“Dax wouldn’t want this.”
There it is.
The one thing I couldn’t bear to hear.
My eyes drag up her small frame—her tanned legs in tennis shoes, her pristine white dress hugging her like innocence could save her, her wild auburn hair pouring down her shoulders, right up to those piercing blue eyes that echo his.
“I don’t give a fuck what he would want,” I spit, the tears clawing their way up again. “I can’t even say his name. Three years and I still can’t.”
“You don’t mean that,” she murmurs.
“Get the fuck out of my house.”
What I really mean is:Leave me alone with the memories. Leave me with the ghost of him.
Silence drops.
Brutal.
Echoing.
My words bounce off the walls, ricocheting straight back into the hollow where my heart used to live.
She sighs, turns, walks to the door.
She gives me exactly what I asked for—permission to drown.
“Cass?”
I lift my head.
“You break your own heart by staying here. You don’t need to drown alone. Fuck, you don’t need to drown at all. Come find me when you’ve decided to stop living in the shadow of my brother’s ghost.”
Her words hit harder than I let her see.
The moment she’s gone, I collapse again—but this time, there’s no scream. No theatrics. No violence.
Just quiet, unravelling devastation.
I fall to my knees and the tears slide silently, a steady, endless river, as I break in a way I’ve never broken before.
The floor is cold beneath my cheek, the boards digging into my skin, but I don’t move.
I can’t.
The sobs rip through me in waves, tearing at my chest, convulsing through my ribs until I feel like something inside me might snap. I choke on the silence that follows Lola’s retreat. She’s gone. It’s just me and the ghosts again.
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe I am drowning but God, part of me wants to. Because I don’t know how to breathe in a world that doesn’t have him in it.
Tears smear across the floor, sinking into the cracks, the same way my grief has sunk into every part of my life.
Three years and I still live like he left yesterday.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I whisper to the floorboards, to the universe, to whatever cruel god is listening. “I can’t keep pretending I’m alive when I died the day you didn’t come back.”
The words echo.
