Chapter Eighteen
Brielle
The door barely has time to close behind me, keeping Asher safely on the other side, when my legs buckle. I collapse, not even trying to catch myself as I hit the floor.
Silence swallows me, the same way it has every day for the last two weeks. I curl in on myself—my knees to my chin and my arms wrapped around myself—like if I just curl tight enough, I'll finally disappear inside myself, and it'll stop hurting so fucking much.
The first sob is so violent it sounds like I'm choking. The next is a scream muffled by my knees. Tears stream down my face, soaking into the fabric of my hoodie, but I can't seem to stop.
My whole life, I've been told that pain is temporary—cry it out, dust yourself off, keep going, princess. But there's no moving through this kind of pain, no tidying it up for polite company.
I don't even realize I'm wailing his name until my own voice echoes back at me from the high ceiling, broken and raw.
Wails and screams blast out of me, one after another, like every time I never let myself mourn or rage or cry has finally caught up with me.
They're detonating in sequence now, one by one.
He saw the red light. He saw it. He saw it, and he kept going.
There are words for this kind of betrayal, but I can't form any of them. I just pound my fist against the floor, again and again, until my knuckles throb.
I curl tighter, desperate to disappear. Desperate to hurt him back, but he's not here. All I have left is this agony that just keeps on coming.
He saw the red light.
He saw it. And he let the world end just to have me for one more fucking second.
My parents died in a boating accident, and I've always wondered what the last second of their lives was like. Did they see it coming? Did they have time to regret or make peace with it?
I never thought about the possibility that they might have been happy for one last moment, so happy they ignored the danger. I never thought about how easy it is to look away from the end of the world if the person you love is right in front of you.
I sob until there's nothing left in me. I sob until my throat burns and my face is swollen and every bone in my body is heavy with exhaustion.
At some point, the sky outside the window darkens, but I don't move. I can't move. If I get up, I might have to be a person again, and right now I can't be that.
Time passes. The shadows on the ceiling crawl across the white paint, stretching and thinning. I stare up at them, empty in a way I've never been.
The silence now is worse than before, because there's nothing left inside me to push it away—no anger, no grief. Nothing.
My hand stings. I look down and see a smear of blood along my palm. I want to laugh, but I can't, not when it hurts just to breathe.
I drag myself off the floor and collapse face-first onto the couch.
I think about what he said, the way his voice shook when he told me he loved me and always had. The way he admitted to being a monster. The way he begged me to tell him how to fix it, like I'm the one holding the blueprints for his redemption.
Fuck him.
Fuck him for thinking I owe him redemption when he ruined us both.
Fuck him for turning me into someone I don't even recognize.
Fuck him for making me love him even now, when all I want is to carve him out of me with a knife.
He wants me to be the girl who forgives.
He wants me to tell him that it's okay, that I understand, that I'm grateful to be alive, and that it was just fate or timing or whatever poetic bullshit he feeds himself to make it possible to sleep at night.
But I'm not. I'm not okay, I don't understand, and I am so fucking sick and tired of hurting.
I sink deeper into the cushions, shuddering. I could lie here until my body rots. For a minute, I think about it. I think about the possibility of never standing up, never picking up the phone, never responding to another text, email, or knock at the door.
But then I remember his face, that desperate twist of hope when he looked at me, like maybe, maybe, if he groveled just right, I'd take him back. I remember how he said "Crawl" like it was a punishment, how he made me hate myself for wanting to do it anyway, just to be close to him.
I remember how many times I forgave him before, and how it never made anything better. It just taught him that he could keep doing it.
I'm not going to be that girl again.
I am done being the thing he shatters whenever he can't handle his own demons.
The city outside is alive with sirens and angry horns and other people's drama, but in here, there's nothing but the promise I make to myself in the dark.
Never again. I will never let him break me like this again.
I squeeze my fist, my nails biting into the fresh cut on my palm. I press until it throbs, letting the pain anchor me. It's a reminder that I'm still here, still breathing, still capable of feeling something besides grief.
I make myself another promise: I will be the last thing he ever gets to destroy.
The room is completely dark by the time I close my eyes. But for the first time in hours, I don't feel afraid.
The next two weeks are an exercise in endurance. The rules are simple: don't answer, don't engage, don't give him a single fucking inch.
My phone becomes a grenade. Every time it vibrates, the pin ticks down, daring me to pick up. I block him over and over, but he just tries a new number, a new way to reach me.
The urge to answer is as strong as the urge to smash my phone against a wall. I just let it ring instead. He leaves voicemails every single time, but I don't listen. I delete each one as soon as it appears.
The texts are worse. They come at all hours—full of everything I wanted to hear him say for years, like how he loves me, and how I'm the only thing he's ever wanted. He confesses every secret he's ever held, pouring them out through text like they're a thread binding us together.
After the first few, I stop reading them. At least, during the daylight hours, I do. But at night, when the silence is too loud? I pour over each one, hating him a little for saying it now, when it's too late.
The gifts start almost immediately.
A delivery guy shows up the morning after his confession with an armful of white roses and lilies, tied with a silk ribbon. I sign for it with a smile, take it inside, and dump the whole arrangement into the trash without even looking at the card.
The next day, another arrangement arrives—orchids this time, their waxy petals bruising where I squeeze them before throwing them away. I almost text him a picture of them in the trash can, but stop myself just in time.
He never shows up in person. Not at first. I think he's scared he'll make it worse. Or maybe he knows I'd rather burn down the building than let him in.
I burrow deeper into my new routine—job-hunting, sleeping, avoiding Asher. Liam is back in London for reshoots, but he calls to check in every day. I lie and say I'm fine. The only person I see is my delivery guy, and he's too busy to care if I'm a little dead inside.
By the tenth day, I start to wonder if I even exist to anyone else anymore. The press stopped calling weeks ago. My friends—or the people who counted as friends, anyway—stopped calling long before that. Mina texts occasionally, but I don't even know what to say to her.
Miles Andrews called once to check on me, right after I flew home from Los Angeles.
I didn't know what to say to him, either.
He pretended that what happened with Asher wasn't my fault, but we both know it was.
Mostly, I think he just felt bad about me getting hit by a car.
The whole conversation was stilted and awkward, full of apologies on both sides.
I doubt I'll ever hear from him again. I'm okay with that.
And then Asher disappears. No calls, no texts. The only proof I have that he even exists is the hole in my heart and the deliveries that never stop. But he doesn't reach out. He doesn't even explain his absence. He just…vanishes.
It should bring me comfort, but it doesn't. I spend the next fifteen days worried about him. Is he alive? In jail? Did he finally take the hint?
I hate that I don't know, and I hate that I'm even obsessing about it at all.
On the fifteenth day, I'm eating cold noodles in the dark when the doorbell rings.
My heart stutters and stops. I know it's him. It has to be.
I creep to the door to check the peephole. He's standing so close, I can see the scar on his jaw, the cut on his lower lip, the way his eyes flicker between hope and utter defeat.
He doesn't ring the bell again. He just stands there, like he's waiting for me to open it, like if he just wills it hard enough, I'll appear. The silence is a new kind of violence.
I press my forehead to the wood, close my eyes, and wait. My whole body is buzzing with the desire to scream at him, to pound on the door until my fists bleed, to let him in so he can hurt me again, properly, with his hands and mouth and the sharp edges of his love instead of with his silence.
Instead, I slide down the wall and sit, my knees pulled up, my cheek resting on the cool wood. I listen for his breathing on the other side, so faint I wonder if I'm imagining it.
"I know you're there," he says, his voice muffled through the door. "You don't have to open it or talk to me. I just…I just need to be here right now."
I don't answer, and he doesn't say anything else. We just stay that way for an hour, him outside the door, me on the inside, just…silent.
"Thank you," he rasps finally, and then I hear his footsteps retreating.
I don't move until I hear the elevator doors at the end of the hall.
My phone dings a minute later, another text from an unknown number.
I've spent every day of the last two weeks wishing I were with you instead of in rehab.
My heart thuds against my ribcage. He was in rehab? What the fuck?