I believed nothing then.
Gracie.
My baby.
My forever ache.
The white hospital sheets bleed into my vision. Her tiny body. The impossible stillness. The sound I made when they placed her in my arms, animalistic, broken, not-human.
The world tried to keep moving after that, but mine stayed stuck in that moment.
And then—
The car crash. The metal. The shattering glass. The screaming. The kind you hear outside your own body, even when it’s coming from your own mouth. The crash that stole the last pieces of who I used to be.
I stop. My hand finds a fence post. I lean. Breathe. Fail. Try again.
Hot sweats break across my back, my breath stuttering in quick, shallow pulls. The world blurs. My pulse thunders behind my eyes.
Group therapy rooms unfold behind my eyelids, circles of grieving mothers clinging to paper cups of lukewarm coffee. Women who looked like ghosts. Women who helped me remember how to be human again. We held each other’s stories like fragile things. Like glass hearts. Like faith.
The nightmares. God the nightmares. Waking up drenched, reaching for a baby who wasn’t there. Sheets twisted in my fists. Skin burning. Heart thundering like I was still trapped in the car. I start walking again. Slower. Heavier. Like each step is pulling a thread loose inside me. Streetlights paint my skin in pale gold. Shadows stretch long behind me, curling like fingers around my ankles.
Every memory, good, bad, unbearable, presses against my ribs.
By the time I reach my driveway, my throat is torn and raw, and I’m not sure if I’ve been crying, or if the night has just found another way to break me open.
My hand trembles as I reach for the door. Inside, the house waits. Quiet. Dark. Too full of ghosts.
Blake’s warmth lingers on my skin. His voice haunts the edges of my memory.
Gracie’s absence presses into me with the weight of a collapsing sky.
And I am still here.
Barely.
Tonight, I burned the last bridge to Blake. Tonight, Pandora saved Penn. And as the sky begins to pale toward morning, I realise something simple. Something terrifying. Something holy. I want Dane. I want the man who sees me. I want the life I buried. And for the first time in years, I’m free to choose it.
The door closes behind me with a soft click, but it feels loud in the quiet. Too loud. Like it announces the moment my spine finally caves in on itself.
I kick off my shoes, missing the mat entirely, stumbling forward on legs that feel foreign—borrowed, trembling, unreliable. The hallway tilts slightly, or maybe that’s just my heartbeat thudding behind my eyes.
I move through the house on instinct, passing the framed pictures that face the wall because I can’t look at them yet—Blake smiling too wide, my own face too carefully arranged, Gracie’s ultrasound pinned like a promise that never got kept.
My breath trembles. My throat closes. I keep moving before I fall apart where I stand.
The bedroom greets me like a memory I’ve tried to outrun—soft sheets, too many pillows, the faint scent of lavender left over from nights I prayed for sleep and never got it.
I shut the door behind me. The world narrows to this room, this moment, this version of myself that hurts in every direction.
Pandora’s lipstick is still smudged on my mouth. Her mascara is cracked under my eyes. Her perfume clings to me like a lie I’ve worn too long.
I head for the mirror above the dresser and brace both hands on the edge. My reflection looks back at me—fractured, exhausted, still carrying Dane’s almost-kiss like a bruise under the skin.
“I’m so tired,” I whisper to no one, to everyone, to the ghosts pressed into the corners of this room.
I pull the wig off first—the long dark waves of Pandora slipping through my fingers like water. I set it down gently, like it’s something alive. Something dangerous.
