Page 181 of The Ache That Stayed

The strange thing about healing was that nobody ever told you how quiet it became once it stopped hurting loudly.

For years, I thought healing would feel monumental. Like some undeniable shift inside me. A moment where the memories transformed into something easier to carry, where the twelve-year-old version of me finally loosened her hands from around my throat, and I would wake up as someone lighter. Easier to live inside.

But that wasn’t what happened. Healing arrived slowly enough that most days, I only recognised it in hindsight. In the way I no longer flinched when someone walked too closely behind me. In the nights I no longer woke up gasping for air, convinced I was trapped somewhere I couldn’t escape.

Healing, I learned, wasn’t linear enough to feel heroic. It was quieter than that. It was repetition. Safety. Being loved consistently enough that my body stopped expecting pain to follow tenderness.

For so long, I thought what happened to me had split something open permanently. Like Darius had reached inside me and rearranged the way I understood myself, my body, my wants. I spent years trying to become smaller after that. Softer. Easier to hold. Easier to love. As though being less of myself might finally make me safe.

The clinic hadn’t changed. Same sterile air, same hum of lights. But I had. I didn’t sit straight this time. I sprawled across the couch, one arm thrown over the back, legs stretched, careless. Like the room belonged to me now.

Julian leaned back slightly in his chair across from me, patient as ever while sunlight stretched across the floor of his office.

“You look good. Different,” he said finally.

A soft laugh escaped me.

“I think that’s therapist language for emotionally unstable in a new direction.”

One corner of his mouth twitched faintly.

“No,” he said calmly. “Less afraid.”

The words settled somewhere deeper than I expected. Because once upon a time, fear had shaped nearly every decision I made. Fear of not being loved. Of wanting too much. Of becoming too much. Fear that if people saw the ugliest parts of me clearly enough, they would eventually leave.

And maybe that was the cruellest thing trauma did.

The way it invaded everything—mind, body, soul—until eventually you no longer recognised yourself beneath it. Not the pain itself. The conviction that love had to be earned through suffering to be real.

My fingers curled loosely in my lap.

“There are still days where I think none of this should work,” I admitted quietly. “Where I look at my life and think… this shouldn’t make sense.”

Julian didn’t interrupt. Outside his office window, the city moved in restless waves beneath the late afternoon sun.

“I spent so long believing I had to divide myself to survive,” I continued. “One version of me for the world. One for my family. One for the people I loved.”

I took a breath.

“And now?” His question came softer.

I thought about Marcello. Steady hands at the small of my back. The certainty of him. The kind that remained steady even when I couldn’t. The way he loved without demanding performance, without making me feel smaller for demanding it.

Then Santino.

All sharp edges and hunger. The man who looked at the worst parts of me and never once asked me to muffle them. Loving him felt like waking up parts of myself I had spent years forcing into silence. Parts that frightened me. Parts that felt too sharp, too alive in ways I no longer knew how to contain. And I didn’t realise how much I had shut down… until he touched me and my body remembered something my mind had spent years trying to forget.

Warmth spread through my chest.

“Now I think maybe healing was never about becoming someone easier to understand.”

Julian’s gaze remained steady on mine.

“Maybe it’s just… finally allowing yourself to exist without apologising for it. Not just the softer parts, but the angry ones too.

The complicated parts. The parts that loved differently than the world expected me to. The parts that survived in ways that weren’t always pretty.”

We sat in comfortable silence between us. And for the first time since I’d met him, I realised I no longer felt like I was sitting across from someone trying to fix me.