Page 35 of A Smile Full of Lies
I tried to open my bank app out of sheer habit, but it wouldn’t load with no service. I scrolled through my pictures to the last screenshot I’d taken of what I had in the bank yesterday and immediately wished I hadn’t.
$18.72.
That was it. That was all I had. If I even had that much left now.
I let out a strangled sound — half laugh, half wail — and slapped a hand over my mouth like I could shove it back inside. My shoulders trembled. My throat ached. And then it just… broke.
The sob ripped out of me so hard I doubled over, forehead pressed to my knees. I was crying — no,sobbing— the kind of raw, broken sound I hadn’t made since Gran died. Maybe not even then. This was different. This was shame. This was failure.
I’d done everything right. I’d said no to Nina. I’d walked out on Sam. I’d held the line, kept my dignity, tried to be good.
And it still wasn’t enough.
I clutched my phone like it was a lifeline and curled in tighter, pressing my cheek to my knees, trying to breathe through it, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’tthink. The tears wouldn’t stop. Neither would the panic.
I was drowning, and nobody even knew I’d gone under.
The sobs eventually burned out, like a storm that ran out of wind. I was still curled up on the living room carpet, cheeks wet, lashes clumped, chest aching from the effort of pulling air into lungs that didn’t want it.
The house was so fucking quiet it was deafening.
No hum from the fridge. No buzz from the overhead light. Just the dark and the tick of the old wall clock in the living room, one Gran had bought at a garage sale when I was ten. The rhythm of it felt louder now, like it was mocking me.
I wiped my face with the hem of my shirt and sat back against the couch, head tipped against the worn cushions. My throat was raw. My eyes burned.
And then, out of nowhere, I heard it. Not aloud. Just… in my head. Clear as day.
“You’re stronger than this, baby.”
Gran’s voice. Soft and steady like always.
I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from crying again.
She used to say that every time something went wrong. First breakup. Flat tire. Finals week. The morning I came home from the ER after that awful frat party shaking and ruined. She’d held me in the kitchen, hands in my hair, and whispered it like a prayer.
“You’re stronger than this, baby.”
My fingers curled tight in my lap. She was wrong. Or maybe I just didn’t believe her anymore.
But I wanted to. God, I wanted to believe her.
So I sat there a little longer in the dark, breathing as steady as I could manage, letting that ghost of her voice wrap around me like a blanket I’d forgotten how to use.
Just until I could stand up again.
I finally pulled myself off the floor, legs stiff, spine aching from how long I’d been curled up. My laptop screen was black now. It had gone dead while I was having that meltdown. I grabbed the power bank I kept in the junk drawer and plugged it in, holding my breath.
The screen flickered to life, dim and sluggish. One bar of battery. Maybe ten minutes of life if I didn’t push it. My phone was already dead, completely useless without service or a charge.
I desperately needed to check the freelance app where I picked up the work that had been keeping me afloat until now, but I knew it was pointless with no power to run my router and connect to the internet.
My heart started racing.
Then I remembered something: Knox’s Wi-Fi. Sometimes it reached from his house to mine.
He’d given me the password a couple years ago, back when my router kept going out and I was trying to meet a deadline. I hadn’t used it since, but I hadn’t forgotten it either.
I clicked into the network settings and found his network,ObsidianNet_5G. There it was. The signal was weak, barely a bar. But it was still there.
