Page 116 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Men said love like an apology.
Like a price tag.
Like a lie.
Tearing myself away, his eyes blow wide, face crumpling with instant regret.
“Octavia-”
“Why did you have to say that?” I choke out, breath scraping my chest raw, the air suddenly tasting sour. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I step past him, slipping through the door before he can grab me. Listening to my feet slap down the hall, bare and shaking, his confession still burns like acid across my skin, my heart aching from the way he looked at me when he knew the moment had fractured into a million different pieces.
CHAPTER 23
Octavia
Wiping Silas off my lips with the back of my hand as I leave the bathroom, the gesture feels useless the second I do it.
It does nothing to steady me. It does nothing to erase the heat still clinging to my skin or the way my whole body is shaking from everything I let happen because I could not bear, even for a few more minutes, to be alone with my own thoughts. The hallway feels too bright. My breathing still won’t settle. Tears keep rising faster than I can fully stop them, blurring the edges of the house as I make my way toward my room.
I am still trying to gather myself when I push the door open.
The second I step inside, something in me drops.
Maria, Cheyenne, and Kadin are all crowded too close together, staring at a phone in Kadin’s hand with the kind of frozen attention that only ever means bad news has already entered the room and made itself at home. No one notices me immediately. Or if they do, they are too stunned by whatever they are seeing to react the way they normally would.
A sick, sinking pressure opens in my chest.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
My voice comes out thin and shaky, smaller than I want it to be. The room feels wrong immediately, the air changed in a way that has nothing to do with the movie still playing quietly in the background. Maria is the first one to look up, the expression on her face enough to make the dread spread.
“I don’t think now is the time to…” she starts.
I don’t let her finish.
Crossing the room too quickly, I snatch the phone from Kadin’s hand before anyone can stop me. In the same breath, I become aware of movement behind me, the quiet weight of another body in the doorway. Silas has followed me in. I don’t turn to look at him, but I can feel him there in the way everyone else notices but tries not to.
“You look like hell,” Cheyenne says. There’s something cautious in her tone now, something almost frightened. Her eyes flick behind me toward the door, and I know she’s seeing him there too.
“He was cleaning up my vomit,” I say automatically.
The lie comes easily, almost too easily. I hate how little effort it takes to throw it into the room. No one even questions it because by then I am already looking at the phone screen.
The headline is enough.
Deborah Lancing, grave robbery.
For one second, I can’t make sense of the words. They look like language, but not my language, not my life, not something that could possibly have anything to do with me. Then my mother’s name settles into place in my mind and everything else follows in a brutal rush.
Her grave.
Her body.
Gone.
The whole room narrows at once. The walls seem farther away yet too close at the same time. The glow from the television becomes a blur. My heartbeat slams so hard against my ribs that it drowns out whatever else might still be happening around me. I don’t realize I’ve stopped breathing properly until my chest starts to ache.
My mother’s grave was opened.
