Page 74 of Tuned To Break
I snap my attention to Chase as he appears at my elbow, looking like he’d rather crawl into an oil drum and die.
“I asked a question,” I say, cold and clear. “What is he doing here?”
Chase stammers, “Stella, maybe we should?—”
“No.” I hold up a hand. My stare doesn’t waver. “You promised me he’d never come in while I was working. So what’s this? Am I not supposed to be here today, or is he breaking the rules?”
Doc opens his mouth. “The Charger needed?—”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
He flinches.
Behind me, Jake’s voice is low, steady. “Let’s just take a breath, Stell?—”
“Don’t. Don’t tell me to calm down. Do you have any idea what this feels like?”
The dam cracks.
“I come back from lunch early—lunch you all but forced me to take—and I find him here. In my space.” I point at my chest. “In the business I’ve rebuilt. The one thing I’ve had to pour every part of myself into just to keep standing.”
Doc takes a step forward. “Stella, sweetheart?—”
“DON’T!” The word tears out of me like shrapnel. “Don’t you dare call me that. You lost that right the day you disappeared.”
“I didn’t disappear?—”
“No?” I laugh, bitter and loud. “Because it sure felt like that. Mum died, and then you vanished. No calls. No visits. Nothing. Like I didn’t exist.”
His face cracks, pain etched deep. “You looked so much like her,” he says, barely above a whisper. “It hurt.”
“It hurt?” My voice rises, raw and splintered. “I was eighteen. I’d just lost my mother. I needed you. And you ran.”
“I was trying to protect?—”
“Yourself. That’s who you were protecting. Don’t feed me noble bullshit about grief. You abandoned me because you couldn’t handle the way I reminded you of her. Like my face was the problem. Like I was something to be erased.”
Doc’s eyes glisten. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then explain it to me. Explain why I left voicemails you never answered. Why I stood on your front step crying, and you never opened the door. Why I spent years thinking I’d done something so unforgivable you couldn’t even look at me.”
“I couldn’t lose her and lose you, too. So I... I froze.”
“You froze,” I repeat, stunned. “You iced me out and watched me drown.”
Tears blur my vision. I don’t care anymore. Let them see. Let them all see.
“I was a kid,” I say, voice cracking. “A scared, grieving kid who would’ve given anything to hear you say you were still there for me. And instead, I got silence.”
He takes another step. “Stella…”
“No.” I hold up my hand again. “You don’t get to say my name like that. You don’t get to cry now like it means something. You weren’t there for any of it. Not the birthdays. Not the uni rejections. Not the nights I cried so hard I threw up. You weren’t there when I got my first job, when I rented my first flat, when I got promoted.”
My throat tightens. “You weren’t there when I came back here, took your legacy, and made it better.”
“I am proud?—”
“You don’t get to be proud of what you abandoned.”
