Fuck.I don’t know.But I have to try.I’m fucking trying with him, and though I think it’s working, maybe I’m doing a shitty job and I’m failing.
I could ask, but ...there’s a long, ugly list of things between us that I don’t want to air like laundry, but they’re there, gnawing at the corners.The nights Barret puts his music first because he’s obsessed with returning to the top.There’s the way I recoil because I can’t trust myself.There’s the way he tries to tamp down what’s left of his feelings by acting like nothing’s wrong.
We’re two men carrying missing pieces, fumbling with intimacy like it’s a language we once spoke but forgot.Forgiveness is a door we haven’t learned how to open.Small cruelties lodged themselves like burrs and never quite came out.Underneath it all, the love remains, stubborn and frightening.Barret is scared.I’m scared.Now, with Cleo near us like a cracked thing we both want to protect, those old fractures feel urgent to fix.
“Look,” I say, softer.“We’ll do it the way the therapists suggested.No pressure.Choices.Let her lead.If she refuses the food, we put it away.If she wants to leave, we will help her with that.We are not the people who get to decide how she heals.We just show up.”
Barret snorts, a brief, humorless sound.“We might as well look for plan B already.”
I meet his eyes, and something inside me eases a fraction.We will fumble.We will hurt.We will apologize, fail, and try again.We will learn how to be present.
“It’s going to take everything, and maybe it won’t be enough, but I won’t stop.”
He nods once, as if saying,I won’t stop either.I believe him.He loves Cleo as much as I do.He picks up and walks back up the stairs, hoping for the best—but honestly, I’m afraid the best is too far to reach.
ChapterThree
Barret
There’s a thing about life I’ve never understood.Maybe no one does.It’s built with fleeting moments of light stacked against a tower of fucked-up times.Just enough good to convince you that things can get better—that maybe survival is possible.Until the rhythm changes.Until the song you thought you knew morphs into something alien.One wrong note, and suddenly you’re standing in the middle of a genre you’ve never played before.
It feels like a brick hurled into glass.Like fire reigniting in a room you’ve just finished dousing.
Optimists, therapists, people with degrees—hell, anyone who wants to believe in resilience—call it growth.They dress it up as a chance to adapt, to reinvent yourself.
Grow into what, exactly?Being stronger?Wiser?Happier?No.That’s a fucking lie.Life doesn’t sculpt you into some noble warrior.It grinds you down into brittle, scarred versions of the person you might’ve been if the world had just left you the fuck alone.
Exhibit A: me.
It doesn’t build character.It’s demolition.And I’m the fool still standing in the rubble, pretending there’s something left worth salvaging.Except I can’t even name what that something is.It sure as hell isn’t me.
The day Arlo Wilder was born—Kit and Roderick Wilder’s son—I thought maybe, just maybe, things would be settling down.A baby shifts everything, doesn’t it?
New life.
New joy.
New fucking hope—maybe even a reason to believe in miracles.
A reset button we didn’t know we wanted, but felt just right.For one fragile second, I wanted to believe it.The Wilder family, the band—maybe this was the breath after so many fucking years drowning in whatever life had thrown at us.
That was also the day Eddie told me he’d finally found Cleo.
She had a fiancé.Dorian Thoreau.New York socialite on the surface.Parasite beneath it.Pedophile.Trafficker.A monster in tailored suits.Eddie’s theory was simple: Cleo wasn’t engaged.She was imprisoned.
My brain shut off, and I spiraled.
Hard.
So fucking hard.
Sobriety almost slipped through my hands like glass beads on a broken string.Every bottle within reach begged me to let go, to surrender.If I stayed clean during the first weeks after, it wasn’t because I wanted to live.It was because Eddie was watching.My sponsor was next to me at all times, but most importantly, the thought of Cleo locked away made me despise myself, even though none of it was my fault.
That was almost four months ago.
Four months of scheming, waiting, clashing with Eddie, yet trying to fix our shit together.
Four fucking months of disappearing into this so-called ‘rustic cabin’—Eddie’s words, not mine.Rustic my ass.It’s a glass-and-cedar fortress clinging to the cliffs of nowhere, Washington, the Pacific waiting below, wide enough to swallow us whole if it wanted to.
