Page 32 of Bitter Truths

A video file loads.

The image is dim and grainy, but I know those hands. That hair. Bodies moving together in low light. Whitney’s back arched. Multiple figures around her, skin against skin…

I can’t see their faces clearly, but I don’t need to. I’d know them anywhere.

I feel myself shatter. I feel all my pieces break apart, and I know without a doubt I will never be whole again.

I drop to my knees and vomit onto the stone, everything inside me rejecting this reality. But the video keeps playing on the cracked screen, silent but devastating.

The sobs start then, harsh and ugly, tearing out of me. Each one doubles me over, stealing what little breath I have left. They build and build until I’m drowning in them, until they’re the only sound in the entire world.

I get enough air around the sounds coming out of me. They consume me, shaking my entire body like I’m coming apart from the inside out. And maybe I am. Maybe this is what breaking feels like—not clean, not quick, but messy and loud and endless.

My eyes burn and everything hurts. Still, they keep coming, wave after wave, until there’s nothing left inside me but the sound of me wheezing for air.

With a scream that shreds my throat, I grab the phone and smash it against the rock. Again and again, the images are burned behind my eyelids, seared into my brain forever.

I stagger to my feet and hurl the weapon used to destroy me over the edge of the ridge. It arcs through the air, catching sunlight on its shattered screen before disappearing into the trees far below.

“NO!” The scream tears from me, a primal sound of anguish. “NO, NO, NO!”

I collapse, fists pounding the unyielding stone until my knuckles split and blood smears across the rock. Physical pain doesn’t register. Nothing registers except the void opening inside me, swallowing everything I thought was real.

The necklace they gave me burns against my skin like a brand.

My fingers close around it and yank hard. The chain snaps, cutting a mark into my skin. I stare at the tiny charm in my palm. It went from meaning everything to meaning nothing.

I should crush it. Throw it. But my body won’t cooperate. Instead, I shove it deep into my pocket where I can’t see it. Where I don’t have to remember what I thought it meant.

The devastation sinks deeper than bone, hollowing me out from the inside.

I curl onto my side on the cold stone, empty of tears, empty of screams. Empty of everything that used to make me human.

Time dissolves. I don’t know if I lie there for minutes or hours. The sun moves overhead, but I’m lost in the darkness behind my eyelids, floating in a space where pain has no beginning and no end. Where I am nothing. Where I feel nothing.

I fade out, consciousness slipping away like water through my fingers.

Sounds begin to trickle in from somewhere far away. My mother’s voice, high with panic. Footsteps pounding up the trail.

“Bianca? BIANCA!”

Hands touch me, turn me. Mom’s face swims into view, eyes wide with terror.

“Honey, what happened? Why are you bleeding? Where’s your phone? Talk to me.”

I stare through her, past her, to the empty sky beyond. There’s nothing left inside me to give her. No words to explain the death I just experienced—not of body, but of soul.

They aren’t mine.

And I am hollow, hollow, hollow.

6

BIANCA

Beeping. Rhythmic and insistent.

The sound drags me toward a surface I don’t want to reach. Consciousness means pain, and I’ve had enough pain to last several lifetimes.