Chapter
One
Cassandra
“You broke us. Not me. You.” The tears drip down my face, warm trails carving down my cheeks as if even gravity wants to witness the collapse. “You did this.” I can still hear the words vibrating in my skull, echoing in the places where hope used to live, and no matter how many times I squeeze my eyes shut, they never leave me, not fully, not even for a breath.
I wonder—though wondering is pointless—if it would have been different if I had just shut up and said nothing, if maybe he would still be here, if perhaps silence would have been enough to glue together the parts of him already breaking. He would never have left, and I would have still gone to bed every night hoping I wouldn’t wake up, trapped in that toxic loop, but at least he would still be here; at least the ghost of him would have had a body.
It has been three years, three long and unforgiving years, and yet the same words still play on repeat, like a hymn I never agreed to learn. My therapist calls it guilt, but I call it regret—the kind that stains, the kind that settles deep.
Dax Kingston.
I close my eyes and I can see him again, can see those sharp pale blue eyes that look like someone dipped a paintbrush in the sky, eyes that were sometimes soft, sometimes lethal, always devastating. His full lips—the same ones that brought me to my knees or made me cry, depending on the day—haunt me just as much. And the way his strong arms used to hold me, steady me, anchor me, right up until the moment they didn’t.
Dax Kingston was my nightmare dressed up like a daydream, a walking contradiction wrapped in a man’s body, and I had often wondered how free I would be if I ever let him go. But that’s the thing about freedom—it’s just loneliness dressed up as regret, wearing a prettier mask but pulling the same strings underneath.
“Cass, one day when you’re all alone, you’ll remember I didn’t break you.” His sneer hits my spine in all the wrong places, slithering under my skin. “How can I break something that’s already broken?”
The last words he ever said to me still haunt me.“You are broken.”The words still hurt. The words still haunt. And as I stand in the same room he said them in—a room now empty, filled with dust motes circling my hair like a halo—I close my eyes and I scream. I scream for the girl I once was. I scream for the silence that suffocates me. But most of all, I scream because he’s not here anymore, because even his absence feels like a presence.
I expect the universe to scream with me; I expect a storm or rain or lightning or anything that lets me know I’m not alone. But the crushing realisation is that I am alone, and when the screams tear from my throat and I’m stood there—heart racing, out of breath, cheeks wet—the only thing I hear is that same suffocating silence that has followed me since he walked out of my life.
I sink to the ground, pain vibrating through my legs as my knees hit the hardwood floors, my hair splayed across my body as my head bends like I’m praying—though I don’t know to what. I gave up believing a long time ago that there was a force bigger than me coming to save me.
Girls like me don’t get saved. We get left. We get left to pick up the pieces of our broken hearts knowing that we will never be whole again. We are told to pick ourselves up, to be strong, to not let our pasts defeat us—but I don’t want to be strong anymore. Strength in pain isn’t strength at all. It’s just a mask, a role we play for the world so other people feel comfortable.
Well, I am fucking sick of drowning to make other people feel comfortable. “My pain is real. I am real.” I whisper it to nobody, even though it feels like the biggest lie I’ve ever told myself.
I hear footsteps behind me, but still I don’t move. I hope I will vanish, simply disappear into the floorboards that have shaped themselves around my broken body.
“Cass?” I shake my head, hoping she’ll go away, hoping she’ll leave me to drown in my own misery. I don’t want pity. I don’t want comfort. I want to die here on the floor and let the memory of his voice die with me. “Cass, please talk to me.” I squeeze my eyes tighter, begging the black vortex to swallow me whole… but I’m not that lucky.
Her footsteps move slowly toward me. I can hear the soft scuff of her shoes as she stumbles closer, can hear her laboured breath as she tries to reach me. “Don’t.” I whisper. “Leave me alone. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want you here. Go. Leave me to rot.”
Silence again. Oh, sweet suffocating silence.
“Cass, I’m not leaving you.” She sighs, a sound that tugs and infuriates in equal measure.
“I don’t want you here.”
“Well, isn’t that a shame? It’s been three years and you’re still living in?—”
I spin around, rage shooting through my body, finally standing tall but not feeling small. “Don’t say his fucking name.” Her eyes soften like she pities me—like she thinks she knows. “Don’t you dare.”
“Cass, please let me help you. You can’t live like this. I am worried about you.” I shake my head and lower my eyes to the ground. I can’t even fucking look at her. Every time I do, all I see is his face. “Cass, talk to me,” she pleads.
“Please just go.” I whisper.
“Dax wouldn’t want this.” She says the words I have been dreading, and my eyes slowly rise, travelling up her body—her tanned legs snug in tennis shoes, her pristine white tennis dress hugging her frame, her wild auburn hair falling down her shoulders—until they meet her piercing blue eyes looking at me with sympathy.
“I don’t give a fuck what he would want,” I spit, the tears threatening again. I can’t even say his name. It gets stuck in my throat, and three years later, I still can’t say it.
“You don’t mean that,” she says softly.
“Get the fuck out of my house.” I scream. What I really want to scream is,Leave me with my memories. Leave me with the ghost of him.
Silence falls again. My words bounce off the walls, hitting me in the chest where a heart once beat just for him. I hear her sigh. I watch her turn and walk toward the door, giving me exactly what I begged for—the chance to drown in my loneliness.
