Page 15 of Creeping Lily
So I keep walking.
Down the stairs. Through the shadows. Out the door.
The night air slams into me, cold and merciless, but it doesn’t clear my head. It only drives the truth deeper into my bones: I’ve left pieces of myself behind in that room, in her hands, in her heartbeat. Pieces I’ll never get back.
And all I can do now is pray that when the time comes, she’ll still be there to take me in.
8
LILY
No one warns you about the pain ofafter.
After the attack.
After the betrayal.
After the loss.
When the fog finally lifts, you don’t find light waiting for you. You find the world stripped bare, every kindness ripped away, every lie exposed for what it is. You see evil—its many faces, its many disguises. It doesn’t always wear a snarl. Sometimes it smiles. Sometimes it wears the skin of people you love. And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
My mind ricochets between yesterday and today. The images are sharp, merciless. But tomorrow? I can’t picture it. There’s no room for it. The idea of a future feels like a cruel joke. My life could end here, now, and there’s nothing I’d miss—because everything worth missing is already gone.
One moment took almost a decade of my life and smashed it to dust. Everything I thought was safe, solid, good—it vanished in a single, vicious blow.
Regret works through me like acid, slow and steady, burning from the inside. It comes with panic too—tightening my lungsuntil each breath is a shallow gasp, dragging me from shallow, fevered sleep into a darkness that isn’t much different from nightmares.
Depression moves in like an uninvited guest. It doesn’t knock. It just stays. And it makes me forsake everything else.
Days bleed together. I stop counting them. My body stays in bed long enough for the mattress to hold my shape. My clothes cling to me for days—weeks—until I can smell the rot of myself in the air. I don’t eat. I don’t sleep, not really. I hover between waking and some kind of half-death, my mind stuck in looping scenes I can’t turn off.
When sleepdoestake me, it isn’t a kindness. It’s punishment. It drags me somewhere colder, quieter—somewhere dead. And there, in the black, I start to wish for death to find me for real.
Months drag by. The world keeps moving, but I don’t. School starts, and I can’t force myself to go. I skip a week. Then a month. Then the year. The thought of rejoining the world feels impossible, like trying to climb out of a well with no walls to grip.
I’m not just mourning what happened to me. I’m mourning the Walker brothers. Losing them feels like losing two vital parts of my body—two limbs ripped away, leaving me stumbling, off-balance. The pain doesn’t come from hate. I could never hate them. I don’t even blame them. None of us were ready for the fallout. We all survived the only way we knew how.
But God, I miss them.
Time passes. It doesn’t heal me, but it scours me down to something raw and clean enough to start over.
It’s Grandma Jo who finally cracks the ice. Not for lack of trying before—she’s been fighting for me all year—but one afternoon she walks into my room, parks herself in the middle like she’s staging an intervention, and snaps my name sharp enough to make me look at her.
She’s managed to talk me into showering once a week. She’sfed me in silence, tolerated my sullen stares. But now? Now she’s had enough. She’s watching me die by inches, and it’s killing her.
And I can’t lose her. Not her.
I get out of bed for her. My legs are wobbly, like they’ve forgotten what they were made for. Fabric hangs loose on me, my skin hollow beneath it. I shuffle into the kitchen and drop into a chair, my hands dangling between my knees like dead weight.
She makes tea—cinnamon, her favorite. The scent wraps around me in a way that almost makes me cry. She sets my cup down and doesn’t touch her own. She just stares at me, those sharp, steady eyes cutting through the mess I’ve become.
I try to hold her gaze, but the sadness pushes in. The guilt. The memory of how I tried to end it—how I thought that endingmewould end the ache. How all it did was create more pain, more wreckage. How it shattered my mother. How it nearly broke my grandmother.
She tells me it’s time for therapy. It’s a long drive to the city, it’s money we don’t really have, but she’ll make it happen. My mind is worth saving, she says, brushing back my tangled hair like she used to when I was little. Without it, she tells me, I’ll stay here forever—frozen in this one ruined moment, letting it define the rest of my life.
I mumble something about whether life is even worth it, and she scoffs, fierce and commanding. The pity party is over, she says. It’s time to stand up and start living again—this time with the right help.
Then she moves closer, takes my hand, and smooths her thumb over the ridge of my wrist. The scar there is thin, pale, permanent. My failed exit. My stupid, desperate mistake.
