Every step he takes, I take one back. It’s like my body’s moving on its own, like it still remembers the threat even if my mind is spinning too fast to think.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, voice as sharp and grating as I remember. The kind that always came before something worse.
“Funny, you didn’t move to a faraway state. I always thought you’d run farther than this.”
My feet stumble into a shelf behind me. I feel cornered, heat rising in my chest even as my blood runs cold. I grind my teeth so hard my jaw aches. My fingers twitch like they’re searching for something to hold on to, anything to ground me.
“What?” Nate sneers. “Still can’t talk?”
The smirk that follows is cruel. Mocking. Like this is a game to him, a game he’s still playing, even after all these years.
Then, with zero warning—no buildup, no mercy—he spits the words that make the ground fall out from under me.
“It’s for the best. You don’t deserve to talk. Or hear. Not after what you did to Tim.”
My stomach lurches. My vision narrows. His voice drops, coated in something dark and festering.
“You remember, don’t you?” he says. “Remember what you did to him? Remember how you did it? Remember his blood, everywhere?”
I stop breathing as the memories I’ve spent years trying to bury rise all at once like black water, flooding my chest, clawing at my throat. My lungs refuse to pull in air. My nails dig into my palms, sharp and desperate. Looking for something to help me feel so I can pull myself out of these dark memories.
Don’t fall apart. Not in front of him.
But his words won’t stop.
“You ruined our lives,” he hisses. “Mine. Josh’s. Caleb’s. And Tim—who’s been in a coma for five fucking years because of you.”
The world spins.
I stare at him, dumbfounded, because how? How can he say that?
How can he stand here, looking me in the eye, pretending like it wasn’t them?
Like it wasn’t four of them?
Like it wasn’t me—on my knees, sobbing and choking while they laughed, Like it wasn’t their voices, mocking me, calling me words that chewed their way beneath my skin and made me hate everything I was.
They took everything.
They broke me.
They destroyed my hearing.
Made me not want to use my voice ever again.
Made me this, a ghost walking in his own skin.
And now he’s here… blaming me?
Like, I’m the monster?
I feel it, something deep inside me, trembling. Fragile. Splintering. My hands start to shake so hard that the nail kit rattles in my grip.
I drop it.
The plastic cracks against the floor, but I don’t look down.
My mind ricochets back to that day, to his hands, his voice, the sound of my own muffled screams. It feels like every scar inside me has been ripped open at once. My knees buckle; every second in this place feels like the walls are folding in. Like the air is thick and strangling. My body screams at me to move, to run.
