Page 117 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Someone took her.
Even dead, she isn't really gone.
“Why are we worried about some woman’s grave?” Kadin asks.
He doesn’t mean it cruelly. That is somehow the worst part. He asks with genuine confusion, from the safe distance of a person to whom this is still an article and not a hand reaching into his own history and tearing something open. Maria and Cheyenne exchange a look immediately, both of them understanding my past enough to know that the question is wrong, even if neither of them truly understands why.
I lower the phone slowly, my hand trembling so badly the screen shakes.
“You all need to go.”
The sentence leaves me before I fully decide to say it. It isn’t loud yet. It doesn’t have to be.
Cheyenne takes a small step toward me, all worry and terrible timing. “Octavia, I don’t think…”
The anger arrives so fast it feels like the only stable thing in me.
“You don’t know what I need, Cheyenne.”
The volume of my own voice shocks all of us. The words keep coming before I can stop them, sharpened by the humiliation of being looked at while I’m unraveling.
“Stop inviting yourselves over. Stop planning things without me. Stop deciding what kind of day I’m supposed to have. I said get out.”
The silence afterward is brutal.
I see the hurt land in Cheyenne’s face immediately. Maria flinches too, her mouth parting like she wants to say something, then thinking better of it when she sees I’m already too far gone to hear it properly. Kadin looks confused more than wounded, caught between concern and irritation, still trying to understand what he’s stepped into and why the whole room suddenly feels so hostile.
“Octavia,” he says carefully, his hand coming to my side.
It is a small gentle touch.
Landing over one of the old scars beneath my shirt, my whole body reacts before my mind can even catch up.
I jerk away from him as if he burned me.
“Stop touching me!”
The scream tears out of me with enough force to hurt. Shoving him hard, harder than I realize I’m capable of in that moment, all the panic in the room changes shape again.
“Stop putting your hands on me,” I yell. The words come out fractured, because they are not only about him.
They are about every hand that ever landed where it wasn’t welcome.
They are about debt, my mother, grown men, childhood, the text message, and the fact that only minutes ago I had Silas in a bathroom with his hands on me and his mouth on me and his voice in my ear saying words no one should have the power to say to me so easily.
I love you.
The memory of it crashes through me all at once.
He said it without hesitation.
He said it like it meant something.
He said it while my body was still shaking for him.
That should matter.
It should.
