close them because I don’t know how to stop remembering.
The darkness behind my eyelid’s blooms with faces.
Gracie
Dane
Blake
Carrie
Versions of myself I barely recognise. All turning. All shifting. All blurring together until I can’t separate pain from hope, past from present, Pandora from Penn.
My tears slip quietly into the pillow. The bed holds me. The night holds me. The memories hold me hostage. And then finally somewhere between heartbeat and breath, my body gives in. My mind folds. And I fall. Not into sleep. But into the weight of everything I’ve been running from.