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“Yes!”
There was an audible breath. “Tell me on thing. What was true? What you told the police or what Blaine told every one?”
I sucked in a breath.
“Which is it, Avery? Because if it was true, why did you drop the charges knowing what he was capable of? Because you had to know that there was something wrong with him and that he’d do it again.”
My shoulders caved in and I whispered, “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand completely. Either way, you’re a liar.” Molly’s breath crackled over the phone. “Do you know why I wanted to get in contact with you? Because I needed to talk to someone who’d been through what I had been through and I thought—” Her voice cracked. “It doesn’t matter what I thought or why I did. You didn’t even take the time to read a single, fucking email. The least you could do is to tell me the truth.”
I closed my eyes, resting my forehead on my palm. My head was still spinning from what happened with Cam and this blew my mind. There had been so many emails from accounts I didn’t recognize. Many with my name as the subject or Blaine’s. And I hadn’t opened them because I hadn’t wanted to deal with it, but I never thought it was her.
Then again, would that really have changed anything? Would I have opened them and reached out to her? Legal aspects of the non-disclosure aside, would I?
I’d be lying if I said I thought I would.
“Are you there?” Molly demanded.
“Yes.” I cleared my throat, lifting my head. The ball in my chest unraveled a little. “I didn’t lie.”
“So it was true?” Her voice sounded closer to the phone. “And you dropped the charges.”
My body tensed like a coiled rope. “Yes, but you—”
“Why would you do that?” Her voice was raw. “How could you? How could stay silent this long?”
“I—”
“You’re a coward. You cling to your silence because you’re a coward! You’re still the same scared, fourteen year old girl pretending to be over it years later!” she shouted, and my ear popped. “This happened to me because you didn’t tell the truth. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but that’s the truth. And we both know it.”
Molly hung on me.
I sat there, staring at my phone. Anger still boiled inside me, but some of what she had said had sunken through the red haze and it made sense.
“You cling to your silence because you’re a coward! You’re still the same scared, fourteen year old girl pretending to be over it years later!”
She was right.
God, she was so right. All these years and I had never uttered the words since that night. I was too scared to tell anyone, to even tell Cam. And that was why he’d walked out of here, because he had also been right. I hadn’t let go of the past and there was no future unless I did so. All I’d been doing this entire time was pretending—pretending to be okay, to be completely happy, to be a survivor.
And I wasn’t a survivor. For too many years, I’d been nothing more than a victim on the road.
Molly didn’t know the whole story. Probably wouldn’t change anything if she did, but surviving and being a survivor were two different things. That’s what I’d been doing this whole time. Just surviving, waiting for the day when what Blaine had done to me would not tarnish everything that was good in my life.
I dropped my head into my hands. Tears welled up in my eyes.
Instead, there were things I could’ve done differently. I couldn’t change what had happened to me, but I could’ve changed the way I reacted, especially now when I was so far away from those who had hindered any attempts to overcome it. But to be honest, it was more than that. It had always been more than Blaine. It had been my parents—it had been me.
The only way I could truly move on was to confront what had happened, to do something I had been punished for doing in the first place.
It wasn’t the past that was coming between us.
It was the present.
Cam had been right.
Suddenly, I shot to my feet. I was moving before I knew what I was doing. It was when I stood in front of Cam’s apartment door that my heart leapt in my throat. It was probably too late for us, but if I told him—if I could explain myself—then that was a start. Either way, I owed it to Cam.
