Page 135 of Promise Me Nothing
There’s an empty place in my chest, something hollow and sticky and painful that didn’t used to be there a few hours ago.
Or maybe it had. But it was much smaller.
Until the bomb that exploded and left a much larger wound behind.
I keep playing it over and over in my mind, as if somehow I can rehear it, not hear it, change what was said. But I know that’s not the case.
Because how do you change the wordsyou have no idea the ways I’ve used her.What else could that mean other than exactly what I heard.
“You brought Hannah here,”he’d said. “You were the one who was so sure that if she met Ivy, felt welcomed, thought she had a family, that she’d be that much more likely to help.”
It makes me feel like everything I’ve ever learned about Lucas, about Wyatt, about this town, this place that I started to feel like I might be able to find a place in…
Was it all a lie?
Was it all some big promise that was meant to fall through in the end?
I feel like I can barely breathe as I collapse in the grass at a small park at the end of the pathway, but it isn’t just from the running. It’s from this undeniable sense of having been a pawn in someone’s endgame. My only role here was to be used.
The tears rush forward, sobs gasping from between my lips.
And the thing that kills me the most is that I probably would have helped anyway.
Whatever is wrong with Ivy? I might have been able to help without the secrecy. Without the lying.
Without what happened with Wyatt.
I clutch my stomach, feeling like I might heave up everything inside of me.
Was that all a game too?
Was everything he told me just another part of this lie?
I don’t know how this happened. How everything fell apart like this.
It feels like the world is closing in. Like, as much as I try to hold everything together, everything I thought about my life is like dry sand spilling between my fingers too quickly for me to recover. And the more I try to keep things going, the faster it falls apart.
How can they do something like this. Lie. Manipulate. Steal.
Because that’s what Wyatt did. He stole something from me. And I don’t just mean my heart or my virginity or even my first love.
He stole away my already fragile belief that anyone could ever promise me anything and actually mean it.
I finally get home a few hours later, my body feeling broken and battered, possibly even bruised.
Lucas comes flying off the couch when he sees me.
“Where have you been?” he asks, his face etched in concern, though I’m too tired to muster up even a fraction of interest. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
I ignore him, walking straight past where he stands and heading up the stairs, slowly, one step at a time.
He hovers behind me as I crawl up the stairs, finally speaking when I stand in the open doorway to my bedroom, his voice sounding broken and strained. Though I really don’t care.
“Hannah, please let me explain.”
“Don’t,” is the only thing I say, my voice rippling with exhaustion and my body fighting off a new wave of tears.
And then I close the door, sliding to the ground with my back against it.
