Page 52 of Bound By Threads
“I know this is hard, Lottie,” she says eventually, her voice too gentle for someone as damaged as me. “But sometimes saying it out loud gives you control over it. You decide what’s shared. What isn’t.Theydon’t get to take that from you, too… not after everything you’ve been through.”
I don’t answer her. I can’t. The moment I speak, it feels like I’m somehow handing something over that I don’t want to speak aloud. Letting it leave my chest, where it’s safe and buried. I’ve held it all in for so long, it almost feels like a part of me, and I don’t feel like I’d know who I was without it.
Emma pushes on, still in that voice that makes it sound like this is all optional, even when we both know it isn’t. “I think it’s time you spoke to them.”
My head snaps up so fast I swear I can hear the bones in my neck snap. My spine stiffens like she just yanked a string, and I’m the puppet. “No.”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t have to be now. Not even soon, but someday. You don’t owe them or anyone anything, but you do owe yourself a chance to stand in front of them and say that. To tell them they don’t get to ask, or demand, or pick at the wounds they helped create. You get to tell them that they lost the right to answers the moment they stopped being your friends and chose cruelty instead.”
I shake my head before she even finishes talking. I can’t help it, I can feel my pulse racing. “It’s not that easy.”
“It’s not easy at all,” she agrees. “But it is yours to do when you are ready, and if you never are, that’s okay too. But don’t stay silent because you think you owe them something. You don’t. Not after everything.”
Silence stretches out between us, and I feel the room growing smaller. The walls press in because I know where this is leading—where it always does when I have a session.
“They keep saying I owe them,” I say eventually, and it comes out bitter. I take a sip of water, the coldness soothing my throat. “That my ‘death’ ruined them.”
Emma tilts her head. “Why did you ‘die’?”
I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. Only exhaustion. “I died because I didn’t think I’d survive if I didn’t.”
“Then that’s your answer. They don’t need to know the whys or how.” She says it like it’s so simple, but she doesn’t know them.
Those three will stop at nothing until they wring out every secret from me, even if it means leaving me bleeding on the floor at their feet.
My hands shake, and I hide them in my lap. The glass is too loud in the quiet when I set it down on the table in front of me.
I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to scream. I want to rip open my chest andshowsomeone what it looks like in there—how messy and broken and full of rot it still is. I was broken that night. Shattered and shredded from the inside out, and since then, I’ve never felt whole.
How can I when he’s still out there?
Emma waits another beat.Another tick of the clock.
I watch as she sits straighter, her fingers resting on the tissue box. “Lottie,” she soothes, “can I ask you something else?”
No.
“Yes,” I say anyway, because my mouth betrays me before I can stop it.
“The night you lost your voice… you’ve never talked about what happened. I don’t want to push, but I think we’ve been circling it for too long now.”
My stomach drops. I knew it was coming but it still feels like all the air has been sucked from my lungs. My vision goes spotty at the edges, like the air’s been sucked from the room.
I know what she’s going to ask next. I can see it in her eyes. “Can you tell me about him?”
And just like that, I shut down.
My body goes still. My jaw locks. Everything in me clenches so tight I feel like I might implode.
I stare at the wall across from me, right over Emma’s head, where the paint is slightly uneven near the baseboard. I count the brush strokes.
One, two, three?—
“Lottie?”
Four, five, six?—
Her voice is soft. I don’t deserve softness.
