20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter twenty
Violet
Ten years ago
Four months after the horrific couch incident, I finally get my own place. School’s done, and I was counting the seconds until I could get the hell out of Riverstone.
Calling it an apartment is generous. It’s more like a box with plumbing and a window that looks out over the back of a kebab shop, but it’s mine.
Mine in the way nothing has ever been before.
The place is so small I have to brush my teeth and do the dishes in the same sink.
The bedroom only just fits a double mattress, which I had to wedge between the walls while swearing my head off.
I loved it on sight.
At least Jeanine’s out of the picture. Carter is too, and that one cuts deeper than I’d like.
I’m standing in the middle of the lounge with a pair of scissors in one hand and an unpacked box at my feet, trying to decide whether to put away the mugs or cutlery first, when there’s a knock at the door.
Liam doesn’t wait for me to answer. He lets himself in with the spare key I immediately regret giving him.
“Well,” he says, stepping inside with a six-pack tucked under one arm and his uni backpack hanging off one shoulder, “look at you.”
I fold my arms. “You say that like I’m renting a penthouse.”
He grins, turning in a slow circle. “Nah. It’s tiny. Bit shit. Weird smell. But…” His eyes land on me. “It’s yours.”
I nod and swallow roughly.
He drops the beer on the counter and walks over to the window. “Nice view.”
“It’s a brick wall and a kebab shop.”
“Yeah, but it’s your brick wall.” He glances back at me. “I’m proud of you, Vi.”
I hate when he does that. Gets sincere when I’m not emotionally prepared.
I shrug and squat by the open box instead, grabbing the forks and sorting them into the kitchen drawer. “Don’t get soft on me.”
“Too late.” He kicks one of the boxes lightly with his shoe. “You sure you don’t want to move in with me?”
There it is.
“And ruin this glamorous lifestyle?”
“I’m serious.” He leans his hip against the counter. “I’ve got the spare room. It’d save you money. You wouldn’t have to work as much while you figure things out.”
I slide the drawer shut. “I know you’re serious.”
“Then think about it.”
“I have.” I brush cardboard dust off my hands. “And I don’t want to.”
He watches me, not pushing yet. Liam knows the difference between stubborn and cornered. I’ve made that one easy for him over the years.
“I want my own space,” I say. “I’m eighteen, Liam. I’m not moving from one person’s house and rules into another.”
He winces. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know.”
He blows out a breath and nods. “Okay, fine. I get it.”
“Good. I’ll figure it out. I’ll move into a better place once I start earning decent money.”
He cracks open one of the beers and hands it to me. I take it, and we stand there in the middle of my half-built life, drinking in silence while a car backfires somewhere out on the street below.
Liam starts unpacking my books without asking.
“How’s uni?” I ask.
“Boring.” He stacks my photography books by height, which is deeply irritating. “Too many finance bros. Not enough people with actual intelligence.”
“Sounds like your fault for going somewhere full of finance bros.”
“Says the girl who picked the weird artsy degree.” He slides another book onto the shelf. “You know, you could’ve come to my uni. They’ve got a solid photography program. But no. You had to do your own thing. Same as Carter.”
Carter’s face flashes up without warning—eyes blown wide, breath ragged, that disgusted look on his face when he realized I’d been touching him.
I drink too fast and the beer goes down the wrong way, making me cough.
Liam eyes me.
“What’s going on with you?” he asks, casual voice, not-casual eyes.
I don’t look at him. “Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
I move to the kitchen and open another box pulling out Jeanine’s plates this time. He follows me with his gaze.
“You’ve been weird for months,” he says. “Sad, or pissed off, or both. Half the time you look like you’re about to bite someone’s head off, and the other half you look like you haven’t slept. Did something happen?”
I stack two plates too hard. Ceramic clacks against ceramic.
“No.”
“Vi.”
I hate the gentle tone. It makes me want to throw the plates against the wall.
“I’m fine.”
He sighs. “Did something happen that night?”
I freeze.
Not visibly, I hope. But inside, every part of me locks.
Liam doesn’t move. “With Carter. When we came back to Riverstone that weekend.”
I keep my back to him and pick up another plate. “What about it?”
“You tell me.”
I laugh, but it comes out dry. “Nothing happened.”
“You’ve barely spoken to him since.”
I slide the plate into the cupboard. “Maybe I got sick of his face.”
“You adored his face.”
“I was twelve.”
“You adored it at seventeen too,” he says quietly.
I turn then, fast enough that he actually blinks. “Can you not?”
His expression shifts immediately. “Okay,” he says raising both hands. “But something changed.”
I look at him and wonder how much he knows exactly.
He was there that night. He came back to Jeanine’s to see me while Carter went to see his mom.
He knew Carter was asleep, sprawled out on the couch after getting into a fight with Maeve’s boyfriend.
And he’d seen me acting all weird the next morning.
Then quieter and smaller, until eventually I was angry all the time.
He isn’t stupid.
“Did you two hook up?” he presses again.
My skin goes hot all over.
“No.” It’s technically true, depending on how much of a coward I feel like being.
The truth is way uglier, though. It wasn’t a hook-up, it was me crossing a line I can’t uncross, then getting exactly the reaction I deserved.
Carter’s face when he woke up. His voice when he told me never to touch him again.
Then nothing—no reply or chance to apologize. I can’t scrape any of it back.
His jaw tightens. “Because if he did something—”
“He didn’t.”
“Vi.”
“He didn’t.” My voice sharpens enough to cut. “Drop it.”
He studies me and knows I’m lying. Maybe not about the shape of it, but about the specifics. About there being nothing worth hiding.
I lean back against the counter and fold my arms again.
“I texted him,” I hear myself say.
Liam’s face stays very still.
“A few times,” I add. “And he didn’t answer.”
That’s as much truth as he gets.
He doesn’t need to know that I texted what the fuck is wrong with you? Or how I stared at my phone like a loser waiting for the little dots to appear. Every day Carter didn’t respond turned my insides into a callus.
Liam’s mouth flattens. “Right.”
“I don’t know what his problem is,” I say, going for careless and landing somewhere near bitter. “And I don’t care.”
Another lie. God, I’m on a roll.
His eyes flick over my face, reading every crack I’m trying to plaster over. “You care enough to be this angry.”
I laugh again, forced this time. “Maybe I’m just embarrassed that I wasted years thinking he was my friend.”
Liam comes to stand in front of me. I can smell laundry powder and the cold outside still clinging to his jacket.
“He’s my best mate,” he says carefully. “I love him. You know that.”
I nod once.
“But he’s also a mess. He always has been. He drinks too much. Sleeps around. He doesn’t think before he does shit and then acts surprised when people get hurt.” His jaw works. “You deserve better than being one more girl he leaves confused.”
I stare at him.
“He’s not a villain,” Liam says. “But he’s not safe, either.”
“I’m not one of his girls.”
“I know that.”
For a moment we just stand there, looking at each other across the wreckage of what I’m not saying.
He gets it. Not all of it, but enough. Enough to know Carter hurt me and I’m not going to tell him how. To decide silently, right here, right now, that we are not doing this. We are not talking about Carter anymore.
Liam steps back first and picks up his beer. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I echo.
The agreement settles between us without ever being spoken aloud. No more Carter. Not from him or from me. Unless I crack first.
He glances around my apartment. “You still need a job?”
The shift is obvious and I love him for it.
“Yeah,” I say. “Turns out landlords are really old-fashioned about wanting money.”
He snorts. “There’s a café around the corner from my place looking for waitress.”
“Nah, I’m good. I already got a waitress job lined up at a club.”
He stays another hour, helping me put together a table that came with instructions written by Satan, then leaves just after dark with a promise to visit soon.
When the door shuts behind him, the apartment goes quiet again.
I stand in the middle of it, and look around at the boxes, the cheap furniture, the stuff I took from Jeanine’s and the life I’m trying to build with both hands while pretending I’m not bleeding out from somewhere no one can see.
I wander over to the window, the neon from the kebab shop flashing red across the glass.
My phone sits on the sill where I left it.
No new messages.
I pick it up anyway. Unlock it and stare at the thread. My last text still sitting there, unanswered and increasingly humiliating.
I think about sending one more. Something cruel and final. Something that would cauterize whatever is left of this.
I don’t.
Locking the screen, I set the phone face down, and get back to unpacking.
If Carter wants me gone, fine.
I know how to disappear.