Page 131 of Wreckage

I stilled, my stomach twisted into knots. I knew they’d be back. They lived here, but I guess I hadn’t prepared myself to see them again.

She hesitated before pulling out her phone and opening social media. She scrolled for a moment.

“I didn’t want to tell you before,” she said carefully. “But since they’re coming back, you should know.”

She turned the screen toward me.

I stared.

Pictures of Troy and Amanda together. Amanda crying on the news, begging for her fiancé to come home. Her engagement ring flashing in every photo. Every word in her caption felt like a knife to my chest.

"Please bring my Troy home. We’re getting married. He asked me to marry him just weeks before he left. We didn’t even get to announce it to family and friends properly. I can't live without him."

Fiancé.

Not ex-fiancé. Not ex-boyfriend. Not a friend.

He had told me she didn’t matter. I had believed him. I hadn’t even asked or pressed the subject.

I had simply blindly believed, just like I’d done with the deer situation. My therapist’s words came back into my head.

It was a trauma bond. You are special, Elena, but at that moment, you were comfort, not love. Only once you learn the difference and accept it will you be able to move past it and heal. Now, about Dean…

I feltsick.

Zara must have seen it in my face because she wrapped her arms around me, holding me tight again.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “You don’t deserve this. I didn’t want you to be blindsided when they returned, and Amanda was all over Troy.”

But I did. It was punishment for being such a damn idiot. For believing in more when there simply wasn’t anything there but survival and basic fucking human instincts.

That night,I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.

My therapist was right. It wasn’t real. It had never been real. She repeated it so much and kept pointing things out to me that I began to believe her.

I had been hurt and scared. I’d needed comfort and companionship. It was human nature at its finest. And that was OK. It was OK to need that.

It wasn’t OK to let those feelings turn my life upside down because deep down inside, I wanted to believe it was real. That I hadn’t been a necessity in a moment of desperation. Maybe I wanted to believe I was special and mattered to them. My therapist kept saying these things to me.

They made sense.

At least on paper, but damn my heart.

I breathed out, accepting this wasn’t something I could deal with. Not right now. Not face to face because I knew they’d come to my house and demand I talk to them.

Why if they didn’t love me, and itwasa trauma response?

Because they were just as confused as I was, that’s what my therapist told me when I asked that question. She continued that they were my brothers, and sex with them bordered on something incredibly unhealthy. It was something we’d be addressing in my next session with her.

The thought made me sick.

I wanted to keep that memory intact that it had been simply sweet lovemaking, even the night Adrian fucked me for the last time. When he knew I was crying and didn’t want him. He’d fucked me anyway, coming deep inside my body, tears on his face.

I should have left all these memories behind when I left the mountain.

That was impossible; the only way to escape those memories was to escapethem. Troy and Adrian.

I had to. I couldn’t be here when they arrived.

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