“Always.”I breathed.
She grinned softly.“Stop overthinking it.Brody’s not Andrew.He’s not anyone but Brody.Just… let yourself see what happens.”
Something in me relaxed at her words, though the ache of fear lingered.
Long after that conversation had ended, I fell asleep with Clara's words drifting through my mind.
Morning light came in soft and steady, like someone had left the day on low.
I made coffee and carried my laptop out to the picnic table in the backyard, because the house felt too full of other people’s opinions.
I set the laptop open and stared at a blinking cursor like it owed me an apology.
This was the chapter, this part of my story...I had been circling it since I wrote the first one.The part of my story I kept pushing to the back of the file because it simply would not stay quiet on the page.In the book, it would be fiction, Maya and Jonah, not Cassidy and Andrew...but my truth had to bleed for the fiction to live.
My fingers hovered.I tried clichés first.The usual writer’s ritual of coffee, a stretch, and a few safe sentences about the weather.I tried to write around what he had done, about what he had almost done.That lasted until the fourth paragraph when the quiet inside my skull gave way and the flashback arrived, abrupt and unwilling.
He was at my door.Not in the way he’d been the first time, warm and relaxed, a man bringing flowers and soft promises.This was different.His eyes had been wrong.I could feel the tension radiating off him.I could still feel the fear in the moment when I realized what he was going to do to me, the smallness of my own body braced against the cold.
I told myself I would write it like a surgeon: clinical, distanced, controlled.But my hands betrayed me.They typed what my brain could not keep in a neat box.
Maya opened the door on a man she thought she knew.He stepped into her apartment with something desperate in his jawline.He moved with the slow certainty of someone used to doors opening for him.She told him to leave.He told her she was his.His hand found her wrist.The pressure came first, the force that said you will not choose for yourself tonight.She jerked back.He pulled her forward.His mouth landed on hers like it was an order, a command.Her protest was swallowed by his hand.
Even typing those words, I felt the old, animalistic panic curl through me.My breath came fast, my chest tight.I wrote about the smell of his jacket, the scraping of his shoe on the floor, the way his voice tried to make things small and tidy with sentences likeyou're overreactingandyou don’t know what you’re saying.
I forced the scene to move as it had moved, no cinematic neatness, no hero music.The moment that broke the air and made everything jagged again came exactly as it had: a sound that blurred into motion.Brody’s shape knocking into the doorway like a fist.Andrew crashing through the table.People shouting.The terrible bright sharpness of the world reasserting itself.
I pressed my palms flat to the table and let tears come.They blurred the screen, and when I blinked them away, I realized that the thing I feared most was naming it, seeing it spelled out and true.But the more I put down, the lighter the pain became.It wasn't gone.It would not be “gone” for a long while.But there was a difference between being a carried thing and being an owned thing.As I wrote, as I turned the attack into sentences, it felt like I was taking it out of the dark and setting it on the table where it could be looked at.
There are details I excised because the point was not to make anyone gawk at the violence; the point was to make people understand the tremor that came after.The way your hands shake when you try to button your jeans.The way a favourite sweater smells like someone you don't want to remember.The slow-burning humiliation that waddles up through your chest.I wrote those textures.The loss of control.The betrayal that comes from a break in trust from someone you loved.The replay that is always just below the surface.The hollow feeling afterward, with people around you trying to stitch things back together as if that could erase the ugliness of what had happened.
I stopped and read what I’d written back to myself, because I wanted to make sure that I was not getting lost in revenge or self-pity.I wanted the pages to be honest, not pretty, because the truth is the most dangerous and most freeing thing to hand another person.
I typed past the part in which the men arrive; I typed the way I curled inward, the sweater pulled up to my mouth, the laughter of someone who’d already broken.I wrote about Chase’s hands that were normally so steady, trembling, clumsy, desperate; about Mason and Brody and the impossible ordinary ferocity of people who love you.I wrote about the sirens, the guilt that followed their lights like a second shadow, and the way the house smelled afterward.
When the story shifted into "after," I didn't soften it.I wrote the numbing quiet in the room, the way questions tumbled in and out of my hearing.I wrote the way my family looked at me, Dad’s jaw, Mom’s hands twisting in her lap, Clara in my bed with me, like when we were kids and I had a bad dream.I wrote the part that matters most: the community that didn’t abandon me, the people who put their hands on my shoulders and said, We see you.
By the time my fingers paused at the sentence that grounded the character's decision to speak up, my throat felt raw.Like, instead of writing my truth, I had been shouting it.The sun had moved, carving a new shadow across the table.The backyard was warmer now.Somewhere down the street, a dog barked and a lawn mower droned.Life, dense and monotonous and tender, kept existing around this quiet, seismic thing I had just slid into words.
I read what I had just written in one long breath.It was not perfect.It was not polished.It was exactly what it had to be.
On impulse, on a kind of quiet, audacious courage I didn't even know I had, I opened my email, found Marin's thread, and attached the file.The little cursor blinked like a heartbeat.My thumb hovered over the trackpad, and then I hit send.
There was no dramatic shaking of the sky.No angelic chorus.Just the small thud in my chest, the same one that had been there when Brody kissed the top of my head on my parents' lawn and the one that came when Clara squeezed my hand and said,We will get through this.
I stared at my laptop and with my hands gripping my knees.A first draft completed is a kind of big deal.It was for any book you write.But this one was so deeply personal.It made me bring the worst thing I had to face and set it down and say,We won't let this live in the dark anymore.Writing it didn't make it disappear, but it made it less of a burden to carry on my own.
I texted Clara a single line:Sent it.First draft is done.
Her reply came in seventeen seconds:I am so proud of you.Come in.We'll celebrate with sweets and stupid movies and no talking about anything hard unless you want to.
I laughed despite the tears on my cheeks.I backed up the document and closed my laptop, letting out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
I walked inside and right into Clara's arms.
Later, Brody would text to check in.Mom would call to ask if I needed anything.The day did not suddenly ease into perfection.Trauma doesn't come with a clean cut.But something inside me changed, a small, crooked tilt toward living rather than hiding.
That night, when I crawled into bed, the field I’d camped in with Brody waited behind my eyelids.I imagined the meadow through the seasons, the house I wanted, the small library I would build with wood warmed by Brody's hands.I felt tired, yes.But also a little less hollow.I felt the soft, steady presence of people who were on my side.
