Chapter 1
Chapter One
Cleo
I surface like a thing pulled from the bottom of a black sea—lungs burning, heart slamming against my ribs. There are no dreams, no images—just a blank void that spits me into awareness.
The first thing that cuts through the haze is the smell.
Pine. Salt—and a trace of a familiar cologne.
It clings to the sweater, swallowing my body, and seeps into my lungs until I’m dizzy.
The scent forces its way in, alive and insistent, carrying the damp bite of the coastline and the fog pressing against the glass.
It should feel grounding. Instead, it tilts everything sideways, reminding me this isn’t my sweater, room, or life.
Somehow, I know—I don’t belong here.
For a heartbeat, I think I’m still in Manhattan, in that glass-and-marble apartment that had become little more than a cage—a tombstone where I was waiting for my life to be over. Not that there’s much life in me anymore.
My heart kicks hard, ribs bracing for a voice that isn’t here—his voice.
The fear comes up like bile, hot and animal against my throat: the prickle at the base of my skull, the way my hands go small and hard inside the sleeves.
I can hear it in my skin—the small, stupid panic that make my fingers clench and unclench without permission.
But instead of him, the window is fogged and wet, fog pressed tight against the glass, rolling off the ocean in sheets.
The sound of waves thunders up the cliffside.
I’ve never been in a room this close to the water before.
The room tries to be both: a magnanimous, elegant living space with the hush of a country cabin.
A long chaise faces a single wall of glass—a floor-to-ceiling window that frames the cliff like a portrait.
Outside, the Pacific drops away in vertical blue, the surf battering rocks that look like teeth.
The interior smells of polished cedar and lemon oil. An antique rug softens the chairs.
There are small luxuries—a brass lamp, thick curtains, a throw that only pretends to be rustic but melts like silk against my skin.
At the same time, the place holds hollows and angles that whisper of an old cabin, something stripped down and simple, later dressed up with taste and money. The city drowned it out.
I sit up too fast, and the sweater—too big to be mine—falls off one shoulder. My bare skin prickles. There are bruises along my collarbone, some purple blooms, others already paling into a blue-green the doctor calls healing.
A thin cut near my clavicle scabs dark and ragged; a pale fingerprint bruises the side of my rib like a stamp I can’t wash away.
The sweater carries a layered scent—cedar and a clean cologne—Eddie’s first. If I strain, I can pretend there’s something rougher underneath—the musk and spice of Barret’s scent mixing with Eddie’s—but maybe that’s my head making ghosts.
It shouldn’t be possible.
Neither of them is here. Which is a reality that makes me sad and yet comforted. I don’t want them to see what I’ve become.
Still, I press the fabric to my face and, for a stupid second, let the memory do its work: Eddie’s laugh breaking too loud in quiet rooms, the way his hand once found the small of my back.
Barret’s cologne clinging to my hair after he leaned too close, the rasp of his voice when he wanted to be gentle and failed.
A body can leave its presence trapped in the weave of cotton long after it’s gone, and for some reason, this sweater carries pieces of both.
I press the fabric to my chest like a talisman. Safe tastes like a foreign language on my tongue. I fumble for the pronunciation. I haven’t been safe for too long. This is more like a dream, which is weird since I just woke up.
My pulse settles a notch and then jumps at the creak of the hall outside.
The house breathes—settling timbers, a distant door, someone walking with purpose—and every sound sketches a narrative in my head: footsteps approach, keys at the door, his voice, an apology I do and don’t want.
My throat tightens at the possibility. There’s a reason he brought me here.
To kill me?
I hope so because I’m done. Fuck, I doubt I can continue.
I look out at the cliff beyond the window. Sea-spray mists the glass in slow, patient lines, a thousand tiny rivers where the water refuses to stay put. A gull drifts, loud and thin, then disappears into the gray like someone erasing a page. Below, the rocks keep their own counsel.
The surf claws at them and runs away, pulls back with the ocean’s steady rhythm. I have never stood at an edge like this, never let the horizon press against me with such scale. It makes the rest of the world shrink until it fits in the palm of my hand and feels ridiculous.
I rub my thumb into a bruise until the sting flares.
The movement is ridiculous and necessary: proof that I am here, that my skin answers me.
The sweater slips again, and I tug it up, hunching like someone who has had a long day and is still allowed one small comfort.
My shoulders round in on itself, and, for a second, the smallness feels like a thing I can carry.
There is a line of light where the glass meets the frame, a seam that catches a sliver of sun between clouds.
In it, for a second, I see the reflection of the room stacked over the cliff: the chaise, the soft lamp, the sweater hanging off my shoulder.
My face, pale and unvarnished, floats in that slice of light.
I do not like the person who looks back.
I tell myself, out loud, because silence makes my thoughts run too fast: I am allowed to be here.
I am allowed to breathe. The words sound foreign in my mouth.
I repeat them, and this time they mean something small and stubborn—a single defiant breath between the waves.
Not sure if this is what will keep me alive for another day.
Beyond the window, the world is all salt and slate. The bedroom reads like a private suite at the end of the earth: wide-plank oak underfoot, finished so smooth it almost reflects the light, a headboard carved from a single slab of wood and treated to show grain without a nick.
Sheets are white and taut. A cashmere throw folded with obsessive neatness at the foot of the bed—a polished brass lamp across a hand-knotted rug. A couple of leather armchairs sit angled to the glass.
There’s a sleek turntable on a console, and its stack of vinyl is boxed in custom sleeves. A crystal carafe and two tumblers sit on a tray beside a hand-carved figure of sea salt, everything chosen and placed so it reads as comfort rather than clutter.
The room is luxurious and disguised as restraint: high-end finishes and artisan touches.
Everything is built to be admired and to keep its distance, which makes me feel smaller in its measured light.
When my feet hit the planks, the house answers with a single, controlled creak—as if the house is announcing my existence.
I sit there a moment and, from the corner of my eye, catch myself in the tall mirror propped against a dresser.
My face looks washed out, as if someone turned down the color—my skin gone to a pale, the hollows around my cheekbones more obvious than they should be.
My lips are cracked. I look away before the glass can spell out everything I already know.
I’m broken.
The door creaks.
My pulse spikes.
My hand clamps the sweater at my throat, fingers digging into the knit as if holding myself still. Terror unspools hot and fast under my ribs—I’m almost certain it’s him. I breathe like I’ve sprinted: quick, shallow pulls that leave a metallic aftertaste on my tongue.
Every tiny sound—the faint step in the hall, the whisper of fabric, the click of a hinge—snaps into focus, each one a sentence I haven’t learned how to answer. The house falls quiet around me, the light narrowing until all that exists is the space between the door and whatever waits beyond it.
Then he appears. Eddie. He’s filling the doorway with a calm that feels measured—too careful. Suit trousers, even though we’re God-knows-where on the ocean’s edge—pressed, dark clothes that say someone never learned to be messy with their life.
He stands straight, hands folded a second before they relax, a watch catching light at his wrist. His hair is neat. His mouth is a plane I used to map and no longer know.
I think I’ve conjured him up for a second—an apparition summoned by my fear. My brain has been supplying me with memories of him and Barret when I can’t take the abuse anymore. Memories that might not be mine anymore.
Eddie takes in the room as if wondering how I’ll react.
“You’re awake,” he says. The sentence is stripped, but his voice gathers more than the words: worry threaded with relief, a tired patience I want to lean on but cannot. His eyes search my face the way someone reads a ledger, quick and precise.
There’s care there—a soft crease by the eye that means he notices small things—and something else, a calculation that keeps the care from being whole.
“B’s bringing you breakfast,” he says. “Oatmeal, fruit, tea . . . unless you want something else.”
He rattles off the choices like he’s trying to be useful, like something as small as porridge might fix whatever is fraying inside me. It’s clumsy kindness, probably meant to pull me back from the edge of myself.
I listen because for a second it feels like a dream where I’m back with them, necessary enough to feed, to care for after a night of sex. Someone worth noticing.
I want to tell him I don’t need a menu, that I don’t know how to be part of this anymore. And by this, I might mean my life—I’m too broken to be anything or maybe want to be.
“Thanks,” I offer, the word comes almost torn.
He steps closer, and the cologne I’ve smelled on the sweater registers in the room.
For a brief and stupid second, my body remembers warmth.
I remember Eddie’s laugh, the way it filled small rooms and spilled over people.
I remember Barret’s rough and low voice and how he tried to be gentle and kept missing the mark.
Which was fine. I didn’t want them to treat me like I was delicate—some flower or a weak woman who could break easily.
Suddenly, he speaks, “Cleo, are you—” He stops, exhales, shakes his head like he’s annoyed at himself for the question. “—of course you’re not okay. How stupid of me to ask. I just . . . say something, baby, please.”
The plea is unexpected. I don’t know what he wants—proof that I’m still salvageable?
He lingers, studying me the way someone inspects a painting to see if it can be restored.
I can read the calculus now: does she look alive enough to keep?
Will she fit? For a second, I think he’ll tell me what to do—eat, rest, stay quiet.
Instead, he presses his lips together, pivoting away like the matter is undecided.
As he moves away, daylight pours through the cracked door and pools across his jaw, gilding the practiced lines.
His shoulders never slack—posture learned in boardrooms and at church tables—control wrapped in a suit that says he never has to get his hands dirty.
He doesn’t slam the door. He doesn’t step close.
He leaves it ajar, a thin promise that he might return.
The room takes him back into itself; sunlight floods the glass and sets the curtains aglow, dust drifting lazily in the beams. The ocean beyond the cliff is bright and loud now, sheets of silver running toward the rocks. The sound makes the whole place feel bigger and smaller at once.
I whisper to the window, “Well, Cleo. This is either a nightmare or a new cage.”
The sea answers with a roar that rattles the glass. I let that sound wash through me for a beat—not courage, not recovery, but a small, dangerous curiosity that tastes like something stubborn. I cross to the window, and the motion clears the fog in my head like someone throwing a pane open.
Decision packs itself into my throat like a stone. I will find out why he brought me here. Fuck—I will know.