He read them.
My stomach flips again, vicious and nauseating.
Noah didn’t just see Kai’s handwriting. He saw me between the lines. He saw the parts I never said out loud, the pieces I pretended were dead. He saw the history I tried to cauterise and call healed.
Your step brother, Scarlett.
Really? That’s fucking disgusting.
The words replay in my head, venomous and loud.
I slide open the drawer by the sink and fumble for a cloth, pressing it over my mouth like I can physically stop the memories from spilling out. My reflection in the microwave door looks feral—eyes too big, face blotched, hair falling out of its careful order.
I look like a liar.
I am a liar.
Not because I fucked him.
But because I never stopped being his.
That truth sits in my chest like a live wire.
My phone buzzes again.
Once.
I flinch so hard I drop the cloth.
I don’t look.
I already know what it will say.
He doesn’t need to text anymore. He’s done his damage. Noah’s reaction was the point. The explosion. The fracture.
Kai always liked pressure more than force.
I sink down against the cabinets again, sliding until I’m back on the floor, my spine curled inward like I’m trying to protect something vital.
“You don’t love me.”
Noah’s voice echoes, not shouting this time—quiet, wounded, furious in that way that feels worse because it sounds reasonable.
I press my forehead to the cold tile.
“I don’t know how to love safely,” I whisper to no one.
The house doesn’t answer.
But my phone does.
This time I look.
One message.
No punctuation.
He touched you when he said it, didn’t he.
