Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“STORM” BY RUELLE
STEELE
Ihear her coming before I see her.
Soft footsteps, the slight grunt of effort that tells me she's carrying something heavy, and every instinct I have fires at once because that's been my job since approximately the second week we lived here. Blossom carries too much and I take it from her. That's just how it goes.
Except today I don't.
She rounds the corner and nearly walks into me and the look on her face — the flinch, the immediate apology, the way she makes herself small — does something ugly to my insides.
Fuck.
This is what I'm doing to her. This careful, polite, stepping-aside version of me that she doesn't recognize because I don't recognize it either.
She mumbles something, keeps her eyes down, and I move to let her pass because I'm a fucking coward apparently, and I watch her adjust the basket against her hip and I don't take it from her.
A week ago I would have had it out of her hands before she could protest. Would have pressed a kiss to her temple while she rolled her eyes and told me she was perfectly capable.
Would have carried it upstairs and made some comment about her doing too much and she would have told me to mind my own business in that prim British way of hers that I love.
I love.
Present tense. That hasn't gone anywhere and sometimes that makes it worse, not better. If I didn't love her this would be so much simpler. I could just leave. Pack my bag and walk and not look back.
But I can't. And I won't.
So instead I stand in this hallway and let her carry a laundry basket up the stairs alone because I don't yet know how to help her without it meaning something I'm not ready to mean.
“Thanks,” she whispers, and disappears around the corner.
I stand there staring at the empty hallway, jaw tight, hating myself a little.
This is not who I am, I think. This is not who I want to be.
I just don't know yet how to be anything else right now.
“PAIN’S MY ONLY HOME” BY ZEVIA
BLOSSOM
Monday rolls around and although we’re back to the chaos of the school run, I’m starting to feel numb.
I deserve this. The space. The distance. I funded hate. Hurt people.
But my chest still feels like it's caving in every time he walks past without touching me. Every time he won't meet my eyes.
"You're being dramatic," I tell myself quietly while making breakfast for the kids. "He said he's not leaving. He just needs time."
But Dad said he'd come to my recital, too. And the next one. And the next one.
Until I stopped expecting him to show up at all.
My hands shake as I pour orange juice. Some spills on the counter.
“You okay, Miss. Blossom?” Sally asks, looking up at me with worried eyes.
I force a smile. “Just clumsy this morning, sweetheart.”
She doesn't look convinced.
Nox refuses to let me sleep alone later that night, and something inside me flickers, like a candle in the wind.
Ant sleeps in the pool house with Steele.
I didn't expect Steele to ask to sleep with me, not now, not after everything.
Of course he wouldn't. Doesn't stop it hurting. Doesn’t make it feel any less like abandonment, even though he hasn't gone anywhere.
Then why does it hurt so much?
“You're avoiding him,” Nox whispers, arms banded tightly around me from behind as if he can stop me drifting away.
“He needs space—”
“He needs you to stop punishing yourself, Petal.” His tone is tired. Worried. A little frustrated.
“I funded people who would kill him, Nox. Kill you—” My voice breaks and more tears trace a well worn path down my cheeks. “How am I supposed to—”
“You made a choice you'll carry forever.” He pulls me closer until our bodies are pressed so tightly together I don’t know where he starts and I finish. “Steele knows that. But you're pulling away like you don't deserve him.”
“He's not coming back, is he?” The words slip out before I can stop them. They’re barely above a breath, but I know Nox hears them as he lets out a soft curse.
Nox's arms tighten. “He's processing, Petal. That's all.”
“What if he can't get past it?” He shouldn’t have to get past it. Shouldn’t have to be faced with someone who did something so awful. I should let him go. But I can’t. Even if I have to cling on and be so apart from him, at least he’s still here.
“Then we deal with that. But Princess—” His thumb strokes my stomach and it soothes the wasps that took up residence on Friday night when we went to get Noah and haven’t left. “You gotta stop running, baby.”
“I’m scared, Nox,” I say in a broken whisper and he turns me around so he can cup my damp cheeks in his large palms. The skin around his beautiful eyes is tight as he looks me over.
“I’m scared he’s going to leave and I’ll have to watch him walk away knowing it’s because I’m not good enough. Just like my father did.”
“Oh, baby.” Nox pulls me tight into his chest and I can’t stop the tears as they flow onto the bronze skin of his pecs.
“He’s not your father. None of us are. Space doesn’t mean leaving, Petal.
” I feel the movement of his chest as it expands then deflates.
“Don't use it as an excuse to push him away before he's even decided how he feels about it.”
Nox doesn't say anything else. Just holds me while I cry into his chest, wondering how many days it takes before "processing" becomes "gone."
I want to believe him. Want to trust that Steele's distance is temporary.
But I've been here before. Waiting for someone to come back.
They never do.
“SAY SOMETHING” BY PENTATONIX
NOX
She's finally out.
I can tell by the way her breathing changes, the slight heaviness of her body against mine. She cried herself to sleep, which I've never seen her do before and fucking hate.
I don't move. Just lie here in the dark with her hair against my jaw and her hand loose on my chest, and let myself think the thoughts I don't think when she's awake.
She lied to us.
Not in words. But she carried this thing — this enormous, ugly, complicated thing — and she smiled at breakfast and she tucked the kids in and she laughed at Jus's stupid jokes and she never said a word. For weeks.
I know about carrying things. Know about keeping your face right while something rotten lives underneath it.
I also know what it feels like to have someone decide what you can and can't handle. To have a choice made for you by someone who thought they knew better. My parents were experts at that. This is for your own good, Nox. You'll understand when you're older.
She's not my parents. I know that. She didn't do it to use me, didn't do it for herself. She did it because she was protecting a kid and she was scared and she didn't know us yet.
But my skin still prickled when I realized how long she'd known us before she told us. How many mornings. How many nights.
The thing is, I can't leave. I've known that since the second week in this house, when I stopped pretending I was going to. Something in me just — locked. Around her, around this chaos, around these kids who trail after us like ducklings.
So I stayed in the back of that car and I held her while she told us, and I kept holding her because she was shaking and someone fucking had to. And I told myself the feelings were just shock. Just the adjustment. Just me needing time to sort through it.
But it's been days now and I'm still sorting.
She shifts in her sleep, her hand curling slightly against my chest.
You're everything, I think, and mean it, and hate how much I mean it.
That's the thing no one tells you about letting someone in. It doesn't make you safe. It just gives the hurt a more specific address.
I press my lips to the top of her head, so quietly it barely counts.
Then I close my eyes and stay.
“HOLD ME WHILE YOU WAIT” BY LILLIAN HEPLER
BLOSSOM
Tuesday afternoon and I'm peeling potatoes for dinner when I look up to find Anatole leaning against the counter right beside me. I missed him coming in, so lost in the fog that won’t seem to lift these days.
“You know he's not leaving, right?” he says quietly, his ice blue eyes boring into me. His jaw is tight, tattooed arms crossed over his broad chest.
My hands freeze, my breathing stuttering out. “He said he needs time—”
“Time to think, Bloom. Not time to decide if you're worth staying for.” Anatole's eyes are steady on mine, not wavering for even a second and they somehow lend me a little strength. “He already knows you are. We all know you are.”
I shake my head, swallowing past the lump in my throat and I go back to the potatoes. “You don't know that.”
“Yeah, baby. I do.” He gently takes the peeler from my hand, drops it on the counter then turns me to face him.
His tattooed hands are careful on my body, black ink against pale skin, and somehow that contrast makes me feel more real, more present, than I have in days.
His fingers come up to grasp my chin, gently forcing me to look up at him.
“Because I've seen the way he looks at you.
The way he talks about you when you're not around. The way he watches you with the kids.”
“That was before—”
“Before he found out you're willing to break every law to save children? Before he learned you weaponized your privilege for good? Before he saw you stare down an abusive father and threaten him in his own home?” Anatole's voice is fierce, his eyes full of blue fire.
“You think that made him want you less?”
“I funded Nazis—”
“To save a kid from becoming one. And yeah, it bothers him. It’s allowed to bother him. But bothered doesn't mean gone, Bloom. Bothered doesn’t mean he doesn’t want you anymore.”
I want to believe him. I do.
“Just talk to him, Bloom.” There’s a plea in his tone so I nod.
But my father's voice in my head is louder.
Not good enough. Never good enough.
“YOUTH” BY DAUGHTER
ANATOLE
She believed about thirty percent of what I just said.
I watched it happen — the small nod, the eyes that went distant, the way she turned back to the potatoes like if she kept her hands busy enough the rest of her couldn't fall apart.
She's been doing that all week. Filling every quiet moment with something practical so there's no space left for the thing that's eating her alive.
I know that move. I invented that move.
The difference is I learned it to survive a system that didn't give a shit about me. She learned it from a father who should have and didn't. Same result. Different crime.
And it hurts a shit ton more watching her perform it.
Just talk to him, Bloom, I said. Like it's simple. Like she isn't fucking terrified down to her bones that if she reaches for him he won't reach back.
I get it. I do. I just don't have the luxury of falling apart about it because someone in this house has to stay upright. Steele's using everything he has just to stay present, and Nox is holding it together by a thread he won't admit is fraying.
So it's me. It's usually me, the one who finds words when no one else can, the one who keeps moving when everything else stalls. I don't mind it. It's just who I am.
But Christ I'm fucking tired.
I'm tired of watching her punish herself for something she did out of love, even if it was something unforgivable, even if it had a cost none of us can fully reckon with yet.
I'm tired of watching Steele stand at windows and leave rooms and carry that quiet damage alone because he doesn't know how to put it down without putting her down with it.
And underneath all of it, underneath every practical thing I've done this week — the meals, the school runs, the conversations, the steady blue-eyed certainty I've been performing for anyone who needed it —
Jus.
Everything we built, everything we've been working toward for eight fucking years, is in this house. Is her. Is this family that somehow became real without any of us quite deciding it would.
And I am not losing it.