Something has come up.. Heading back to New Zealand, reach me on my cell if it’s important otherwise you know what I require and I will pay you handsomely for the extra work.
Tearing myself to pieces as I wished the driver would drive faster. She’s like the seasons. My Peach. She can change just like that and I wish I was there to hold her in the current season just a little longer.
I miss you. I miss your voice. Don’t hide from me, Penn.
Now I sound like Blake hassling Pandora for the attention of a woman.
I’m no better than him.
The airport comes into view and my heart hammers as my palms sweat.
I’m coming, Penn. Please stay and wait for me. I will explain it all to you, Peach please just stay I will lay all my skeletons bare.
I stare at Dane’s message like it’s a lit match pressed to my throat.
If I tell you, can you promise you won’t freak out?The words shouldn’t gut me. But they do. Because for weeks months maybe something inside me has been stirring awake. Not softly. Not gently. But like splinters of memory falling through a cracked ceiling, collecting in messy, shimmering piles at my feet.
Pieces of a boy I once knew. A boy with too-quiet eyes and too-heavy shadows. A boy who used to sit alone at lunch and stare at the sky like he was begging it to break open and swallow him.
Dane.
My Dane.
The one Blake scrubbed from my mind without ever needing to say the words. Years with him were like being slowly drowned with silk and praise and ownership. He replaced my thoughtswith his. My voice with his. My history with whatever made him shine brightest.
I forgot I came from a family of writers, painters, professors. I forgot I used to dream. I forgot I was allowed to exist outside of him.
And Dane…God, that boy. Those flickers of him soft, blue-lit memories have been floating back to me like dust motes in a sunbeam. Fragile. Beautiful. Almost too small to believe in.
But now?
Now Dane is real. Here. Wanting me. Waiting for me.
And I’m leaving him on delivered because I don’t know how to breathe around the truth.
Because Blake, my ex-husband, my almost-destroyer, sent me a message too.
A caveman invitation. To the one party, he swore he’d never host again. A masked night. Sin-soaked. Invite-only.
And he invitedPandora.
He doesn’t even know Pandora is me. His wife. His ghost.
It makes something hot and acidic coil in my stomach.
I need to end him. Not violently. Not dramatically. But truthfully. Finally.
I need to cut him from my heart so cleanly that nothing grows back.
If I want Dane, if I want anything real again, I have to purge the last of Blake’s hold.
So, I go to the bathroom.
And I start to become the woman Blake wanted.
So, I can kill her.
The shower is scalding, steam turning the room into a blurred watercolour. I wash my hair twice. Scrub my skin until it glows pink. I paint my lips a deep plum the one Blake always said was “too much” on me. Then I line my eyes in kohl so dark it feels like armour.
